If you were traveling between Boston and Washington, DC, and had the choice of either flying or riding in a driverless car, which would you choose?

Under good conditions this is an 8.5-hour drive vs. 4-5 hours flying – driving to the airport, wading through security, boarding the flight, landing, and commuting to your destination when you arrive.

Keep in mind that the first wave of driverless vehicles will be luxury vehicles that allow you to kick back, listen to music, have a cup of coffee, stop wherever you need to along the way, stay productive with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for roughly the same price.

If you think this vision is far off, think again. Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made with vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

Here are a few thoughts on how this industry will develop.

Read the rest of this entry »

On December 29th, Verizon announced it would begin charging a $2 “convenience fee” for any customers paying monthly bills with a credit or debit card via the Internet or telephone.

Within 24 hours, online petitions began to circulate and commenters voiced their condemnation of Verizon’s corporate greed. Instantly, their messages started showing up on websites and message boards across the Internet, and even the FCC responded quickly, announcing plans to investigate the charge. A day after the so-called convenience fee was announced, Verizon caved to public and governmental pressure and scrapped the charge.

This type of public outcry is beginning to happen with ever-greater frequency.

• Netflix subscribers derailed the company’s July 2011 plans to raise prices and spin off its DVD-rental business by overwhelming it with more than 27,000 comments. CEO Reed Hastings instantly moved from media darling to media demon over night.
• In October 2011, Bank of America announced a new $5/month charge to use debit cards. In less than a month, more than 300,000 people signed an online petition to stop the planned fee, and over 21,000 customers pledged to close their Bank of America checking accounts. One news anchor even cut up her card on the air. By the end of Oct, the $5 fee was dropped.

These are just a couple recent examples of how consumers are flexing their newfound muscles. But rest assured, the war against consumer injustice is just beginning. We are witnessing the start of a new era – micro-movements. Here’s what may be happening in the months ahead.

Read the rest of this entry »

The sixth law of the future states, “The “unknowability” of the future is what gives us our drive and motivation.”

The fact that the future is unknowable is a good thing. Our involvement in the game of life is based on our notion that we as individuals can make a difference. If we somehow remove the mystery of what results our actions will have, we also dismantle our individual drives and motivations for moving forward.

There is a whole lot that we don’t know about the year ahead. Yes, it will be messy. Important people will die. We will not cure cancer, just yet. And we won’t find a solution for war. But there is great value in the struggle. Our greatest achievements will come from these struggles.

We can learn much about where we’ve come from, and for this reason I’d like to give you a quick overview of the top articles in 2011 on FuturistSpeaker.com, based on popularity. They touch on jobs, education, crime, food supplies, and most importantly, the future. Join me as we take a look at the future through the eyes of the past.

Read the rest of this entry »

Understanding trends is more of an art form than an exact science. But for those who can read the tealeaves, and make bold moves, leveraging trends can give them a serious competitive advantage.

As an example, LinkedIn just posted its annual list of top buzzwords, the ones most commonly used on their members’ professional profiles. The top word people in the U.S. use to describe themselves on LinkedIn is “Creative.” Last year “Creative” didn’t even make it into the top ten, where “Extensive Experience” topped the list.

And it’s not just the U.S. This was the most used word in Britain, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany. So what business decisions will you make that tie into people’s recast dreams of being “creative?”

Obviously, trends don’t happen in one-year cycles. They are constantly evolving, and all of the content below is, in one way or another, already happening. Last week we began our journey with trends 1-14 of the “28 Major Trends,” and this week we will finish it. Here are trends 15 – 28.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are in for a very exciting year ahead. 2012 is a year where many competing trends will collide, and through those collisions we will see new pathways emerge.

At the same time, many new trends are forming, some with enough steam to form entirely new movements, others that will run their course and splinter into other emerging ways of doing business.

The “new normal” is quickly becoming the “nothing normal,” and our daily routines, the things we use to maintain our own sanity, will need to morph and change if we hope to stay competitive in the emerging job market and even stay current in our own social circles.

With this in mine, I’d like to take you on a journey into some of the trends I’ll be watching in 2012 as the tectonic plates of change inch their way into new positions. Here is the first half of the 28 major trends to watch in 2012 and beyond.

Read the rest of this entry »

Between 1990 and 2005, immigrants created 25% of all the publicly traded companies in the U.S. These included some of our best-known businesses such as Intel, Sun, eBay, Yahoo, and Google. This same group of foreign nationals went on to become the inventors behind 25% of all patents filed in U.S. in 2006.

Ever since the World Trade Center bombing, the U.S. has been tightening the screws on immigration policy. So much so that securing work visas for the thousands of foreign-born engineers and thinkers that U.S. companies desperately need for them to conduct business has become a serious impediment. Many fledgling companies simply can’t afford the effort.

Problems like this are screaming for a solution and a new startup called Blueseed, founded by Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija, may have a solution.

Blueseed, now funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, proposes to create visa-free floating work villages in international waters, with the first to be located within helicopter distance of Silicon Valley.

So will this ingenious plan to circumvent U.S. immigration policy lead to more policy tampering and eventually an erosion of the power of nations? Here are a few possible scenarios that are sure to surprise you.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you listen closely you can almost hear the armaments of battle being rolled into place. The stage is set with warring parties getting organized and the frontlines prepared. 2012 is destined to become the most turbulent year on record, a battleground of epic proportions.

But the primary wars of 2012 will not be fought with guns, tanks, or missiles. Instead, they will be fought inside corporate boardrooms, hacker basements, offices of government policy wonks, startup garages, on central banking committees, and the entire monetary playing field. And while the battles won’t be fought with gunpowder and bullets, battlefield generals will be empowered to use the equally lethal weapons of reputation assassins, privacy snipers, and data-blackmailers.

The U.S. presidential elections are heating up. Dirty politics of the past will seem like child’s play compared to what is about to be unleashed in 2012. During these campaigns we will be witnessing full-frontal reputation-lynchings with play-by-play narratives telling us how to think, shown on every possible surface along the information highway.

The reason I’m bring this up is because the lawlessness with which national candidates use to conduct themselves on the path to getting elected, will set the tone for nearly every other aspect of social life. And this disruptive conduct will lead to problems and chaos like never before. But that’s just a small piece of the driving forces that will influencing our future next year.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2008 the entire world was beginning to panic as our global financial systems teetered ever so close to total meltdown. Major banks were either failing or near failure, and the entire house of cards seemed to be one 10-of-Clubs away from becoming a meaningless flat stack in the middle of the table.

There was a growing distrust of banks, Wall Street, and our entire monetary system. We had allowed the wrong powerbrokers to gain control and business and industry were collapsing all around us. Visions of the Great Depression and its soup lines were haunting us, like a reoccurring nightmare, causing us to rethink our every move.

Many ideas were percolating in the background, but for one, the timing was perfect. Indeed, it is during the worst of times that we, as humans, often do our best work.

So it was in this collapsing chaos where people were grasping desperately for even the slightest ray of hope when on November 1st in 2008 a mysterious paper appeared on an obscure cryptography listserv describing details for a new digital currency called bitcoin.

It was from this seemingly innocent birthing chamber that this piece of monetary-replacement technology would begin its three-year rollercoaster journey, a journey with great lessons for our future.

Read the rest of this entry »

Warren Buffett owns many things, but so far owning his own country is not one of them.

In 2008 I gave a talk to an audience of 1,200 at the “Leaders in Dubai Business Forum” along with a dozen other global thought leaders that included best-selling writer Tom Peters, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, and many more.

Most of the speakers were addressing our depressingly screwed-up economy. I decided to take a different approach and presented my thoughts on emerging new systems for governmental power.

One idea, in particular, raised more than a few eyebrows among the Dubai group: selling islands as autonomous countries.

Dubai had been on the cutting edge of island-building technology, building Palm Island, along with a series of other artificial costal islands, selling them as high-end luxury homes and resort properties.

I suggested that creating new land could lead to the creation of real estate that is unattached and unaffiliated with any existing nationstate or indigenous group — land that could be sold for much more money as an autonomous country. I still see this as a distinct possibility today.

However, looking at the desperate state of countries in Europe today, it may now be cheaper to buy an existing country than to start a new one.

So could Warren Buffett buy Italy, or Greece, or Portugal? The answer may surprise you.

Read the rest of this entry »

“There is no future in any job. The future lies in
the person who holds the job.” – George W. Crane

One of my primary complaints with higher education is that they tend to prepare students for jobs of the past. The way a Midwesterner would phrase it, “they are constantly shooting behind the duck.”

Similarly, whenever a column is written about the best paying jobs of the future, jobs like civil engineers, registered nurses, and computer system analysts, they are all jobs that currently exist today.

Yes, many of these jobs will still exist in the future, but every one of them will morph and change as technology and communication systems make their impact.

As an example, technology research firm IDC predicts the amount of data businesses will have access to will grow 50-fold over the next decade. As data becomes cheaper, faster, and more pervasive, the nature of our work begins to change as well.

The first wave of baby boomers has now turned 65. As this generation greys, their needs will change. Their growing numbers and increasing medical needs will require a different kind of health care professionals to take care of them.

As a rule of thumb, 60% of the jobs 10 years from now haven’t been invented yet. With that in mind, I’ve decided to pull together a list of 55 jobs that will be in high demand in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »