A picture of me speaking at yesterday’s TEDxReset in Istanbul.

Yesterday I was honored to be one of the featured speakers at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul, Turkey where I predicted that over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030. Since my 18-minute talk was about the rapidly shifting nature of colleges and higher education, I didn’t have time to explain how and why so many jobs would be going away. Because of all of the questions I received afterwards, I will do that here.

If you haven’t been to a TEDx event, it is hard to confer the life-changing nature of something like this. Ali Ustundag and his team pulled off a wonderful event.

The day was filled with an energizing mix of musicians, inspiration, and big thinkers. During the breaks, audience members were eager to hear more and peppered the speakers with countless questions. They were also extremely eager to hear more about the future.

When I brought up the idea of 2 billion jobs disappearing (roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet) it wasn’t intended as a doom and gloom outlook. Rather, it was intended as a wakeup call, letting the world know how quickly things are about to change, and letting academia know that much of the battle ahead will be taking place at their doorstep.

Here is a brief overview of five industries – where the jobs will be going away and the jobs that will likely replace at least some of them – over the coming decades.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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It was roughly two years ago, October 15, 2009, when I got a call from a desperate lady, panicking, as she asked for my help.

Being a futurist, I don’t get many calls from people who urgently need my help. Futurists are rarely first responders.

As she described the situation, telling how a young boy’s life was at stake, and the situation was far too complicated for normal emergency rescue crews, she somehow thought of the DaVinci Institute.

“You work with some of the brightest minds in the world and this situation is going to require a very ingenious solution.” Her voice was dripping with trepidation and fear.

Moments after receiving her call, I turned on the television because the problem she described was quickly unfolding across the nation, gaining national attention, as a six-year old boy named Falcon had somehow gotten trapped inside a small weather balloon that was flying over the Midwest. Yes, this was the legendary balloon-boy incident, gripping the nation in panic and fear until the entire hoax started unraveling.

At the DaVinci Institute, we often tackle complex problems to find solutions. But in today’s world, one of the biggest problems threatening society today is complexity itself. Here’s why.

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In 1936 Edwin Howard Armstrong unveiled an improvement in radio that would later become known as FM radio. Working out of an office on the 82^nd floor of the Empire State Building, an office provided by RCA, Armstrong was on the verge of revolutionizing the radio industry. But it was a revolution that would not happen for several decades.

Armstrong was a true innovator in communications technology, first patenting three breakthrough technologies between 1914 and 1922. By early 1923, Armstrong was a millionaire as a result of licensing his patents to RCA.

David Sarnoff, then President of RCA and former friend of Armstrong, decided the switch from AM to FM would undermine the current AM monopoly. Sarnoff came to see FM as a threat and refused to support it further. What once seemed like a sure thing quickly turned into an industry black sheep.

After countless years of court battles with RCA and others, financially drained, Armstrong gave up the battle. Removing the air conditioner from the window of his 13^th floor apartment in New York City, he jumped to his death on January 31, 1954.

Due to the actions of RCA, FM technology sat on the sidelines for two decades waiting for legal battles to play out. It wasn’t until 1952 that Blaupunkt would become the first radio manufacturer to offer FM receivers for cars, and it wasn’t until 1978 that listenership to FM stations would finally exceed that of AM stations in North America.

The story of FM radio typifies what we’ve all come to think of as the overarching ruthless power of monopolies. But what a monopoly is and how it gets formed is being reinvented by some very shrewd business people using tools that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

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As the musical chairs game of unemployment money runs out, and an increasingly large number of people are left without a seat at the jobs table, desperation begins to set in.

For them, it becomes painfully obvious that their lackluster effort to find a job, which often involves playing video games and watching TV interspersed with sending an occasional resume or phone call, has left them with few options as the end of their financial rope draws ever closer.

Panic begins to set in.

Human to human social skills are vastly different than online social skills and their ability to interact with others has atrophied to a point where their entire circle of friends consists of a few relatives and some high school classmates who have somehow turned beer drinking into a profession.

They have already been suckered into several network marketing get-rich-quick schemes and looked at going back to college but couldn’t see a quick enough payback. With few options left, they find themselves slipping into survival mode.

Welcome to the underground economy.

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Sometime over the coming months you can expect to see a version of the following help wanted ad:

“Help Wanted: Full-time aerial drone drivers needed to help manager our growing fleet of surveillance, delivery, and communication drones. We are also looking for drone repair techs, drone dispatchers, and drone salesmen.”

In 2010 the U.S. Military spent $4.5 billion on drones. This has been a rapidly growing budget item in the military’s arsenal with $4.8 billion requested for 2011.

With this kind of focused spending, drone technology has improved dramatically over the past decade, but as a technology, the future for drones will go far beyond military uses. The stage is being set for thousands of everyday uses in business and industry all over the world.

A few months ago I speculated on how flying delivery drones could be added to the FedEX and UPS fleets. As it turns out, we are now moving well past the speculation stage. (pics)

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A report issued Tuesday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety boasted of the fact that red-light cameras were responsible for a significant drop in highway fatalities at the intersections where they were posted.

With this one well-crafted report, a document proving they save lives, the red-light camera industry established a beachhead in American society.

Naturally there was no mention of the lives that have been destroyed, marriages ripped apart, or the economic drain on the communities surrounding them because of the onerous fines imposed. Saving lives virtually always trumps the carnage of enforcement.

The issuance of the red-light camera report follows a repeatable pattern in business where a controversial enterprise with substantial cash-flow devises a brilliant strategy for justifying their existence.

Transparency creates its own economies. Whether or not red-light cameras are a net-positive or a net-negative for society is less important than the fact that we are making a dramatic shift towards micro-monitoring human actions.

With every new technology that expands the realm of human transparency, enterprising people quickly follow with systems designed to capitalize on any human deviation from the newly established norms.

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What will cause the power to shift among nations between now and 2050?

I often get interview requests from newspaper and magazines as they probe for a better understanding of the world ahead. However, the request I received two days ago was a bit unusual.

On Monday, I received an email from Elena Snezhko, a journalist with the Ukrainian financial weekly magazine InvestGazeta, posing a series of question about which countries will rise to power 40 years from now, and why.

In 200 BC, the great Carthaginian General, Hannibal, used an army of elephants to symbolize power. In World War II the idea of power was symbolized by heavy artillery in the form of tanks and bombs. Tomorrow’s battles may be so strange that people will long for the days of guns and knives again.

Here is how I answered her questions.

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