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.

No one will miss the clutter and chaos of power lines.

1.) Power Industry

Until now, the utility companies existed as a safe career path where little more than storm-related outages and an occasional rate increase would cause industry officials to raise their eyebrows.

Yet the public has become increasingly vocal about their concerns over long-term health and environmental issues relating to the current structure and disseminating methods of of the power industry, causing a number of ingenious minds to look for a better way of doing things.

Recently I was introduced to two solutions that seem predestined to start the proverbial row of dominoes to start falling. There are likely many more waiting in the wings, but these two capitalize on existing variances found in nature and are unusually elegant in the way they solve the problem of generating clean power at a low cost.

Both companies have asked me to keep quiet about their technology until they are a bit farther along, but I will at least explain the overarching ramifications.

I should emphasize that both technologies are intended to work inside the current utility company structure, so the changes will happen within the industry itself.

To begin with, these technologies will shift utilities around the world from national grids to micro grids that can be scaled from a single home to entire cities. The dirty power era will finally be over and the power lines that dangle menacingly over our neighborhoods, will begin to come down. All of them.

While the industry will go through a long-term shrinking trend, the immediate shift will cause many new jobs to be created.

Jobs Going Away

• Power generation plants will begin to close down.
• Coal plants will begin to close down.
• Many railroad and transportation workers will no longer be needed.
• Even wind farms, natural gas, and bio-fuel generators will begin to close down.
• Ethanol plants will be phased out or repurposed.
• Utility company engineers, gone.
• Line repairmen, gone.

New Jobs Created

• Manufacturing power generation units the size of ac units will go into full production.
• Installation crews will begin to work around the clock.
• The entire national grid will need to be taken down (a 20 year project). Much of it will be recycled and the recycling process alone will employ many thousands of people.
• Micro-grid operations will open in every community requiring a new breed of engineers, managers, and regulators.
• Many more.

San Francisco–based design team Mike and Maaike’s concept car, the ATNMBL (the “autonomobile”).

2.) Automobile Transportation – Going Driverless

Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made by vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

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 in transit with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for substantially less than the cost of today’s limos.

Driverless technology will initially require a driver, but it will quickly creep into everyday use much as airbags did. First as an expensive option for luxury cars, but eventually it will become a safety feature stipulated by the government.

The greatest benefits of this kind of automation won’t be realized until the driver’s hands are off the wheel. With over 2 million people involved in car accidents every year in the U.S., it won’t take long for legislators to be convinced that driverless cars are a substantially safer and more effective option.

The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.

Jobs Going Away

• Taxi and limo drivers, gone.
• Bus drivers, gone.
• Truck drivers, gone.
• Gas stations, parking lots, traffic cops, traffic courts, gone.
• Fewer doctors and nurses will be needed to treat injuries.
• Pizza (and other food) delivery drivers, gone.
• Mail delivery drivers, gone.
• FedEx and UPS delivery jobs, gone.
• As people shift from owning their own vehicles to a transportation-on-demand system, the total number of vehicles manufactured will also begin to decline.

New Jobs Created

• Delivery dispatchers
• Traffic monitoring systems, although automated, will require a management team.
• Automated traffic designers, architects, and engineers
• Driverless “ride experience” people.
• Driverless operating system engineers.
• Emergency crews for when things go wrong.

Apple is involved in another life changing innovation with iTunes U.

3.) Education

The OpenCourseware Movement took hold in 2001 when MIT started recording all their courses and making them available for free online. They currently have over 2080 courses available that have been downloaded 131 million times.

In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.

Now, the 8,000 pound gorilla in the OpenCourseware space is Apple’s iTunes U. This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.

All of these courses are free for anyone to take. So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?

As the OpenCourseware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.

In the middle of all this we are transitioning from a teaching model to a learning model. Why do we need to wait for a teacher to take the stage in the front of the room when we can learn whatever is of interest to us at any moment?

Teaching requires experts. Learning only requires coaches.

With all of the assets in place, we are moving quickly into the new frontier of a teacherless education system.

Jobs Going Away

• Teachers.
• Trainers.
• Professors.

New Jobs Created

• Coaches.
• Course designers.
• Learning camps.

Prototype of a 40′ X 40′ 3D Printer capable of printing a small building

4.) 3D Printers

Unlike a machine shop that starts with a large piece of metal and carves away everything but the final piece, 3D printing is an object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place.

Chuck Hull in front of stereolithography machine.

The first commercial 3D printer was invented by Charles Hull in 1984, based on a technique called stereolithography.

Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.

3D Printed Dress

3D Printed Shoes

Jobs Going Away

• If we can print our own clothes and they fit perfectly, clothing manufacturers and clothing retailers will quickly go away.
• Similarly, if we can print our own shoes, shoe manufacturers and shoe retailers will cease to be relevant.
• If we can print construction material, the lumber, rock, drywall, shingle, concrete, and various other construction industries will go away.

New Jobs Created

• 3D printer design, engineering, and manufacturing.
• 3D printer repairmen will be in big demand.
• Product designers, stylists, and engineers for 3D printers.
• 3D printer ‘Ink’ sellers.

Boston Dynamics’ BigDog

5.) Bots

We are moving quickly past the robotic vacuum cleaner stage to far more complex machines.

The BigDog robot, shown above, is among the most impressive and potentially useful for troops in the immediate future–it’s being developed to act as an autonomous drone assistant that’ll carry gear for soldiers across rough battlefield terrain.

Nearly every physical task can conceivably be done by a robot at some point in the future.

Jobs Going Away

• Fishing bots will replace fishermen.
• Mining bots will replace miners.
• Ag bots will replace farmers.
• Inspection bots will replace human inspectors.
• Warrior drones will replace soldiers.
• Robots can pick up building material coming out of the 3D printer and begin building a house with it.

New Jobs Created

• Robot designers, engineers, repairmen.
• Robot dispatchers.
• Robot therapists.
• Robot trainers.
• Robot fashion designers.

Final Thoughts

In these five industries alone there will be hundreds of millions of jobs disappearing. But many other sectors will also be affected.

Certainly there’s a downside to all this. The more technology we rely on, the more breaking points we’ll have in our lives.

Driverless drones can deliver people. These people can deliver bombs or illicit drugs as easily as pizza.

Robots that can build building can also destroy buildings.

All of this technology could make us fat, dumb, and lazy, and the problems we thought we were solving become far more complicated.

We are not well-equipped culturally and emotionally to have this much technology entering into our lives. There will be backlashes, “destroy the robots” or “damn the driverless car” campaigns with proposed legislation attempting to limit its influence.

At the same time, most of the jobs getting displaced are the low-level, low-skilled labor positions. Our challenge will be to upgrade our workforce to match the labor demand of the coming era. Although it won’t be an easy road ahead it will be one filled with amazing technology and huge potentials as the industries shift.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” - the book that changes everything

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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.

When David Meets Goliath

In 1983, when Apple was on the verge of launching the Macintosh, Steve Jobs sought out film producer Ridley Scott, who was just coming off the critically acclaimed production of Blade Runner, to produce a SuperBowl commercial that would play up the David and Goliath battle being waged between IBM and Apple.

Using an unprecedented $900,000 budget to produce the commercial, Job’s was determined to make a big slash. Even though the Apple Board tried to kill the ad for the Superbowl, through some behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the commercial still ran, and the impact was huge.

The commercial opened with an ominous dark feel of some future time, showing a line of bald genderless people marching in unison through a long tunnel with every movement being monitored by electronic screens. This scene sets the stage for the contrasting image a well-muscled female runner carrying a large hammer while wearing a colorful athletic outfit.

As she is chased by four police-like officers representing the “thought police,” she races towards a large screen with an image of Big Brother giving a speech:

“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology — where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

As the runner closes in on the screen, she hurls the hammer towards it, at the exact same moment that Big Brother announces, “we shall prevail!” In a flurry of light and smoke, the screen is destroyed, shocking the people watching it.

The commercial concludes with an ominous narrative rising from the hazy, whitish-blue aftermath of the cataclysmic event:

“On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”

The commercial ends by fading to black and as the Apple logo appears.

After receiving numerous other awards, in 2007 the ad was chosen as the “Best Super Bowl Spot” in the game’s 40-year history.

Steve Jobs was a master at leveraging his role as the underdog, always wanting to champion the “little guys” in their battles against the forces of big business.

Big Brother Vs. Big Citizenry

Ever since George Orwell published his 1949 head-turning classic “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” people have had a lingering fear of government usurping too much power, and especially in the electronic age, of them monitoring our every movement.

The “1984” paranoia surrounding Big Brother is still alive today, but with one big difference. The little guys now have the tools to fight back.

People power has gone mainstream:

• In May 2011, a Chicago jewelry artist accused Urban Outfitters on her blog of copying her designs, her post went viral and the company pulled the items within a day.
• When Facebook pushes their transparency plans too far, users scream and Facebook changes their approach.
• Coca-Cola released a special 2011 white and silver holiday design for its cans to raise awareness about the plight of polar bears. But the cans closely resembled the silver ones used for Diet Coke and many diehard Coke drinkers felt misled. As a result, they took to the Internet to complain and the company pulled the can design.
• On Dec 19th a video showed up on YouTube of a FedEx courier tossing a computer monitor over a backyard fence. In days, the video had millions of views, and began showing up on everything from Good Morning America, to CNN News, to the Late Show with David Letterman. FedEx responded quickly with a YouTube video of its own and a blog post saying that the courier’s behavior was “absolutely, positively unacceptable.”

Micro-Movements and the Tools of the People

In the past, most governments could use heavy-handed top-down tactics to foil any protest or uprising. But the toolsets used by the people are changing.

The most powerful tools in today’s arsenals are transparency and instant communication. Spotting injustice and rubbing the public’s nose in it can cause micro-movements to surface and explode in less than a day.

This new trend is all about micro-movements and their ability to self-organize in minutes, not days, and cause the world to change. Micro-movements are an instant checks and balance where other systems fail.

The watchers are watching, so the listeners have to be listening.

Anyone who doesn’t respond quickly runs the risk of being burned at the stake of public ridicule.

When it comes to other tools these architects of micro-movement can leverage, in addition to generating instant awareness, they can influence people’s political vote, their monetary vote (where they spend their money), and their attention vote (where they spend their time). Going even further, leveraging perhaps the most disruptive tool of all, they can cause people to register a defiance vote, ignore the rules, and simply walk away. This can have severe consequences, but if played right, can quickly garner political backing.

As an example, when housing prices began to plummet and the outstanding mortgages were more than the underlying value of the houses, homeowners simply walked away. Even though it wasn’t the result of any well-planned movement, the next one might be.

Given the right circumstances, someone may architect a similar mass exit for the following situations:

• As the price of college education begins to drop, the outstanding student loans will begin to seem unreasonable. At this point it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to convince large numbers of people to stop paying their student loans.
• As frustration over big banks increase, many could be influenced to move to credit unions or “no bank” alternatives.
• As credit card companies continue to press for high transaction fees, companies and consumers could be directed toward Dwolla and other low-fee options.
• As health insurance companies try to raise prices, virtually every increase could become a new micro-movement with people lining up to change it.

Big Citizenry Going Global

The past 18 months have seen extraordinary outpourings of discontent. BBC writer Paul Mason captured the reasons behind this movement well in his column “Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere”

Listen closely as the voice of the people begins to gain momentum. Look for both the technology that supports it to improve, startups to form around the micro-movement industry and spring to life, and political pressure to be felt like never before.

The Arab Spring has set most governments of the world on notice.

On January 1st, probably more as a preemptive strike, the Chinese government ordered the cancellation of what it considered “low brow” programming, dropping many of its most popular TV programs from 126 a week to just 38, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

Each of China’s 34 satellite television channels is now limited to an hour and a half of light entertainment programming between 7.30pm and 10pm. In addition, the regulations now require at least two half-hour news bulletins a night.

Protests are now a daily occurrence in China and officials are responding to each incident differently. But this kind of “people power” will not go away anytime soon, and China will have entirely new kinds of outbreaks to deal with this year.

Economic turmoil is causing uprising throughout Europe, but this time around they will be far more exacting in how the protests are staged.

Even Russia’s Vladimir Putin is now receiving unprecedented push-back from his heavy-handed governing authority. No governments will be exempt.

The age of protest has only begun. With new tools coming online daily, and the overarching reach of the awareness extending even further, those who are caught in the crossfire will no longer have the luxury of planning a response. They will need to react quickly, and correctly. If not, they will end up little more than footnoted casualties of the power of the people and the great consumer backlash.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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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.

10.) Four Fundamental Myths Derailing Academic Change

When we think about Benjamin Franklin, we instantly think of the author, scientist, inventor, diplomat who signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence and has his face on the one-hundred dollar bill. Ben Franklin was a truly remarkable person, yet he had less than two years of formal education.

I recently came across a study that examined the lives of 755 famous people who either dropped out of grade school or high school. The list included 25 billionaires, 8 U.S. Presidents, 10 Nobel Prize winners, 8 Olympic medal winners, 63 Oscar winners, 55 best-selling authors, and 31 who had been Knighted.

With names like Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Richard Branson, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Will Rogers, and Joseph Pulitzer, being an academic failure still left you in the company of some incredible luminaries.

Going one step further, adding the names of well-known college dropouts to the list, names like Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill Gates, Buckminster Fuller, Larry Ellison, Howard Hughes, Michael Dell, Ted Turner, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, and virtually every famous actor, actress, and director in Hollywood, and the dropout list becomes a venerable Who’s Who of American culture.

So what are we missing here? On one hand we are being told that the path to success is through academia. Yet, we have literally thousands of examples of wealthy, successful, business leaders, industry icons, and some of our greatest heroes that took a different route. Continue reading here.

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9.) Why Industries Collapse

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. Continue reading here.

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8.) Hoping the Crime Rate Goes Up

How many laws are governing you at this very moment?

Driving across America we find ourselves constantly driving through invisible barriers where new laws come into play and old ones fade away. We have no clue as to what laws they are, or even how many, but these laws have the potential to ruin our lives.

In a country that claims to be the land of the free, the number of people under the control of the U.S. corrections system has exploded over the last 25 years to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 U.S. adults, according to a report by the Pew Center on the States. The actual number of people behind bars rose to 2.3 million, nearly five times more than the world’s average.

But true criminals are not the problem.

Headlines in the New York Times have repeatedly showed us the irony of our current dilemma – “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling,” “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops,” “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,” and “More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime.”

Logically then, if crime keeps falling, we simply won’t be able to build prisons fast enough.

We can only hope that real crime goes up so our criminal justice system will have real criminals to go after. Continue reading here.

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7.) Introducing the Eight Grand Challenges for Humanity

As I took the stage, my goal was to introduce the crowd to a series of Eight Grand Challenges, incentivized competitions designed to push humanity to another level.

But as with many crowds, there was a formidable issue in the minds of attendees, a hurdle of acceptance before these challenges would be deemed cause-worthy.

At issue was our obsession with solving all of today’s problems before we dare think about advancing humanity. How can we possibly justify advancing humanity when the money would be far better spent solving today’s massive problems?

Answering this objection first, was critically important, so here is the way I presented it.

If we only focus on solving today’s problems, we become trapped in the past. Every solution leads to another set of problems. Much like the whack-a-mole game at video arcades, as one problem gets pounded down, another pokes its ugly head out.

The only real way out is to advance civilization. By advancing civilization we change the nature of the problems we’re dealing with, and that is exactly what the Eight Grand Challenges have been designed to do. Continue reading here.

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6.) The Coming Collapse of Bitcoin?

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. Continue reading here.

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5.) Eight Critical Skills for the Future

On Monday evening I presented my thoughts on the “Future of Mobile Apps & Peripherals” at our monthly Night with a Futurist event. My talk was followed by a fascinating panel discussion with three of the industry’s brightest minds – Michael Sitarzewski, Lisa Calkins, and Gary Moskoff with Karl Dakin moderating the discussion.

Several people left this event saying their heads were ready to explode with all the fascinating new ground we covered, and I credit these four with helping us push the envelope on this topic.

At one point the conversation turned to social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, and Buzz that encourage users to log in and share their location. This feature is packaged as a fun way to find friends and stay social. But there is a downside.

Michael Sitarzewski was quick to point out a new site called ‘Please Rob Me‘ that aims to make online tell-alls aware of the potential downside to public location-sharing.

‘Please Rob Me’ aggregates and streams location check-ins into a list of “all those empty homes out there,” and describes the recently-shared locations as “new opportunities.”

While this seems comical on one level, the dangers are quite obvious, and even more apparent is our poor understanding of the demands being placed on us individually, and the skills we will need to function in this unchartered new territory.

With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of the eight critical skills that we will need in the future that are not being taught in school today. Continue reading here.

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4.) 12 Laws of the Future

For several decades now I have been contemplating our relationship with the future.

Many of my colleagues think of me as that crazy guy who assigns human attributes to this thing we call the future.

On occasion you can hear me uttering phrases like, “I know it’s going to be a great day because the future is clearly happy with me today.” Or, “no, that’s not a good idea because the future is probably going to push it off a cliff.”

At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car, but she wasn’t buying it.

So why is it so important to study the future? For starters, we all have a vested interest in it. We will all be living in the future. Continue reading here.

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3.) The Coming Food Printer Revolution

Would you buy a product that was advertised as “Naturally grown, completely organic, printed food?”

Anyone who has an apple tree growing in their yard knows how difficult it is to grow one that is worthy of eating straight off the tree. Most have bruises, wormholes, or bird damage that leaves most apples somewhat marginalized. They may be perfectly good on the inside, yet they don’t look very good.

As we shop for apples in the grocery store, we find ourselves looking for the “perfect apple.” Only a small percentage of apples grown on the farm are worthy of making it into the major leagues of food – the fresh produce section of our grocery stores.

But what if we could take all of those bruised and damaged apples and turn them all into “perfect apples” – perfect size, perfect color, perfect crunch when we bite into them, and the perfect sweet juicy flavor and aroma that makes our mouth water every time we think about them.

This is the promise of food printer technology as we move from simply printing ink on paper, to 3D printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers.

These aren’t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising. Instead, they are devices with the very real potential for turning real apples into perfect apples. But this is only scratching the surface. Continue reading here.

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Great lies continue to be propagated

2.) Eight False Promises of the Internet

In early 2003 I had a conversation with Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA. At the time we were interested in hiring him to be the keynote speaker at our upcoming Future of Money Summit, an event that would take place in November of that year.

Ten years earlier, in March of 1993, Hock gave a dinner speech at the Santa Fe Institute where he described his unusual organizational theories in managing VISA, describing them as “chaordic” a term that roughly translates into “ordered chaos.”

In 1996 he formed the Chaordic Alliance, later renamed the Chaordic Commons, for the purpose of furthering his notions that businesses can run more effectively when they are based on a “vital set of living beliefs” distributed through an organization, essentially replacing top-down command and control.

As we talked, his powers of persuasion were quite evident as he artfully described his “chaordic” theories, and by the end of the conversation I was a true believer, wanting to become a disciple of this new business gospel.

But as with many things that sound too good to be true the first time you hear them, Hock’s “chaodic” theories that somehow worked within VISA, proved non-reproducible in other settings, and have now largely been abandoned after numerous attempts to implement them in other companies.

As we enter the 2nd decade of the new millennium we find ourselves in a similar quandary trying to separate the fallacies from the promises of what works and what doesn’t on the Internet. With that in mind I’ve put together a list of eight of the founding theories of the Internet that have proved similarly deceptive. Continue reading here.

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1.) 55 Jobs of the Future

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 grays, 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. Continue reading here.

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Final Thoughts

We are in for a very exciting year ahead. It’s 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.

The year ahead will be a wild ride. Let’s take that ride together.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future“ – the book that changes everything

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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.

Below is a list of the eight colliding forces that will turn 2012 into one of the most memorable in all history:

1.) Atoms Vs. Electrons

While most people don’t think of it this way, there is a war going on between atoms and electrons. Atoms are what I use to describe everything in the physical world and electrons are the embodiment of the digital world.

Digital businesses are moving exponentially faster than anything that requires manipulating physical materials. Companies today are making conscious decisions about whether they should be working with physical products or digital ones.

Physical products require the use of raw materials, designers and engineers, shipping & receiving, inventory, warehouse space, shelf space, marketing & sales, and most importantly, physical products have tax implications. Digital products, on the other hand, can eliminate 90% of the work involved in distributing them.

Digital companies move exponentially faster than physical ones, simply because they can.

We are witnessing a brain drain as employees leave their physical-world jobs in transportation, manufacturing, and service industries to move into positions in digital companies because that is where all the excitement is.

Even though we run the very real risk of becoming a digitally distorted society, giving too much power to geeks and nerds, it will be a refreshing move away from the banking overlords of the past decade.

2.) Student Debt Crisis – Online Education Vs. the Sage on Stage

There has always been competing forces within education, but the looming student debt crisis is beginning to paint colleges with the same brush as Wall Street. And the belt-tightening ahead for colleges will be a precursor to reining in costs in K-12. As the austerity movement in Washington begins to settle in, education, like virtually every other profession, will be asked to do more for less.

At the same time, there’s a new sheriff in town, in the form of online education, holding everyone’s feet to the fire.

As evidenced by the success of the Michael Milken – Larry Ellison funded K12, a Virginia-based company leading a national movement to replace classrooms with computers. K12 works which children as young as 5 who learn at home at taxpayer expense. With some 95,000 students already enrolled in its system, K12 is demonstrating a strong case for giving new options to students who, until now, have been relegated to attend the failing school next door.

While their efforts are not without its detractors, this sudden shift towards acceptance is causing a new wave of introspection among educators. This introspection can best be summed up in the educator’s dilemma – “Am I really looking out for what’s best for the kids, or is this more about protecting my job, saving the profession, and preserving a way of life?”

3.) Health Food Vs. Brain Amping

A growing number of studies about the downside of vitamins have been sending shockwaves through the alternative health field. Over the years the pattern of media headlines have gone from “Vitamins may be a waste of money” to “Study confirms significant risk of daily vitamin use.”

As with other forms of health food, the sales pitch for vitamins has been pegged to the intangible hope for better health and a better life. But they offer little in the form of instant feedback for the consumer. You may be getting healthier but you won’t know until later.

Currently there is a growing subset of the health food industry that comes with instant indicators of its effectiveness.

Energy drinks, which includes everything from Red Bull and Monster to Starbucks and home-brewed espresso, fall into the food industry category of “functional beverages.” This “functional” classification also involves sports and nutraceutical drinks.

Athletes were the original target market and primary consumers of energy drinks. However, as the energy drink market grew and expanded into various niche markets, athletes are no longer the primary target. Today, the majority of energy drinks are targeted at the 18-34 year old teenagers and young adults because of this generation’s on-the-go lifestyle.

But beyond this marketing shift comes the generational-altering philosophy that if it doesn’t happen instantly, it isn’t happening at all. And simply saying you can feel the results “soon,” will no longer be good enough.

2012 will be the year when a wide range of new self-manipulating products and drinks will be launched involving everything from “instant-strong” to “instant-sleep” to “instant-attraction” to “instant brains.” Look for electronic devices to be added to the mix that push the envelope even further.

4.) The Awareness Revolution – Big Brother Vs. Big Citizenry

Yes, the world has certainly changed since 1850 when Paul Reuters, founder of the Reuters News Service, set a new speed standard for delivering news between Brussels and Berlin by using carrier pigeons.

With the pervasiveness of smartphones and instant connectivity, we are living in a society that is jacked-in 24-7 to the world around us.

Not only are we increasingly aware of the world around us, we are able to focus the frequency of our awareness to precisely the topics and industries we are most interested in.

Those who are uncomfortable with this lifting of the veils tend to be the guardians of the secrets, people entrusted with protecting company assets, government secrets, and the old guard who firmly believes that ignorance is bliss.

With centuries of dark secrets being carefully guarded by governments to prevent retaliations decades after-the-fact, facing off against disenfranchised individuals who are mere button-clicks away from unleashing pandemonium, we are seeing a rapid escalation in legislation and technologies for preventing cracks in the national armor.

Governments are keeping a closer eye on potential disruptors and the disruptors are using what they see as the rampant growth of governmental powers as a reason to create chaos and anarchy.

These two opposing factions are becoming more entrenched on a daily basis.

This will not end well. The power struggles of global politics are on the verge of becoming totally unhinged

5.) Crowdfunding Vs. Banking Industry

On Nov. 3rd Congress moved the economically disconnected pieces of society a bit closer to the American Entrepreneurial Dream of owning a business by expanding the option for attracting angel investors. Even thought the vast majority of Americans are woefully disconnected from knowing how jobs get created, this will have a major impact on virtually everyone’s lives.

Next stop for this bill will be the U.S. Senate. Given its strong bipartisan support, and backing by the Obama administration, it looks likely that the bill – or at least some version of it – will soon become law.

Although little has been written about the long term implications of this bill, opportunists, in all walks of entrepreneurship, are taking notice and beginning to formulate plans to either launch their own crowdfunding operation or unveil a startup that can benefit from it.

Since startups have become an infinitely small portion of most bank’s loan portfolios, and the SBA who guarantees (primarily asset-based) loans for startups has become increasingly out of touch with the lean thinking and digital nature of new business formation, it wouldn’t appear to be much of a banking conflict on the surface.

However, after years of being snubbed by the financial community, startup entrepreneurs have very little love for those working in “the system.” With the right mix of personalities and motivation, a full toolset of crowdfunding options in the right hands will invariably create a powder keg of activity designed around circumventing banks entirely from the system that has dissed them repeatedly.

6.) The Transparency Wars – Privacy Vs. Convenience

As humans we are constantly radiating information, and this information is being detected, logged, and analyzed for use in startling new ways.

People gathering the data are doing so for positive reasons, to make our lives more convenient. But there is a downside to this level of exposure.

Technology for capturing personal data is now being pushed to the nth degree. As humans we need to be able to make mistakes. But transparency increases the pain threshold for making those mistakes.

It sounds good when business people talk about wearing failure as a badge of courage, and how we can improve our success ratio by failing faster and failing smarter. But, in all likelihood, the next generation of transparency won’t even let us get to that point.

As Thomas Edison so aptly reminds us, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the things that don’t work.

As transparency grows, we are approaching a logical breaking point. When we do, look for the small-time rule-breakers of the past to become the full-scale turbo-charged rule-breakers of the future.

The driving forces of those wishing to monetize transparency will find themselves in a full-scale cyber-war with those who have reached their limit. And it may involve much more than online battlefields.

7.) The Retirement Battleground – The Working Poor Vs. the Retiring Rich

Populations around the world are declining. We are seeing negative population growth in Canada, all across Europe, Korea, Japan, China, Australia, and many more. The U.S. is about even with roughly 2.1 children per family.

While the number of young people is becoming proportionally smaller, the number of seniors is becoming proportionally larger – much larger.

Americans over 65 will more than double, from 34.8 million in 2000 (12%) to 70.3 million in 2030 (20%). At the same time, the next generation of retirees are destined to become the healthiest, longest-lived, best educated, most affluent in all history.

But we will pay dearly for this level of prosperity, and with the systems as they currently stand, the working class will become the indentured servants of the retirement class, consuming a growing level of income until it reaches a breaking point.

8.) Healthcare Wars

Five driving forces will cause healthcare to go into a death spiral in 2012 – the new healthcare legislation and forces of transparency combined with the convergence of smartphones, peripherals, and apps.

With every piece of health-related information that an individual consumes, there is an accompanying moment of introspection.

People today are far more adept at connecting cause and effect relationships between everything from food and the body’s energy, to physical activity and mental alertness, to sleep and daily performance.

The more we know about the human body, the more we become aware of its deficiencies. Our health is a common topic of conversation and we now have names for thousands of new medical conditions and physical performance issues that didn’t even exist 20 years ago.

Over time the number of treatable conditions for us to contend with will increase exponentially. Enterprising people will devise treatments for virtually every slight deviation from the norm, and many will prey on those who are hypersensitive to their own physical maladies.

This cumulative awareness is building towards something, and this something I believe will involve more personal control, greater efficiencies, and a focus on the concept of “self.”

Self-diagnostics, self-monitoring, self-medication, and just an overarching need for self-control.

The massive surge in smartphone technology is setting the stage for a wide variety of health-related peripheral devices to spring to life, revolutionizing how healthcare is monitored and managed.

The combination of smartphones, functioning as small anytime, anyplace computers; wirelessly connected peripheral devices such a ultrasound wands, blood pressure cuffs, EKG monitors, skin-monitoring patches, and ingestible cameras; along with a rapidly growing app-builder community capable of finding uses for equipment that manufacturers never dreamed possible, and the stage is being set for an entirely new health system to emerge.

It is this convergence of smartphones, peripherals, and apps that is on the verge of granting us, the consumers, a whole new level of awareness, and the ability to live with far fewer gatekeepers in our quest for optimal health and physical performance.

Many in our current healthcare fields will not appreciate this development.

Final Thoughts

As I started pulling my notes together for 2012 trends, I instantly became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of changes currently in the works. The number of moving parts seems to exceed the number of stationary parts. All of our markets, systems, and technologies have become incredibly fluid, and much like a floating vessel, we are heading to parts unknown.

To a futurist, the chaotic nature of interconnecting trends and the extreme possibilities appear at times like a spinning compass needle. The disarray that we find ourselves in cries out for answers – some glimpse of the uncharted waters that lie beyond the horizon.

In the famous words used by John F. Kennedy at Rice University, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Curing the failing systems that are crumbling around us gives us a far different motivation. We are doing it because we have to. And yes, it will be very hard.

We’re not going to find a way out of this mess if the industry captains and political leaders do not pay attention to the simple chore of engendering trust.

Are we up to the task? Do we have the talent in place to lead us through the coming minefields? Only time will tell.

Ultimately, we have the opportunity to emerge as a far better world.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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.

Collapsing Civilizations

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a disturbing book titled The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter’s work enabled him to take a close look at some of the most sophisticated societies throughout history to gain a better understanding about what led to their fall – the Roman Empire, the Anasazi In Chaco Canyon, the Mayan Civilization, ancient Mesopotamia and several more.

Every one of these groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, and advanced technology. But despite their cleverness, they all collapsed.

These once great civilizations, all separated by time and distance, created systems for living and working that were not flexible enough to survive the demands of change.

With architectural details still offering only sketchy insight at best, the rapid declines were invariably triggered by a single incident that caused the entire house of cards to crumble.

For people living in each of these cultures, it became impossible for any one person to understand the interrelationships and intricate workings of the whole. While the triggering event may be considered a classic blunder by today’s standards, it would have been impossible to predict at the time.

Re-Inventing Classic Blunders

Industries today operate, in many respects, like these ancient cultures, but heavily influenced by external forces.

In September last year, Blockbuster Video filed for bankruptcy protection amidst a rapidly declining video store rental market. At their peak, this well-know brand boasted over 4,400 stores around the world.

Over the coming years, every one of these stores will be closed, replacing people with machines as they try to re-engineer their business model around a faceless vending operation, and eventually they too will disappear.

Video rental businesses are going the way of the Yellow Pages, travel agencies, and, in earlier days, blacksmiths, telegraph operators, and livery stables.

The difference today is a well-connected world that enables us to learn about the signals of change before the bulk of the change actually occurs.

Unlike the slow moving cultures of the past, where every change took a generation or two for people to adapt to, business opportunities today can be capitalized on in a matter of days. These businesses are being created around fragile structures that can cause entire industries to grow and collapse in what would seem like fleeting moments in any history book.

50% Unemployment

One topic receiving considerable attention today is unemployment. The trappings of modern employment have a relatively short history with an entire body of regulations building up around the employer-employee relationship to help define an equitable working arrangement.

At the same time that employment law is being defined to the nth degree, technology is being developed to disrupt the human need for traditional workers.

Automation comes in many different shapes and sizes, sometimes hardware, sometimes software, that causes the need for human labor to drop precipitously.

Since business has an obligation to hire and employ the fewest number of people it can get by with, most are quick to jump on any labor-saving automation they can reasonably implement.

Many of these automations eliminate as many as 10,000 people at a time. Just as email has eliminated the need for mail delivery, electric cars will eliminate the need for car mechanics.

These types of automations are being introduced into society with ever-greater frequency. Much like a giant elephant stomping across the employment landscape, huge numbers of jobs are being eliminated every time a foot hits the ground.

A research group we have at the DaVinci Institute has been looking closely at the future employment issue and whether we are destined to reach something as devastating as 50% unemployment.

One conclusion we reached is that every industry will indeed go through a period of 50% unemployment, eventually.

In the 1700s over 97% of the people in the U.S. were involved in agriculture in one way or another. Today that number is 1.4%, yet we produce far more food. Agriculture is an industry that has gone through several iterations of 50% unemployment.

Similarly, in 1970 the U.S. steel industry employed 531,000 workers who produced 91 million tons of steel. By 2006, the industry dropped to only 159,000 workers, yet they produced over 106 million tons of steel. Again, this is an industry that has gone through multiple iterations of 50% unemployment.

Neither of these industries has collapsed, but they look radically different than they did a few decades earlier.

The Engines of Job Creation

In a recent column I asked the question – “Is there such a thing as a “forever” job, a position that will endure forever through time?” Will we always need policemen, firemen, teachers, farmers, doctors, and nurses, or is it possible that those professions will also go away?

One astute reader commented that we will always have a need for “fathers” and “mothers.”

Excluding these two non-paid professions, if we start with the premise that there is no such thing as a forever job, that all jobs will eventually be replaced, we can logically conclude new jobs will be needed to take the old one’s place.

Going one step further, if we assume the pace of life is constantly speeding up, we must also consider the possibility that jobs will disappear far faster in the future than they do today. Certainly there are no guarantees we will stay on this torrid pace of change, but for the time being we will need to quickly make adjustments along with all other aspects of society.

For this reason, the next obvious question is whether or not we can create new jobs as fast as the old ones go away? And if not, will we suffer the same fate as the Romans, Mayans, and the Anasazi.

In a closely linked, interdependent world, every change will cause ripple effects that reach into people’s lives, even those working in industries seemingly unrelated to what originally happened.

Change does not happen because everyone gets together first and decides a change is going to happen. When the stock market started collapsing in 2006 and 2007, it wasn’t because there was some grand conspiracy to cause entire industries to fall apart. Everyone loses when that happens.

Final Thoughts

Tainter concluded that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy too many that it becomes the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Complex societies collapse because they are too inflexible to respond. From our vantage point, this can seem rather mystifying. Why didn’t they just re-tool and make things simpler? The answer Tainter gives is a simple one: When societies fail to respond with orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

Even when moderate adjustments can be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification is too disruptive for the elite among us. Collapse becomes the last remaining option on the path to simplification.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” - the book that changes everything

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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.

The Human Nature of Monopolies

In economic terms, a monopoly exists when a single entity has enough control over an industry to determine the terms of access for products or services.

In a free enterprise system, the game of business is a competitive sport that rewards aggressive personalities. As a result, some monopolies form naturally out of the competitive nature of generally accepted business practices such as with Google’s search engine, Microsoft’s Office products, or Facebook’s social networking system.

One thing they all have in common is an “unusual competitive advantage” stemming from economic barriers such as economies of scale, capital requirements, cost advantages, and technological superiority. However they can also be formed around legal barriers and deliberate actions.

In the recently released book “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” written by Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu, Tim does a masterful job of describing the history of communications in the U.S. starting with the telegraph and the growing power of Western Union.

As Dr. Wu describes, nearly every new form of communication technology begins with a period of experimentation followed by overly optimistic speculation on the freedom and openness it will bring to the masses. But over time, one dominant player will emerge to usurp control of the industry, and turn it into a monopoly.

The Life Cycle of a Monopoly

One thing history has taught us is that all monopolies end.

Given the fact that they end, we can begin to distinguish the characteristics of the beginning, middle, and end as well as the turning points along the way.

Government sanctioned monopolies granted to the likes of power, natural gas, and cable TV companies requiring their own infrastructure tend to have much longer cycles. Natural-forming monopolies in rapidly changing tech spaces, like the short-lived dominance of MySpace in social networking circles, can be measured in months, not years.

As Professor Wu says, “Info-monopolies tend to be good-to-great in the short term and bad-to-terrible in the long term. Today, a single search engine has made virtually everyone’s life simpler and easier, just as a single phone network did 100 years ago. Monopolies also generate enormous profits that can be reinvested into expansion, research and even public projects: AT&T wired America and invented the transistor; Google is scanning the world’s libraries. The downside shows up later, as the monopolist ages and the will to innovate is replaced by mere will to power.”

Todays Monopolies

In the late 1990s, there were many competing search engines, like Lycos, AltaVista, HotBot, and Excite. In the 2000s, there were many social networking sites, including Friendster and MySpace.

It was “us” driving the marketplace that made Google and Facebook dominant. The biggest sites were faster, better and easier to use than their competitors, and the benefits only grew as more users signed on. But what seemed like a good idea in the beginning, to pick one search engine or one social networking site, ended up giving us what we didn’t want — a world with fewer options.

Every time we follow the leader for what seems like good reasons, the consequence is a narrowing of our choices. This is an important principle of information economics: “Market power is rarely seized so much as it is surrendered.”

Here are a few examples of some of today’s more unusual monopolies:

• Monsanto is the largest seed company in the world. It controls 95 percent of the market for insect and herbicide resistant cotton traits. During the late 1990s and through the 2000s, Monsanto acquired almost 40 companies creating the horizontal and vertical integration that underlies the firm’s dominant position in the seeds farmers plant in their fields. Their patents on Roundup Ready seeds gives them unusual power over the entire seed market.

• Major Sports Leagues. Because of the high barrier to entry, sports leagues such as the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the National Basketball Association, an industry based on human athletic competition, ironically has little competition of their own.

• Luxottica. When it comes to sunglasses, there are many brands to choose from: Oakley, Ray-Ban, Revo, Vogue, DKNY. Some of the high dollar brands from Prada and BVLGARI cost over $500 a pair. All of these brands are made by one manufacturer - Luxottica. They started as a tiny Italian glasses company in the 1980s. Over time, Luxottica started buying every glass-wear company it could get its hands on. With growing levels of clout, they went on to convince virtually every fashion designer into letting them make their line of sunglasses.
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• Menu Foods. If you buy wet pet food labeled Eukanuba, Iams, Nutro, Hy-Vee, Triumph or Priority, it all comes from the same factory. One Canadian company, Menu Foods, makes all those brands. They just slap different labels on it because they know that we as a breed like the illusion of choice. Their wide distribution network and low-cost supply chain give them an unusual competitive advantage.
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• Private Prisons. Because of the lack of checks and balances, one of my biggest fears in life centers around the monopolistic nature of private prisons. Once built, private companies can virtually assure a full house simply by lobbying for tougher tough-on-crime laws.

Future Monopolies

One thing is clear, the monopolies of the future will be far different than the ones we’ve seen in the past. Limitations surrounding infrastructure that require pipes and wires will begin to find usual competitors. Similarly, industries formed around scarcity will be confronted with work-arounds that were previously unimaginable.

Perhaps the biggest battles will be wages over who gets to monopolize our time.

Monopolies of the future will transcend country boundaries and defy regulation by any one country. While the advantages of an Internet based on a global communications network make it easy for us to eliminate dependency on buildings and specific locations, these same attributes make them harder to regulate.

The Internet itself will become the subject of many take-over bids, the first of which will likely come from AT&T.

Final Thoughts

Government itself is a monopoly. People in government tend to be more tolerant of monopolies because they serve as a stabilizing force in an otherwise unstable world.

It would be a gross over-statement to say that monopolies are all bad. In the short term the create market efficiencies, set standards, and grow the market farther and faster than companies operating in small competitive marketplaces.

As consumers, it often far easier to have the decision made for us, where we only have one company to call.

The Internet is still in its adolescent years. The monopolists guiding the Internet are still in the “good-to-great” stage of the monopoly life-cycle. We can also take comfort in the fact that most of the Internet’s giants are aware of the responsibilities that come with the powers they wield.

Is there a chance that history could be handing us a new script to follow to go along with the new communication tools now in play?

Not too likely, but I’m certainly open to hear from those of you who draw other conclusions.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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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.

The Global Perspective

There are no good numbers to describe the size and characteristics of the underground economy, but it is most certainly growing.

From the government’s standpoint, when there’s no crisis, no one worries about it. However, as national debt skyrockets and an even more troubling international debt crisis looms, the declining balance sheet causes many to go into finger-pointing mode.

A recent article in the London-based Financial Times took a close look at this growing problem.

Pietro Reichlin is an economics professor at Rome’s Luiss University who has studied the underground economy (sometimes refered to as the “black” economy) extensively.

“When wages go down, there is more incentive to move towards the black economy. It is almost a form of insurance, a way out,” says Reichlin.

Europe’s shift towards an underground economy is happening far faster than in the U.S.

According to Friedrich Schneider, economics professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, the size of the Spanish black economy is equivalent to 19.2 per cent of official gross domestic product. That happens to be the same proportion as the average he calculates for 31 European countries, with Bulgaria the highest at 32.6 per cent and Switzerland the lowest at 8.1 per cent.

Schneider estimates the size of the underground economy in the U.S. is in the range of 7%. But that 7% represents a far greater dollar amount than most of the other counties combined.

“Among the main causes of the black economy is the level of taxation. The higher the tax and the regulatory burden the bigger the shadow economy of the country,” Prof Reichlin says.

The Online Underground

Business is becoming very fluid in how it operates, and the driving force behind this liquefaction is a digital network that connects business or personal needs with solution providers, and buyers with sellers, faster and more efficiently than ever in the past.

But the effect of our flowing digital business world does not stop with how transactions are performed. Instead, it has begun to morph and change virtually every aspect of how business is conducted including the duration and permanency of work assignments, the employer-worker relationship, and the organizing principals around which work assignments and talent coalesce.

At the center of the underground economy is a set of tools that makes working from home or a local coffee shop far easier than finding a job.

Here are a few examples of unusual home-based and personal enterprise businesses:

1. Home Laundry Service: For those who don’t mind doing laundry, it only requires a washer, dryer, ironing board, a few bottles of detergent and fabric softener. A few hours spent flyering local neighborhoods and you’re in business.
2. Divorce Counseling/Mediation Business: Rather than turning every divorce into a rip-your-genetalia-out-through-your-wallet exercise, there are far better ways to create solutions without spending all the money on high-priced attorneys.
3. Pedicab Business: Every one of these pedal-powered rickshaws is a stand-alone business enterprise that can move from market to market to meet the sort-distance transportation needs of the people.
4. Online Storefront: It is now easier than ever before to create your own retail operation on Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Half, Abe, Alibris, Biblio, direct, Tomfolio, Volare, and Zvab. Many products can even be drop-shipped directly to the customer from the manufacturer so there is no need to manage any inventory.
5. Pet Counseling: People love their pets, but not all pets are a good fit for their owners. Bridging that gap creates room for a wide variety of new services that an enterprising person can leverage.
6. Professional Testimonial Writer: A growing population are searching for ways to shore up their online reputation and the solutions can be a simple as writing good testimonials or as elaborate as offering a complete set of reputation management services.
7. Donation Services: We all own too much stuff. But when it comes time to get rid of our stuff, we somehow want it to go to a good place but we don’t know the options and we don’t want to spend a lot of time handling it. Any good donation service will find themselves quickly in demand both by the donors and the recipients.
8. YouTube Video Services: Managing your online video reputation can be very time consuming.  As each of the online video services adds features and becomes more sophisticated, both individuals and businesses need help.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of home-based businesses in the U.S. exceeds 18.3 million businesses.

Although difficult to track, it is estimated that nearly 70% of home-based businesses succeed for at least a three-year period (compared to 29% outside the home business ventures). The higher success rate is due to the ability for home-businesses to be operated part-time around a day job.

These types of enterprises lend themselves well to an off-the-books underground operation.

Micro Jobs

If there’s one thing you can learn from Timothy Ferriss and his book The 4-Hour Work Week, it’s the value of outsourcing. You can gain all sorts of time and freedom by getting someone else to do the work.

But what about from the worker standpoint? Will it always be a competition to see who can underbid whom?

Micro jobs are short-term tasks that create an opening. They can either be the starting point for a longer work relationship or just one in a series of one-off projects to bring in a little income.

As most employers know, the quality of the work is far more important than the price paid for it. So while many will experiment with low-cost workers, a longer-term relationship with someone who is a consistent performer is far more valuable.

Micro job sites like Ffiver, Dollar3, MyntMarket, GigHour, and 7Freelance do a good job of connecting talent with the needs of business. But building a long-term relationship is highly dependent on the individual.

Youth Employment

Today’s Wallstreet Journal took an in-depth look at the declining trend in youth employment.

“Perhaps you’ve already noticed around the neighborhood, but this is a rotten summer for young Americans to find a job. The Department of Labor reported last week that a smaller share of 16-19 year-olds are working than at anytime since records began to be kept in 1948.

Only 24% of teens, one in four, have jobs, compared to 42% as recently as the summer of 2001. The nearby chart chronicles the teen employment percentage over time, including the notable plunge in the last decade. So instead of learning valuable job skills—getting out of bed before noon, showing up on time, being courteous to customers, operating a cash register or fork lift—millions of kids will spend the summer playing computer games or hanging out.”

As young people try to enter the job market at an older age, they will have already gained some awareness of the advantages afforded by the underground economy.

Long Term Trends

The U.S. government has become growingly inept in their ability to work with the emerging digital economy in the midst of the global financial problems.

The number of miscues and disconnects are all but guaranteeing the size of the underground economy will grow.

Is this a bad thing? It depends on which side of the fence you’re on.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” - the book that changes everything.

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)

The Nano Hummingbird by AeroVironment meets real hummingbirds

Current Uses

AeroVironment Inc. recently introduced a life-size Hummingbird-like drone, named Nano Hummingbird. The cute little device was funded by DARPA for possible military and non-military surveillance applications.

Google recently purchased a small fleet of micro-drones to help with their mapping projects.

At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Parrot unveiled a series of games that could be played with their iPhone-controlled AR Drones sold in all Brookstone stores.

In preparation for London’s 2012 Olympics, the UK is making plans to have a fleet of flying drones in place to monitor the crowds. But they are considering taking it one step further by equipping some of the drones with non-lethal weapons in case violence breaks out.

With military and police forces being the primary customers of drone technology so far, it’s only natural that most of the industry’s thinking has been skewed towards surveillance and weaponized drones.

However, flying drones are an incredibly flexible platform for new technology to emerge. Simply adding elements like cameras, lights, audio, sensors, or even a robotic arm can increase the utility of a drone exponentially. Here are a few unusual possibilities to help tweak your imagination:

Onboard wireless communications

Cruise Ship Drones: While the rest of the world has shifted from place-to-place to person-to-person communications, the cruise industry remains woefully behind. Cell phones and other handheld devices are not usable on ships without paying exorbitant connection fees. This can be solved with flying communication drones hovering above each ship. Since the airspace at sea is unregulated, this can be implemented with or without the okay of the cruise ship below. Doing some quick math, if 1,000 people were willing to pay $10 a day to stay connected, the income streams will be huge.

SATCOM Drone

Communication Drones: Operating like communication satellites in space, flying communication drones will be a quick way to eliminate the shadows and dead spots common with today’s tower-based cellular networks. The only things preventing more experimentation in this area has been legacy systems and the existing spectrum allocations that favor telecom incumbents such as AT&T and Verizon.

In a recent conversation I had with an executive in the aerospace industry, I was told that the entire U.S. could be blanketed with high speed wireless connectivity with a formation of 19 well-positioned communication drones hovering overhead.

Surveillance drones in Los Angeles

Surveillance Drones: Criminals fleeing the scene of a crime will have an entirely new set of police tracking devices to contend with when drones are brought into the mix. This may also be extended to border-crossing drones, prison-watching drones, and open-sea pirate and smuggler drones. Add a set of speakers to the drone and an operator can start yelling at anyone engaged in vandalism, graffiti or littering.

Tiny video projector

Video Projector Drones: Once a video projector is added to a flying drone, you suddenly have a marketer’s dream tool with the ability to project images on the sides of buildings, on sidewalks, or even on the side of a moving vehicle.

Lighting Drones: We’ve been trapped into thinking that lighting can only be managed from stationary positions, but that is about to change. Concerts and stage shows with flying spotlights or pyro-burst effects, TV sets, political speeches, and opening night galas can all be enhanced when our lights start flying.

Xenon strobe drone

Strobe Drones: High-intensity strobes can cause dizziness, disorientation and loss of balance making it virtually impossible to run away. As a weapon to disrupt or disable crowds, this kind of technology added to a drone is just now becoming practical.

Flying strobe lighting on a movie set will open a different set of options and floating concert strobes can create stage shows effects never before possible.

Audio Drones: Drones outfitted with speakers are already being experimented with. Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) are being used as loud hailers to emit warning signals, or when the volume is turned up, as weapons to deafen opposition forces with a jarring, discordant noise. Some ships now carry LRAD technology as an anti-pirate measure. As an example, LRADs were used to drive off pirates attacking the Seabourn Spirit near Somalia in 2005.

Audio drones, however, have far more potential in the marketing and entertainment fields. Floating and flying sounds create a far different sensation than stationary speakers. Floating messages over nearby crowds may be the solution to draw attention to a mobile business, a time sensitive special such as hot bread just pulled from the over, or situational conditions such as announcing the sale of umbrellas during the start of a rainstorm.

The Hawk Eye by Air Hog

Advertising Drones: Planes towing advertising banners are a long-standing tradition for outdoor stadium events and wherever large crowds gather. But scaled smaller in size, with more maneuverability, drones towing banners or equipped with side displays for advertising are distinct possibilities.

Air Drone with an Aerial Photography Package

Photography Drones: The fine art of photography takes a new twist when flying camera drones become affordable. Photographers have long dreamed of being able to find the perfect angle for every shot, regardless of elevation or precariousness of the vantage point. Going beyond the military’s need to spy on people, photography drones are headed for more mainstream uses such as photojournalism, catalog photos, real estate photos, scientific research, slow-motion sequences, and hobbyist experiments.

AR Drone by Parrot

Gamer Drones: In January, Parrot introduced a number of games that could be played on their AR Drone quadricopters using an iPhone as the controller. This layout and design is setting the stage for many more smartphone-controlled drones with app developers providing a never-ending stream of new games.

For parents worried about their kids spending too much time playing games in their basement, the new concern will be about kids getting lost in the forest playing “drone wars.”

Delivery Drones: Thinking beyond traditional delivery systems, flying drones could be used to deliver food, packages, water, change out the batteries in your home, remove trash and sewage, and even vacuum the leaves from your front lawn. For some people, the drones will allow them to live off the grid, and even off the net.

Robotic Arm Drones: Add a robotic arm to a flying drone and a person’s mind begins to swirl with possibilities. A “flying arm” can be used as a probe in hazardous environments, a transport for dangerous chemicals, or a rescue mechanism for someone dangling off the side of a mountain.

Fleet of micro drones

Sensory Drones: Many of today’s drones have the ability to monitor air quality and map pollution flows. Future drones will have the ability to chart a wide variety sensor-based data such as soil quality; moisture content; micro-temperature variations of air, land, and sea; air densities; particulate matter; and chart the spread of plant diseases and micro-organism infestations.

Fireworks Dropping Drones: When fireworks are manufactured, a large portion of the overall weight is dedicated to the propellant needed to launch the pyro-display into the sky. The propellant is also one of the least stable and least controllable components of the assembly. Fireworks designed specifically to be “dropped from the sky” would have far more stable characteristics, and produce spectacular visuals for a fraction of the cost.

Search and rescue drones

Search and Rescue Drones: Very often weather and visibility issues prevent a manned-rescue team from venturing into turbulent waters to attempt a rescue. For this reason a number of unmanned rescue drones are being planned and tested to overcome our own “human” limitations.

Lasers used in surveying drone

Surveying Drones: The process of surveying land and documenting the terrain can be greatly speeded up with the introduction of flying drones designed specifically for taking all of the measurements. Laser measurement systems coupled with topography mapping systems are a natural extension of current drone tech.

Aerosonde Mark 4

Weather Drones: NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been testing the use of an Aerosonde Mark 3 drone aircraft to fly into the heart of hurricanes for more accurate storm predictions. In 2008 it was used to fly into Hurricane Noel, but was purposely sacrificed to the turbulent winds of Noel as part of the process.

Next generation weather drones will be smaller, smarter, faster, and more survivable to match the needs of virtually any research projects.

Tiny flying drone

Micro Drones

Drones are getting smaller, and for some applications, nearly invisible. When drones begin to approach the nano-scale, traditional laws of physics begin to break down, and when flying in a nano-aircraft, air molecules are too far apart to provide consistent buoyancy. But as always, our current limitations create an excellent opportunity to uncover the true laws of “flight physics“ when dealing with nano-particles.

While some science fiction writers have already speculated on the upside and downside of super tiny drones, the true potential is beyond our ability to image it. In the next section on swarmbots, I will attempt to think through a few of the possibilities, but in reality will just be scratching the surface.

Swarmbots in action

From Flying Drones to Flying SwarmBots

The term swarm is applied to fish, insects, birds and microorganisms, such as bacteria, and describes a behavior of a group (school) of animals of similar size and body orientation, generally moving in the same direction.

The term “swarmbot” is used to describe this same type of behavior when it is coded into groupings of robots, in some cases, flying robots.

From a science standpoint, swarmbot technology is still barely peeking its head out of the birth canal, because the tools available to examine life in its most rudimentary form – DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, gene chips – are quite new. We are just now scripting basic models of life processes at this fundamental level, and as we re-create these processes in binary form, we’re starting to see how they work in inorganic settings.

SwarmBots were the evil villains in Michael Creighton’s book Prey, but today they also form the basis of ongoing research at places like MIT, UCLA, George Mason University, and several other universities.

So how will SwarmBots be used in the future, and what are some of the more extreme possibilities for these multi-unit robot teams?

1. SwarmBots on the ground can form communication networks, conducting pattern-based searches for missing people and objects.
2. Microbe-sized SwarmBots can be built to “chew their way through” landfills and fields of toxic material as a way of improving the rate of decomposition and lowing toxicity levels.
3. Flying and swimming SwarmBots can be made to target and neutralize unwanted airborne or waterborne emissions such as carbon, lead, radioactive isotopes, or other unwanted pollutants.
4. Flying SwarmBots will be capable of forming shields to protect people from too much sun, too much wind, and even temperature extremes. In person to person situations, SwarmBots will form a protective shield around people, keeping them safe.
5. Flying SwarmBots will serve as our clothing, flying into “clothing formation” on command, reconfiguring themselves according to our fashion moods, changing color on a whim.  Once we step out of the shower in the morning, the SwarmBots will dry our skin, fix our hair, and take their place as part of our ever-changing wardrobe.
6. SwarmBots will serve as an information conduit for our minds, forming antennae to capture wireless transmissions, forming an information processing array for the data, a floating visual display that only we can see before our eyes, and channel information to our minds.
7. Remote viewing from anywhere, at any time, from any angle, will be possible as the swarm moves into whatever position we ask it to. This “eye in the sky” can range from several miles across on one extreme to a micrometer across on the other extreme.
8. With flying swarms that serve as our clothing, the next step will be for them to evolve into an exoskeleton of sorts for physical enhancement.  Flying swarms will give of superhuman strength, superhuman durability, and even the ability to fly.

Wasp III launch

Final Thoughts…

Over the coming months we will begin to see the convergence of air technologies that enable a drone to fly and onboard capabilities that give each drone its own unique set of characteristics.

With basic drone hardware being matched up with smartphones, and the bottom-up design capabilities of app developers around the world, drones will quickly move from the realm of personal toys to functional necessities that we interact with on a daily basis.

For those of you looking to switch careers, this will become a hot one in the near future, and it won’t be just in the military.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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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.

The Coming Age of Micro-Transparency

With improved sensor technology, it’s easy to envision parking spaces that come with their own enforcement. Once parked, you have 45 seconds to pay for the space. If you park outside of the lines, you will be fined. If your car remains even one second past the time you agreed to, you will also be fined. Any piece of trash that lands in your space during your parking time will also be cause for additional penalties.

To some, this is a highly needed “take-ownership-of-your-actions” accountability standard to be imposed on everyone around us. To them, the world will be far better place if people are held to a higher standard.

To others, the risk of penalty far outweighs their value to society. They will choose to avoid activities that require them to park in spaces with that kind of liability.

Compare that type of parking space to one where you can come and go as you please and you are seamlessly charged for time spent parking. One is a services-rendered model, the other a compliance-driven with penalty model.

In a society where both models are allowed to exist, transparency becomes the arch enemy of anything with penalties. Since people are an inexact species driven by emotions and spur-of-the-moment decisions, any attempt to over-regulate the humanness of our actions will be met with extreme resistance.

As we move further down the transparency spectrum, it’s not difficult to imagine surveillance systems that monitor us constantly.

• Computer systems that monitor the flow of information we are consuming and every transaction we make.
• Traffic drones that monitor our cars, with the ability to log every speeding violation, both going too fast and going too slow, illegal turns, lane changes, emission checks, noise violations, and even prolonged hesitation at stoplights.
• Surveillance drones that examine our individual actions, citing us for missing a trashcan when we throw something away, use foul language in public, or even disciplining our kids incorrectly.

Again, every breakthrough in transparency-related technology creates its own economies. If allowed, each level of personal intrusion will be accompanied higher and higher thresholds for compliance…. until we reach a breaking point.

Radical Transparency

While a few inspired individuals have pushed the notion of radical transparency, living in a world where we are all equally exposed to the nth degree, this is simply not an achievable objective.

Yes, I will agree that in most cases, people who live in glass houses will not throw stones at others who live in glass houses.

However, in an imperfect world, transparency cannot be distributed equally, and those with less transparency will always have a significant advantage over those with more.

In a peace-loving community that exists without any guns, the person who arrives with a gun, and is willing to use it, has a significant advantage over everyone else.

Similarly, in a business environment where everyone follows the rules, the person who is willing to ignore the rules has a significant advantage over everyone else.

At some point, when the designated elite can hide behind the veil of privacy and others cannot, transparency becomes a lethal weapon.

Rule-Breakers are Our Heroes

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” – Truman Capote

Browsing through some recent college course catalogs it occurred to me that for all of the colorful characters in the history books, no one is currently teaching classes on the fine art of rule-breaking.

Virtually everyone who makes it into the history books is a rule-breaker. Yet for all the accolades we heap upon past rebels who zigged left when everyone else zagged right, those luminaries responsible for much of the world we live in today, we have not bothered to turn rule-breaking into an noble profession.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, someone needs to create the official rules for becoming a rule-breaker. We can learn much from the inspired paths of these past contrarians.

Our Need for Rules

Before plotting a strategy for breaking rules, we first need to understand the reasons behind the rules, and the risks that come with breaking them.

Rules create order. They create the inter-relational fabric of society around which all of our actions are woven.

When rules are too harsh, and crudely enforced, they cause people to live in constant fear, forcing a regression of arts and sciences.

When rules are too lenient and loosely imposed, they provide an equally poor structure for the advancement of culture and knowledge.

Corporations are formed around rule structures that guide people through their working days. Like many other aspects of life, company rules can either be a net-positive or a net-negative. Too often businesses create layers of rules that keep bright people from doing new things.

To executives, power is about what they control. For the workers, power is freedom, and freedom is about what they can unleash.

Rules create stability, but rule-breakers are constantly looking for the next revolution they can unleash.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Failure

“Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress.
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.” – Thomas A. Edison

Rule breakers need to be able to make mistakes, but transparency increases the pain threshold for making those mistakes.

Its sounds good when business people talk about wearing failure as a badge of courage, and how we can improve our success ratio by failing faster and failing smarter. But, in all likelihood, the next generation of transparency won’t even let us get to that point.

As Thomas Edison so aptly reminds us, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the things that don’t work.

Failures are not inevitable, and failure to one person is success to another.

When the learning process that comes from failure is aborted prematurely, the failure is destined to repeat itself.

The Coming Collision of Transparency Advocates and Rule-Breakers

Transparency is entering our lives at a relentless pace.

As we continue to transform into human information nodes, we find ourselves constantly radiating information. And this information is being detected, logged, and analyzed for use in unusual ways.

1. In the design of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has invariably chosen to err on the side of transparency. While there are always options for controlling individual privacy, the default settings tend to be the more open choice. Data mining of Facebook profiles has become a growing source of concern.
2. Major retailers are investing heavily in creating shopper profiles from tracking signals emitted from cellphones and other handheld devices. While the individual remains anonymous, their movements are tracked throughout the store with a careful record being kept of any action that may signal an interest in a particular product.
3. The Wall Street Journal published a report on the use of cookies, and the growth of consumer-tracking on major Web sites. In this report, they analyzed big websites and found that many dropped more than 100 cookies into visitors’ computers, with a 64-cookie average on the 50 largest sites.
4. Video surveillance has become a huge industry as camera prices and installation cost continue to drop. Intelligent surveillance cameras now have built-in features like instant analytics. This means that less video data needs to be streamed to a central location for viewing, which reduces the chance of bandwidth constraints and requires less human monitoring.
5. Low cost thermal security cameras are a fairly new phenomenon. Innovations in sensor technology have led to a significant reduction in the cost of producing thermal cameras, paving the way far more thermal video surveillance.
6. China is now setting the pace for the world in video surveillance. City-wide installations of over 100,000 cameras are not uncommon, dwarfing even the largest projects in Europe and the U.S.

As transparency grows, we are approaching a logical breaking point. When we do, look for the small-time rule-breakers of the past to become the full-scale turbo-charged rule-breakers of the future.

The driving forces of those wishing to monetize transparency will find themselves in a full-scale cyber-war with those who have reached their limit. And it may involve much more than online battlefields.

Testing Our Limits

Growing up as young people we are constantly testing our limits. We are testing the limits of how much we can eat or drink, how little sleep we can get away with, how fast we can run, and even how many people we can date simultaneously. We structure competitions, such as track and field events and academic challenges, around finding who has the highest limits.

Without testing our limits, we can’t possibly know what they are.

We are all terminally human, and our learning styles and thought processes vary tremendously from one person to another. As such, we need enough runway to fall on our face a few times before we understand our limits.

The world is changing and limit-testing is our way of informing us how to behave in the future. Our understanding of these evolving new rules are valuable insights worth learning.

Transparency has an insidious way of encroaching on our space and exposing our foibles to the rest of the world.

Those with the greatest upside potential also have the greatest risk of downside exposure.

Most of humanity has a built-in lemming gene that causes them to go with the flow. But once the pain threshold reaches a certain point, even the lemming genes won’t contain the fury.

Strap yourself in, it’s about to get messy.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” - the book that changes everything

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.

Elena Snezhko – In what way will the power shift among countries (in the world) by 2050?

Thomas Frey – It’s an intriguing exercise to think through the process that people will use to rise to power in the future.

In the future, will corporate CEO’s have more power and control than leaders of individual countries? Will religious organizations, wielding their international clout, begin to usurp the authority of their host nations? Will groupings of countries such as the European Union, OPEC, and the UN supersede the power of their member states? Will non-governmental organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and perhaps even ICANN rise in influence to a point where they can usurp the authority of individual countries? Will the economic ties of large professional organizations, such as IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – currently 365,000 members worldwide), transcend the authority of the countries where their members live?

In the past, the power of a nation was considered the ability to defeat an enemy and protect its own people. But power today is more about the ability to influence and control other countries, even though a few still cling to the notion that it’s about defeating the enemy.

In the future, a few dominant countries will continue to serve as the global police to quash uprisings and resolve disputes. But as communication systems improve, we will see fewer and fewer willing to openly wage war with an enemy.

Most of the power shifts between now and 2050 will result from subversive economic battles, and the ability to control or disrupt revenue streams. For the disruptors, the tools for creating chaos are becoming more destructive, and soon a single individual with the right kind of gear will be able to shut down, perhaps even destroy, an entire nation.

The power centers of the future will be the countries with systems most adept at competing in the global marketplace. Large countries like China, Russia, Brazil, India, Japan, England, and USA will still play major roles, but smaller countries will have a distinct advantage with their ability to quickly adapt and experiment with new approaches.

ES – What will be the main reasons for that kind of shift?

TF – Three primary drivers will be our improved communication systems, including the Internet, an increasingly mobile society, and our seemingly relentless drive for transparency.

1.) The Internet. With social networking tools like Facebook, we can easily become friends with people in dozens of different countries and read about their family and friends. We are far less likely to go to war with people when we know their families members by name. Instead, our Facebook friends become our business partners, our advisors, and our talent pools.

As the Internet continues to develop, it is becoming the nerve center for a larger global intelligence that is still in its infancy. In its current form, the Internet has the ability to shift public opinion and even alter the balance of power at a moment’s notice.

Future iterations of the Internet will be unrecognizable by today’s standards, and as it evolves, the power of nations will evolve with it.

2.) Increased Mobility. In much the same way borderless economies created by the Internet caused individual countries to lose control of commerce, personal air transportation devices in the future, such as flying cars, will cause countries to lose control of their citizens.

People will increasingly work and live in multiple countries. As our ability to move across country borders becomes more seamless, society itself will become far more fluid, with loyalties to an individual country diminishing along the way.

3.) Transparency. Transparency will not only result from the availability of handheld cameras, video devices, online reputations, and data mining. It will come from all of those and far more.

In much the same way programs like Microsoft’s Photosynth can stitch together numerous photos to create one massive panoramic image, programs in the future will use thousands of different inputs to stitch together an increasingly clear profile of every individual on earth. Their accomplishments, failures, foibles, and idiosyncrasies will all come to life in the coming era of transparency.

For this reason, the concept of leadership will change, and country leaders will have far less of what we describe as the “unbridled power” of the past.

ES – Are we to expect the number of countries in the world to remain the same? Or will it change? For what reasons?

TF - To answer this question, we should begin with asking how the role of a country will change in the future.

In the past we have associated a country with attributes such as a single geographical territory, a common people with a common culture and language, a common government with its own currency and its own set of laws and regulations, and a series of systems that tie the country into a functional entity.

My prediction is that a series of small micronations will begin to emerge within the next 10 years, and they will dramatically shift the face of global politics. Many will serve as experimental nation states giving rise to new forms of government and unusual political models.

Some will experiment with things like corporate nation-states, religious states, tax-free zones, single-function or single-purpose countries, cause-related countries, and even rental nation-states where organizations can “rent a country” for a year or two to test a specific project.

Some existing nations may even buy or create their own island countries as a way to extend their influence and test new systems in other parts of the world.

“Open enrollment” citizenship may emerge. As the concept of creating a virtual citizenry, where citizens do not have to reside in the country they are affiliated with, gains in popularity, open enrollment will cause many new laws to be created to sort out responsibilities between countries and the people they control.

As more and more countries come into being, vying to attract the wealthy and talented, existing countries will be forced to compete to retain their own citizens. If something or someone were to cause a mass migration of wealthy families to micronations, this would cause grave concern among established governments.

ES – What countries will be economic leaders of the world in 2050? In what way will they achieve it?

TF – Counties serve as the economic and social operating system for the people and businesses operating within their borders.

To improve their standing in the global community countries will need to improve the efficiency of their own internal systems. As an example, a super efficient heathcare system will minimize the loss of talent and allow additional resources for other matters. Similarly, a highly proficient immigration system will enable countries to attract talent at a moment’s notice.

I’ve often said that the country with the most efficient tax system “will win.” Most taxes have a severe dampening effect on economic activity. They create a adversarial relationship with the government and occupy entirely too much intellectual bandwidth.

Tech-savvy countries will have the edge. Digital systems will prove far more efficient than paper ones. But digital systems alone are not the answer. They need to be coupled with efficient government decision-making processes. China has shown a remarkable ability to shift gears and adapt to new situations.

In addition to the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, some of the rising stars in the emerging global economy will be Poland, South Korea, Mexico, Turkey, and Vietnam. They will rise to power based on the speed and efficiency of their own internal systems, their access to talent, and their ability to adapt to new situations quickly.

ES – What factors will influence the economic and global political power of USA, China, Russia, Germany and European Union?

TF - The biggest factors will be the national and global systems, grooming next-generation talent, and population levels.

1.) Global Systems. We find ourselves going through a unique period where we will be transitioning from national systems to global systems. Behind every economic battle will be a battle of systems, and an underlying effort to streamline and simplify. At the same time, competing efforts will be pushing to extend system capabilities in a way to gain a competitive advantage.

As an example, nations today each have their own systems for dealing with patents and intellectual property. It’s a cumbersome and highly inefficient. Cross-border monitoring and regulation is difficult at best. Companies who dedicate resources to working through this minefield have fewer resources to dedicate to other issues. A global patent system will reduce the cost of doing business globally and give some of the emerging technologies more of a fighting chance.

2.) Next Generation Talent. Today’s education systems are clunky and highly inefficient. They tend to focus on developing skills for the past, emphasize textbook learning as opposed to practical experience, and bestow credentials with little relevancy to tomorrow’s employment marketplace.

Future online education systems will enable the bright young minds of tomorrow to have access to skill and training repositories from around the world with little regard to their current social status.

3.) Population Levels. One huge economic factor in the background that gets very little attention is the declining population levels among today’s most powerful countries. Fertility rates are declining and every change in the population alters the supply-and-demand equation for the global marketplace.

Declining populations will require fewer buildings, less food, and fewer purchase transactions. Yes, there may be some short term anomalies where a country’s economy will pick up in spite of a declining population, but in the long run, since people create the demand, fewer people will mean lower economic drivers.

ES – What will be the main geopolitical and economic challenges the world will face in 2050?

TF – I often describe the future with human-like characteristics. So think of it this way. The future hates complacency, so much so that it has built-in self-sabotaging mechanisms to continually hold our feet to the fire. It will not allow us to shift into neutral. If we are not moving forward, we are moving backwards. There is no middle ground.

People are at their best when they are challenged. If we don’t challenge ourselves, the future has a way of giving us challenges anyway. There is great value in our struggles and human nature has shown us that we only value the things we struggle to achieve. We are currently out of balance between backward-looking problem-solving and forward-looking accomplishments.

Forward accomplishments help erase past problems. They solve problems in a different way. We need more forward-looking accomplishments, and our greatest challenges in the future will come in this area.

To this end, I recently announced what may be the world’s most challenging competition, a contest that will involve sending scientific probes to the center of the earth.
The “Race to the Core” competition is being framed around an Olympic-style battle of the minds where individual countries will field teams to tackle the enormous problems associated with sending scientific probes 3,950 miles straight down to the center of the earth.

Every time we experience an earthquake, volcano, or hurricane, we have very little understanding of why it happened or what may be done to prevent it. As we solve the massive technical issues associated with sending probes to the center of the earth, we will also find new mineral deposits, gain in our understanding of the weather, earth cycles, and even human survival.

ES – Are we to expect the creation of the global government by 2050? If yes – what structure do you think it will have? If no – please explain what factors will prevent the world from creating the united global government?

TF - The best way to answer this question is to create a scenario involving the world’s first global election where over a billion people vote and select a winner for some global office. Naturally, some of the first questions that will come to mind are “what office will this person hold?” and “how much influence will they have?”

It may be possible to stage a global election like this, and for the people involved to rise to power. But I really can’t envision a scenario where there will be any form of global government over the next 50 or even 100 years. There may be some attempts, but none will get much traction.

What we will see, however, are a growing number of global systems, and these systems will grow in importance over time. As an example, we will see efforts to create a global stock market, global accounting standards, global standards for weights and measurements, global systems for dispute resolution, global currencies, and possibly even a system for global taxation. Some will work, others will be colossal failures.

A friend of mine recently asked me if I speak “earthling,” and went on to push his notion that we need a global language. While we will undoubtedly move towards technologies with global translation capabilities, there is also little chance that we will see any true global language within the next 100 years.

ES – What will happen with the climate of the Earth by 2050? What might disappear by that time?

TF – I often talk about the “life cycle of a cause.” The only thing that will disappear by that time will be the talk about climate change. As with every major cause of the past, we simply “adjust and move on.”

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