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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November 2009 was when Michael Migliozzi and Brian Flatow started a website called BuyaBeerCompany.com who’s lofty goal was to buy the ailing century old Pabst Blue Ribbon beer company. In less than two years, working to match the $300 million sale price, the pair attracted over 5 million investors pledging upwards of $280 million, with an average pledge of $40.

The SEC found out about the money raise and put a stop to it in Sept 2011. The problem? They hadn’t registered the offering with the SEC and they targeted unaccredited investors. These are two major no-nos in investment circles.

Because no money changed hands, only pledges, the two escaped charges, but the entire incident fueled the interest of some very prominent people who saw the potential for invigorating the cash-strapped startup and small business world where most new jobs get created. The concept of crowdfunding was born.

On November 3, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed H.R. 2930, a crowdfunding bill that will allow startups to offer and sell securities online. The Senate will likely vote on the bill in early 2012.

After eight decades of arguably the most restrictive rules for raising capital in the world, we are standing on the precipice of a new era for funding: crowdfunding. Here are 23 unusual ways in which the crowdfunding revolution could redefine the business to investor relationship.

First a Little Background

On the evening of Monday Jan 23, 2012 DaVinci Institute hosted a packed Night With A Futurist event as three experts took the stage to speak on the topic of crowdfunding. Brian Tsuchiya, Karl Dakin, and Steve Reaser all covered different aspects of the topic, but combined, painted an inspiring picture of how crowdfunding could unfold over the coming months.

Here are some of the highlights:

At the same time the Crowdfunding bill was being voted on in the House of Representatives, Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts introduced a similar bill in the Senate which was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

There are four significant differences between the House and the Senate Bills so far and more changes may be coming:

• The Senate bill only permits the issuance of securities “through a crowdfunding intermediary”. Accordingly, startups would not be permitted to raise funds via social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn (as permitted under the House bill).
• Under the Senate bill, each investor is limited to investing up to $1,000 per year per company; the House bill permits an amount equal to the lesser of $10,000 or 10 percent of the investor’s annual income.
• Similar to the House bill, the Senate bill caps the total amount of capital that may be raised during any twelve-month period at $1 million; the House bill, however, raises the cap to $2 million if the issuer provides potential investors with audited financial statements.
• Finally, the Senate bill permits some form of registration by the State in which the company is organized and/or “any State in which purchasers of 50 percent or greater of the aggregate amount of the issue are…residents.” The House bill preempts State law and, accordingly, there is no State registration requirement.

Opposition groups are forming with the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), a trade group for state regulators lobbying very hard against the House Bill to prevent the preemption of State law and to reduce the maximum investment amount per investor.

The topic of fraud has also been touted by the opposition, and while fraud is a legitimate concern and there probably will be cases of it, that concern is disproportionately small compared to the benefits crowdfunding will ultimately create.

Remember, people had similar concerns about e-commerce when it first debuted, but those fears have since been allayed. Crowd-funding won’t replace venture capital, angel investing or bank lending, nor should it. They encompass a substantially different model and mindset for raising funds.

Popular websites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have already shown the power, possibilities and vitality of crowdfunding. In these models, people request funds online from strangers to back specific projects such as a new invention, filming for a movie, or a cupcake delivery truck. What makes these allowable and legal under the current regulations is that those who pledge money can only receive perks and products like T-shirts, DVDs, or posters in exchange, not actual equity shares.

Lending websites like Prosper.com are another facet in understanding the funding puzzle. They facilitate person-to-person loans. People ask to borrow money for anything from plastic surgery to starting a company and offer a fixed interest rate in return. But again, equity stakes are not allowed.

Reid Hoffman

Speaking recently at an event titled “Silicon Valley comes to Oxford,” Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and serial investor, said many startups seeking investment money still don’t properly think through where they fit in to the markets they aim to penetrate. Incorrect sizing of the commercial opportunity and the company’s competitive circumstances are still widespread barriers that fund raising amplifies.

But in asking the right questions, any funding process arguably forces entrepreneurs to think further ahead and arrive at more water-tight justifications for the paths they are planning to take. If more people thought about raising money, more people would be thinking more seriously about the plans that underpin this activity – and that has to be a good thing.

Crowdfunding in Other Countries

Other nations – such as Great Britain, France, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands – already offer equity-based crowdfunding opportunities to investors and startups to help companies get started. Here are four quick examples:

1. One of the pioneers of crowdfunding in the music industry was the British rock group Marillion. In 1997 American fans underwrote their entire U.S. tour with $60,000 following a highly successful Internet campaign.
2. The British site A Swarm Of Angels raised the first $50,000 of a $2 million feature film that was distributed free online.
3. British documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong raised more than $815,000 to underwrite the film – The Age of Stupid. People who gave 20 quid ($35) got a credit on the film’s website; those who gave £5,000 ($9,000) and up got a percentage of the profits.
4. Another Britain project, My Football Club, tapped into global soccer fervor to raise more than $2.6 million from 53,000 fans in less than four months to purchase a British soccer team.

The Future of Crowdfunding – 23 Unusual Examples

The popularity of the House bill with over 90% voting in favor, and the speed with which it cruised through the process has led many to believe crowdfunding is a done deal.

The blocked Pabst purchase brought to light the massive potential for crowdfunding and changing the rules of business funding options from here on out.

Granted, what the two beer-minded gentlemen were doing may have been a bit over the top, it undeniably proves a point. There is a strong interest for the average American to support ideas they believe in. While raising $300 million on the Internet may be excessive, allowing entrepreneurs to raise a limited about of seed or growth capital through crowdfunding can easily be seen as being very beneficial.

Regardless of the details that are put into the final legislation, entrepreneurs will find a way to work with it. Assuming it passes, crowdfunding will either make a huge difference or relatively little, with the devil-in-the-details being the deciding variable.

While there will be an initial rush to “throw things at the wall to see what sticks,” only those who are able to cultivate a loyalist investor following will find the gold at the end of the rainbow.

Investor pitches will likely be much more grassroots and emotional, pulling on the heartstrings of people through cause marketing campaigns, save the city pitches, or “we’re all in this together” movements.

The most effective campaigns will spend time developing a target market of likely investors and custom tailor their strategy around reaching that community.

Virtually every trick in the marketing handbook can quickly come into play with these new parameters for business to consumer investor pitches.

Redefining the Company-Investor Relationship

More than anything else, crowdfunding will re-invent the company-investor relationship. Gone are the days of suits meeting suits to hammer out contracts in the boardroom on the 37th floor.

Companies will no longer be judged solely on their office furnishings, polished appearance, or the address of the company. Instead, we are moving into an era of common people doing business with common people.

Those who are most successful at funding their business will have a unique way of rising above the noise, standing out in the crowded din of “pick me, pick me” language surging through the blogosphere.

For this reason I’ve decided to feature 23 unusual concepts that entrepreneurs might utilize to stand out. Not all of these may fit in the legal category once the final legislation is approved and most will involve a second stage of relationship-building, but marketing the products simultaneously with the investment opportunities will likely create a loyal customer base in the process.

1.) Stage a Positive Protest – Stage a protest in front of the business seeking funding with fake protesters holding signs that read “This company is brilliant” or “These people are too nice.” With a little creativity and the right audience, this strategy could be an overnight sensation.

2.) Guest Blogging – This is for the bloggers and freelance writers out there. Thousands of blogs are starving for good content and getting your article posted will be relatively easy. This will be most effective on high traffic blogs that are closely aligned with the target audience of prospective investors.

3.) Product Demonstrations – For some products or services a demonstration done on a street corner or in a building entrance may be an effective way to get people’s attention. Offering free food, drinks or snacks can be leveraged to attract a crowd of people who can then be introduced to the investment opportunity.

4.) Online Investor Gambling – This one may be pushing the limits, but is “gambling your way to an investment” still gambling? If it were allowable, a business could create an online gambling site to entertain people as they play for the opportunity to invest in your company combined with some other form of return.

5.) Competitions – Offer a series of prizes to people who can figure out new uses for your product or services. The investment offers will follow once you’ve collected all the contact information from the top competitors and participants.

6.) Movie Theater Ads – If the business being funded is a movie production company or music recording studio, movie theater ads could be an effective way to reach a very targeted investor group. Combined with an effective phone app, newly converted investors could invest from their theater seat before the feature even begins.

7.) Borrow a Wall - Get a projector and find someone who will allow you to use the side of their building at night. The wall could host projections of your company logo and website information as well as promo videos of how your product works and other teasers.

8.) Invest $10,000 and Date a Supermodel – Sex still sells, and while posting photos of beautiful women on a website may seem sleazy or lazy to some, for the right company, this could be an effective strategy.

9.) High End Hair Salons and Barber Shops – Hair stylists love to talk. With a little motivation in the form of finders fees or commissions, these people could become a good investment funnel.

10.) Grouponing Your Investment – Deal of the day sites like Groupon and Social Living reach huge audiences. With their current business model, these sites take half of the revenue that comes in through the offer. However, thinking more creatively, an offer could be created that would have prospects “buy” a dinner, tour, or show that was combined with and includes a short no cost investor pitch.

11.) Free Chauffeur – Offer free limo rides to people at airports or hotels and pitch them on the investment while they are being driven to their destination. This approach could reach several dozen good prospects a day in a “captive audience” setting.

12.) Legacy Building – Buy a brick with your name on it or Have your name engraved on the wall are common donor strategies for nonprofits. They could also work as investment incentives in the crowdfunding model.

13.) Framed-Art Stock Certificates – Having artistically crafted stock certificates framed and prominently posted on a wall gives investors bragging rights and also generates conversations within their circle of friends.

14.) Affiliate Marketing Investments – Paying a finders fee has been a long standing tradition within the investment community. Working through affiliate networks should be considered an extension of this in the online world and a natural part of its evolution.

15.) Live Animal Marketing – Walking through town with a cow, water buffalo or cloned triceratops on a leash can be a highly effective attention-getter.

16.) Building Lists – Building lists is all about building a community of online followers. Using fishbowls to have people drop in a business card for a free prize or signing up for a free newsletter are just couple of the many effective ways to build lists, but innovative crowdfunders will create many more and ultimately find techniques of quickly generating large lists.

17.) Riding the Ski Lift – Instead of actually going to a ski resort to ski, people sitting next to you in a ski lift become a captive audience until you reach the top.

18.) Free Seminar – A well-orchestrated free seminar can attract large numbers of people who will listen to an inventive investor pitch on a hot topic.

19.) Limited Edition Artwork – One investment model could be structured around 100 people making a $10,000 investment. If each were offered a limited edition piece of artwork, signed by the artist, some of the money would go to the artist with the rest used to fund the business.

20.) Partner Promotion – Invest $10 and get a $10 gift certificate to Nordstroms, Macys, Dillards, or some other high-end department store. You get the investment, they get the customers.

21.) Personalized App Promotion – Create a smartphone app that is custom designed around the business seeking funds and the person buying it. Since people will pay more for something that is “all about them,” the app could be priced at $10 or more.

22.) Host a Blood Drive – A blood drive for a cause creates a good will atmosphere for the event sponsor.

23.) Underground Music – If there is a genre of music that your target market listens to, host a concert or benefit with live music to set the stage for brief investor pitches between sets.

Final Thoughts

Yes, you may find some of these ideas too far out to consider reasonable investment tools for crowdfunding, but most will not.

Crowdfunding will usher in a new era of thinking, with the advantage going to those who are the most creative, innovative and passionate.

It certainly won’t solve all the problems with funding early stage companies, and it will likely create many more at least initially. But the investment world is overdue for something that will shake it up, and this is exactly that.

Look for many new resistance groups to form as this gains momentum. Even after the legislation is passed, the battle will be far from over.

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

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

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

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

1.) Retail 2.0 – People still like getting out of the house and being around other people, but the retail world hasn’t quite figured out what people are looking for. New ways of thinking about Retail 2.0 will form around phrases like “experiential entertainment,” “active engagement,” and “interaction with experts.”

Some of the major expenses involved in traditional retail have been maintaining inventories and shelf space. Look for a new breed of retails shops that carry no inventory, only product demonstration stations with the ability to order on the spot (and receive a discount). Most will be pay-to-play product placement stations with experts on hand to answer questions. Tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft will be paving the way for these kinds of storefronts. I’ll be writing more on this topic in the weeks ahead. Other thoughts on this topic here.

2.) Crowdfunding – Even though some sites like Kickstarter and Quirky have been getting traction in this space, Congress’ recent effort to pass official Crowdfunding legislation will unleash an entirely new Pandora’s box full of options for entrepreneurs hoping to launch their latest ventures. Many startups are waiting on the sidelines for this new option to kick in, so look for a surge of activity to take place as an entirely new finance industry begins to take shape.

3.) The Persistent “Big Lie” Opportunity – Throughout history we have seen any number of cultural truisms spring to life that were simply not true. If something is repeated enough times, society will begin to believe it. With our ability to post and repost a novel concept, new cultural memes can be formed virtually over night. Yet at the same time, our attempts to debunk any myth with over a million mentions online often runs into a murky wall of ambivalence. For this reason, even though they have been scientifically disproven, “big lies” such as these will persist:

• “In the future everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame”
• “You only use 10% of your brain”
• “The Internet is making us dumber”
• “The more you sweat, the more calories you burn”
• “Listening to classical music turns babies into geniuses”
• “Alcohol kills brain cells”
• “Being skinny means you’re fit and healthy
• “Your IQ is fixed and stays the same throughout your life

If you thought some of the statements above were true, you’re not alone. Many of us still do even though they have been proven false. Look for a new breed of services to appear that will offer solutions for globally debunking the persistent “big lies.”

4.) Emerging Data Marketplace – The data that you currently own can become far more valuable when you mix it with other data. As an example, if you add weather conditions to your customer data, chances are you will find some connection between weather patterns and your customers’ purchasing habits.

Acquiring datasets such as these is presently very time consuming, expensive, and generally a pain to do. Look for emerging big data marketplaces, such as Microsoft’s Azure, that will come complete with directories of the available datasets, along with counselors who can help coach you through the maze.

5.) Smartphone Peripherals – The whole mobile apps revolution began in March of 2008 when Steve Jobs announced the software developer’s kit for the Apple iPhone. When Apple’s App Store officially opened on July 11, 2008, there were a whopping 552 apps to choose from. Over 60 million apps were downloaded within the first 3 days and tech companies around the world began to sense a market shift, and we now have well over a million apps to choose from.

While apps have been getting tons of attention, the piece getting very little is the exploding field of smartphone peripherals that extend our current communication systems far beyond simple person-to-person communications. Virtual every object we come into contact with has the potential for being controlled by our smartphone, and interface designers are working overtime to make this happen.

Look for literally thousands of new peripheral devices to hit the market over the coming year or two. More details here.

6.) The Coming Age of Micro-Incomers – Twitch.tv, or “Twitch,” as it’s called by founder Justin Kan, was built as a way to make professional video gamers more mainstream. It has a partner program similar to YouTube, where the most popular gamers can make money by running commercials during their live streams. Yes, people can actually make money by playing games.

While most of them will not make full-time incomes, they will find it relatively easy to become part of the emerging “micro-incomer” crowd. Here are a few other ways people can make partial and even full-time incomes online:

• Sell stuff on eBay or Craig’s List
• Sell photos to stock photo sites
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
• Transcribing audio files
• Become a virtual assistant
• Interview people and sell the interview
• Enter online competitions
• Write articles on eHow.com

None of these are get-rich-quick schemes, but they can make all the difference between getting by and being destitute. Look for training centers to emerge with a “micro-incomers” kind of focus.

7.) Data Visualization Trends – “I remember seeing a terrific video on wireless power but cannot seem to find it no matter what I do.” Mental faux pax like this are all too common.

For most of us, it’s very difficult to image what information looks like, and when we save a file somewhere, its very often very difficult for us to find it again. Data visualization has been a problem plaguing the online world for years and will become even more pronounced as we move further into the cloud.

Data visualization provides tools for two primary functions – explanation and exploration. While business people might think of visualization as the end result, scientists also using forms of visualization to formulate questions, and for discovering new features of a dataset. More importantly, our ability to find and work with data needs to be so easy that average everyday people can work with it. Look for a few critical new offerings in this area to revolutionize how we store and retrieve the information that will operate and manage our future selves.

8.) Regionalization of the Internet – In the 1990s the Internet was greeted as the New New Thing: It would erase national borders, give rise to communal societies that invented their own rules, and undermine the power of governments. But not so fast!

Even though the Internet began as a utopian dream of a unified world without government intervention, today’s Internet is moving towards the opposite end of the spectrum. In many cases, Internet companies not only welcome governmental restrictions; they are being used as agents of government policy.

The future Internet will see a move towards even more border sensitivity, with hyper-location based services to both improve relevancy of the user experience, and also put themselves in good standing for regional business and government contracts. More details here.

9.) The End of an Era – Faster than Ever – When Dell announced it would no longer be selling netbook computers, it foretold the end of an era. The cute little laptops surged in popularity and came crashing back to earth in a timeframe best measured in months, not decades. Tablet computers, starting with the Apple iPad, made them instantly obsolete.

Our increased awareness of what’s hot and what’s not gives us instant ability to turn our backs on “the old” and to begin embracing “the new.” When Netflix announce they were changing their business model, they instantly got the cold shoulder and had to reverse course. RIM’s Blackberries, once the hottest product in the connected business marketplace, got blindsided by the iPhone and Android and has been plummeting ever since.

The speed with which new companies can emerge, is also the speed with which they can become dismantled. Today’s hotness can become tomorrow’s coldness in a matter of months. So take a close look at the top 100 emerging new companies and know that less than 20% will still be around five years from now. (By the way, I just made that statistic up. Soon to be another one of the Big Lies.)

10.) Poor Lifestyles Hurting Long-term Health – In the past three or so decades, women have increased their calorie intake by 22% and men by 10%, with carbohydrates and sugar-sweetened beverages being major sources of the unnecessary calories.

The inevitable result is that more than two-thirds of U.S. adults and about one-third of children are over the ideal body weight, with the extra layers of fat putting a major strain on people’s hearts. The trend is particularly concerning in children. Today, about 20% of U.S. kids are obese, compared with just 4% thirty years ago.

Neither adults nor children are exercising enough and about 21% of men and 18% of women still smoke. About 20% of high school students also have taken up the smoking habit. This means that 94% of U.S. adults, and that’s almost everyone, have heightened risk factors for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

However, as always, every problem creates an opportunity, and every one of the identifiable risk factors will become a focal point of activity until each of the problems has become a thing of the past.

11.) Reversing the Obesity Trends – New research documents a 5.5% drop in the number of obese kids in K-8 classes in New York City’s public schools from 2006-2007 to 2010-1011.

It’s no secret that reversing the childhood obesity epidemic in the U.S. will require a long-term effort. Since 1970, the rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has tripled. There have been hints that these rates were leveling off in New York City in recent years, but the new study reports an actual decrease. The bad part is that no one knows exactly why it’s happening.

Look for a trend where researchers flock to every new community that shows progress, to uncover the clues. Also look for the answers to be different than what “the experts” have been telling us in the past.

12.) Fast-Niche Online Universities – We are seeing more and more niche professions without a clear path for getting there. At least not through any traditional University programs. These include everything from social networking experts, to product evangelists, to drone operators, to business colony managers.

Through projects like Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, and iTunesU, the Internet has made it easier for anyone to be a student. Now it’s also making it easier for anyone to become a teacher. Several platforms have launched within the last couple years that democratize teaching.

Online universities such as Udemy, Learnable, Tildee, Skillshare, and Sophia are beginning to capture market share. Look for large associations and businesses, as the early adopters, to start creating their own path-to-profession courseware to fill the demand for rebooting skills in a short timeframe.

13.) Teaching Entrepreneurship and the Rise of the Accelerator – Can you teach entrepreneurship? People like Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup,” think so. He also thinks that entrepreneurship must be taught to far more people if the American economy is to successfully pivot towards a post-manufacturing era.

But as people who have started a business know, is very difficult to teach the emotional side of business, and startups invariably become extremely emotional at one time or another. And the only good counseling for a person going through the trials of getting a business off the ground are other well-seasoned entrepreneurs. That’s why accelerators like Techstars and Y-Combinator have been gaining so much attention.

With their rapid incubation processes, Techstars and Y-Combinator have quickly becoming a natural farm club for VCs in the high tech arena. Look for a variety of other vertical niche accelerators, in fields like healthcare, education, finance, and other sectors, to materialize.

14.) Information Doesn’t Want to be Free – In 1984 at a Hackers Conference, Silicon Valley futurist Stuart Brand was the first to use the phrase “Information wants to be free” in response to a point made by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak but continued, “On the other hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.”

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, keyed in on the first half of the phrase, “Information wants to be free” in a keynote speech at an Open Source Internet Symposium in 1992. This set the stage for an entirely new era of free-thinking “free” advocates. This became another one of society’s “big lies.”

There is always a cost to “free.” While it may not extract a payment from your bank account, there is always a “time” cost involved. Without some amount of friction, the volume of information you have to sift through skyrockets and even with good search technology, your time-costs climb dramatically.

The days of “free” thinking are numbered. Look for this mindset to shift over the coming years. More details here.

Next

Continue to “28 Major Trends in 2012 and Beyond – Part 2.”

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jobs Before 2020

Many of the changes we see today will cause new jobs to materialize quickly. This first section deals will new positions that will likely be spawned within the next 10 years.

1. Augmented Reality Architects – Much like the paint we put on houses and the flavorings we add to food, the future will seem boring if our reality hasn’t been augmented in some way.

2. Alternative Currency Bankers – According to Javelin Strategies, 20% of all online trades are already being done with alternative currencies. The stage is being set for next-gen alt-currency banks.

3. Seed Capitalists – In the startup business world there is a huge gulf between initial concept and fundable prototypes. This dearth of funding options will require an entirely new profession. Seed capitalists will specialize in high-risk startups. Counter to todays investment-world thinking, if they get more than 100% return on their investments, they will be docked for not taking enough risk.

4. Global System Architects – Our systems are transitioning from national systems into global systems. Architects of these new global systems will play a crucial role in future global politics. More details here.

5. Locationists – People who specialize in adding the relevance of “place” to our global online communities.

6. Waste Data Managers – To insure data integrity in today’s fast evolving information storage industry, multiple redundancies have been built into the system. Achieving more streamline data storage in the future will require de-duplication specialists who can rid our data centers of needless copies and frivolous clutter.

7. Urban Agriculturalists – Why ship food all the way around the world when it can be grown next door. Next generation produce-growing operations will be located underground, often below the grocery stores where the produce will be sold directly to customers. More details here.

8. Business Colony Managers – The average person that turns 30 years old in the U.S. today has worked 11 different jobs. In just 10 years, the average person who turns 30 will have worked 200-300 different projects. Business colonies are an evolving new kind of organizational structure designed around matching talent with pending work projects. The operation will revolve around some combination of resident people based in a physical facility and a non-resident virtual workforce, with some opting to forgo the cost of the physical facility entirely. People who can effectively manage this type of operation will be in high demand. More details here.

9. Competition Producers – One of the hottest new trends will be to design incentive-based competitions to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Paving the way has been X-Prize Foundation’s Pete Diamandis and the success of the Ansari X-Prize. In the future, every major corporation will have their name on a major prize competition. Similar to buying the naming rights to a stadium, a well-orchestrated competition has far-reaching branding potential.

10. Avatar Designers – Next generation avatars will become indistinguishable from humans on a two-dimensional screen. However, avatars will only live in the computer world for a short time longer. It is only a matter of time before they emerge from the computer and appear as visual beings, walking around among us. Once an avatar goes through the radical metamorphosis from an image that we see on a screen to a three dimensional being that joins us for dinner, carries on conversations with our friends, and serves as a stand-in for us at meetings, we will see work start on an even more realistic avatar, one that we can touch. More details here.

11. Avatar Relationship Managers – As the foibles of humanity enter the realm of autonomous, freethinking avatars, people will find it necessary to both manage and limit the often dangerous relationships that avatars get themselves into.

12. 3D Printing Engineers – Classes in 3D printing are already being introduced into high schools and the demand for printer-produced products will skyrocket. The trend will be for these worker-less workshops to enter virtually every field of manufacturing, stemming the tide of outsourcing, at the same time, driving the need for competent technicians and engineers to design and maintain the next wave of this technology.

13. 3D Food-Printer Engineers – Pushing the envelope for 3D printer technology even further, will be the coming age of food printers. Converting 3D printers to work with cartridges containing food-stocks will prove difficult and demanding on a number of levels. Those who can solve this kind of problem will be in high demand. More details here.

14. Book-to-App Converters – Over the coming months we will begin to see a form of competition brewing between books and apps. With both being information products that we interface with differently, we will begin to see a large scale effort to convert existing books and literature into an interactive app, similar to the current effort to convert popular literature from print to audiobooks. More details here.

15. Social Education Specialists – We learn from each other. But what is it that we learn from others that is valuable? And how do we structure a circle of friends, as a highly influential group that we rely heavily on, to give us a constant stream of truly valuable information and advice.

16. Privacy Managers – If you think you have lost most of your privacy already, we’ve only scratched the surface. We are all terminally human, and as such, we do not always make good decisions. Striking the perfect privacy-transparency balance will require far more than amateur insights. It will require a privacy professional. More details here.

17. Wind Turbine Repair Techs – The proliferation of windmills around the world will dramatically drive the demand for repair techs who are not afraid of heights and can solve whatever new problems this fledgling new industry blows their way.

18. Data Hostage Specialists – Holding people as hostages is very messy. But holding data hostage is a less-risky crime that can be done remotely, and has the potential for far greater rewards. This is especially true if the country you’re living in condones your actions. This type of activity will give rise to the likes of data-hostage negotiators, data-retrieval specialists, and damage-control analysts.

19. Smart Dust Programmers – In it’s simplest form, smart dust consists of a sensor combined with a wireless transmitter and some kind of power source. Many are envisioning the power to come from wireless RF signals. The reason it is referred to as “smart dust” is because the technology is shrinking in size until it reaches the particle size of dust. Future designs for smart dust involve detecting everything from moisture content, to soil temperature, to chemical composition. More details here.

20. Personality Services – Talking back and forth to a computer that has a machine-like voice is boring. But being able to download specific “personality packages” will add an entirely new level of engagement for basement-dwellers everywhere. The hottest personalities to download will be offshoots of existing characters or celebrities such as being able to download a David Letterman personality, a Homer Simpson personality, or perhaps even a Darth Vader personality.

21. Smart Contact Developers – The idea of “smart” contact lenses, the kind that can superimpose information on the wearer’s field of view has been around for a while. But the first iteration of smart contact lenses is already on the market and industry execs are beginning to generate a wide array of possible applications. More details here.

22. Nano-Medics – The medical problems most people have can be traced to a single cell or a small group of them. Health professionals capable of working on the nano-level, both in designing diagnostics systems, remedies, and monitoring solutions will be in high demand.

23. New Science Philosopher-Ethicists – Every new technology creates its own set of unintended consequences, and people who can ask the tough questions and demand deeper introspection will be in high demand. Industry sages will serve as both a conscience and a guide for decision-makers everywhere.

24. Organ Agents – The demand for transplantable organs is exploding and people who can track down and deliver healthy organs will be in hot demand.

25. Octogenarian Service Providers – As the population continues the age we will have record numbers of people living into their 80s, 90s, and 100s. This mushrooming group of active oldsters will provide a demand for goods and services currently not being addressed in today’s marketplace.

26. Elevated Tube Transport Engineers – The next big infrastructure project on planet earth will be a human and cargo transport system designed around a network of vacuum tubes with maglev tracks. Operating at less than 2% of the cost of today’s car, truck, jet, ship, and train systems, this emerging tube transport system will be a massive undertaking that demands talented new-age thinkers for decades to come. More details here.

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The Dismantlers

Over the coming years will see a number of industries dismantled requiring a skilled workforce of talented people who can perform this task in the least disruptive way. Most of these industries have been built around aging facilities and infrastructure that will become unnecessary and unsustainable in the future. These will include:

27. Prison System Dismantlers – More details here.

28. Hospital and Healthcare Dismantlers – More details here.

29. Income Tax System Dismantlers - More details here and here.

30. Government Agency Dismantlers – More details here.

31. Education System Dismantlers - More details here and here and here.

32. College and University Dismantlers - More details here and here and here.

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Jobs in 2030 and Beyond

A number of technologies currently on the drawing board will require a bit longer lead time before the industry comes into its own. Here are a few examples of these kinds of jobs:

33. Drone Dispatchers – Drones will be used to deliver groceries and pizzas, deliver water, remove trash and sewage, monitor traffic and pollution, and change out the batteries on our homes. Skilled dispatchers for future drones will be high demand. More details here.

34. Brain Quants – Where the stock market manipulators of the past meet the brain manipulators of the future to usurp control of Madison Avenue.

35. Tree-Jackers – Plant and tree alteration specialists, who manipulate growth patterns, create grow-to-fit wood products, color-changing leaves, and personalized fruit. More details here.

36. Plant Psychologists – An entire profession dedicated to undo the damage caused by the Tree-Jackers

37. Extinction Revivalists – People who revive extinct animals.

38. Robotic Earthworm Drivers – The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills because that is where we have buried our most valuable natural resources. In the future, robotic earthworms will be used to silently mine the landfills and replace whatever is extracted with high-grade soil.

39. Gravity Pullers – The first wave of people to unlock the code for influencing gravity.

40. Time Hackers – If we think cyber terrorists are a pain, it will seem like nothing compared to devious jerry-riggers who start manipulating the time fabric of our lives.

41. Clone Ranchers – Raising “blank” humans will be similar in many respects to cattle ranching. But once a clone is selected, and the personality download is complete, the former clone will instantly be elevated to “human status.”

42. Body Part & Limb Makers – The Organ Agents listed above will quickly find themselves out of work as soon as we figure out how to efficiently grow and mass produce our own organs from scratch.

43. Memory Augmentation Therapists – Entertainment is all about the great memories it creates. Creating a better grade of memories can dramatically change who we are and pave the way for an entirely new class of humans.

44. Time Brokers – Time Bank Traders – Where do you go when you run out of time? Naturally, to the time-bank, and take out a time-loan.

45. Space-Based Power System Designers – At some point, the burning of earth’s natural resources for power will become a thing of the past. Space-based systems will capture and transmit power far more efficiently than anything currently in existence.

46. Geoengineers – Weather Control Specialists – We are moving past the age of meteorology and climatology to one where the true power-brokers will wield the forces of nature.

47. Plant Educators – An intelligent plant will be capable of re-engineering itself to meet the demands of tomorrow’s marketplace. Plant educators will not work with lesson plans or PowerPoint presentations, but the learning process will be even more effective. More details here.

48. Nano-Weapons Specialists – Many of the weapons of the future will be too small to be seen by the human eye. And naturally, these will be the most dangerous. More details here.

49. Lip Designers – If you could have any lips in the world, what would they look like?

50. Mass Energy Storage Developers – As a society, we have become very good at generating electricity, but are still terrible at storing it from one day to the next. Once mass energy storage systems are developed and installed, our total energy needs will drop precipitously.

51. Earthquake Forecasters – Everything we know about the inside of the earth has been developed through indirect evidence. We have no maps of the center of the earth. We have no accurate diagrams, no understanding of motion, fluidity, or changes happening with any degree of accuracy. While scientists are developing skills to work with nanoscale precision on the earth’s surface, the best we can muster below the surface is blindfolded guesswork done with 100-mile precision. What we don’t know is literally killing us – over 226,000 killed in 2010 alone. But that will change over time as we begin to understand the inner working of the earth and accurately forecast when the next big quakes are about to hit. More details here.

52. “Heavy Air” Engineers – Compressed air is useful in a wide variety of ways. However, we have yet to figure out how to compress streams of air as they pass through our existing atmosphere. Once we do, it will create untold opportunity for non-surface based housing and transportation system, weather control, and other kinds of experimentation.

53. Robot Polishers – If we are going to have robots, they will invariably need to be polished.

54. Amnesia Surgeons – Doctors who are skilled in removing bad memories or destructive behavior.

55. Executioners for Virus-Builders – In the future, virus-builders who get caught will have a choice. They can either go to the electric chair, or spend some quality time with the Amnesia Surgeon.

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Final Thoughts

The jobs and occupations listed above are just scratching the surface. This list is intended to help stretch your imagination and start you down a path of imagining your own future.

But I’d love to hear your thoughts. What am I missing? Where have I gone off the reservation and missed the big picture entirely? Are there better names for these professions? And most importantly, how can someone today prepare himself or herself for the changes to come?

Yes, this column includes far more questions than answers. But when it comes to understanding the future, it all begins with asking the right questions.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Today, our best and brightest are drawn to elite colleges like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and Yale. As they attend these institutions they are surrounded by some of the most talented people in the world.

Yet, despite having all the cards aligned in their favor, and being presented with one huge opportunity after another, many of these people fail. They fail at their jobs, fail in their businesses, and fail to live up to their full potential.

So what if a new kind of proving ground were created, an anti-academic college of sorts, where graduation was predicated on success? Where success wasn’t defined as academic success, but as real-world accomplishments.

And what if this new institution not only attracted the best and the brightest, but also the most determined and driven? And what if this organization completely rewrote the rules of academia and created an entirely new rung on the ladder of success?

That is exactly what could happen with accomplishment-based education. Allow me to explain further.

Symbols of Achievement Vs. Actual Accomplishments

Writing a book, receiving a patent, or starting a business are all symbols of achievement in today’s world. But being the author of a book that sells 10,000 copies, or inventing a product that 100,000 people buy, or building a business that grosses over $1 million in annual sales are all significant accomplishments that are far more meaningful than their symbolic starting points.

Much of what happens in today’s colleges and universities is based on “symbols of achievement,” not actual accomplishments.

A student that enters a classroom will typically find themselves immersed in a academic competition, a competition that pits students against each other to produce results that best match the teacher’s expectations. Only rarely will the work product of a student in a classroom rise to any notable level of significance.

Completing a class is nothing more than a symbol of achievement. Similarly, completing many classes and receiving a diploma is noteworthy, but still only a symbol of achievement.

Rest assured, I’m not about to say that classroom training has no value. However, accomplishments in a classroom are at least one level of abstraction removed from a real-world application. Few employers would be willing to pay for the activities that take place in most classrooms.

Reading a book is far different than writing a book, and simply writing a book is far different than writing a book that sells over 10,000 copies.

So the question we should be asking is, “How can we transition college-based education from merely producing symbols of achievement to actual real-world accomplishments?”

Simulated Applications Vs. Real-World Applications

Since colleges are beginning to shift towards online education, we can find some interesting parallels between today’s gaming environments and real-world situations.

In much the same way a gamer can become very adept at fighting a simulated battle, it can only partially compare to a real-life battle. Even in a closely comparable situation where a gamer shifts from flying a simulated drone to a real-life drone in the military, many changes will occur. Suddenly the consequences of their action become something real and tangible, and what used to be simulated pain and suffering instantly becomes real pain and suffering.

The emotional context is something they begin to feel throughout their entire body.

US Major Bryan Callahan is an Air Force pilot flying remote controlled drones known as RPAs. His work involved flying RPA missions over Afghanistan. In a 2010 interview with Germany’s Spiegel, he described it this way:

“…It sounds strange but being far away and safe is kind of a bummer. The other guys are exposing themselves, and that to me is still quite an honorable thing to do. So I feel like I’m cheating them. I’m relatively safe. If I screw up or miss something, if I screw up a shot, I wish it was me down there, not them. Sometimes I feel like I left them behind.”

“…you can’t just roll your unmanned plane over and look out the window. I have to use all these very external cues, sometime we’re literally using a map with pins, on the computer. In an F-16 I can use my eyeballs, I can build what we call situational awareness in two seconds flat. I have the ability to strike a target quickly.”

“…Killing someone with an RPA is not any different than with an F-15. It’s easy to think that, to fall down that trap. We’re well aware that if you push that button somebody can go away. It’s not a video game. You take it very seriously. It’s by far nowhere near a video game.”

The Anatomy of and Accomplishment

The word “accomplishment” is a loosely defined term used to describe everything from a 4th grader’s piano recital to achieving peace between warring nations. For this reason it’s important to draw a distinction between a vague accomplishment and a real one.

What exactly constitutes a “real-life accomplishment” and how does it differ from what I labeled earlier as “symbols of achievement?”

An accomplishment-based education system is one where the output of every student has tangible, demonstrable value to others.

• Writing a paper on the life and times of William Shakespeare is meaningless unless someone is willing to pay for that paper.
• Creating architectural drawings for a house has little value unless someone wants to pay for those drawings and build the house.
• Being a brilliant mathematician contributes nothing to society unless it can produce some value in a real-world application.
• Producing an event has little value is no one wants to attend.

I will be the first to admit that everyone needs time to learn their profession, and making mistakes will help them improve along the way. But the global marketplace is not looking for people who have learned how to be great students. It wants results.

Examples of Accomplishment-Based Education

When a student immerses himself or herself in a specific topic, they begin to learn the vocabulary, learn about significant pieces of research, and the foundational principals that make it important. In short, they begin to get an inkling of how people in that industry think, talk, and communicate.

But that’s not enough. They need to know what it feels like to produce something of tangible value.

An amazing transformation happens once you find someone willing to pay for what you produce. It becomes both an interpersonal transformation as well as a relational transformation. The change that happens within will also manifest itself in your relationship with others.

Here are three brief examples of how an accomplishment-based education system might be structured and the profound implications it would have on society.

1.) Master of Social Marketing & Sales – Many people have figured out how to create their own impressive social network with tens of thousands of friends and followers on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This program is designed to leverage a person’s social influence and create measurable results.

Criteria for Graduation: To graduate, each student will need to demonstrate a social network that includes over 100,000 people around the world, have an online video that has gone viral with over 250,000 views, work with 10 products that each can be found within the top 10 search results on a major search engine, create an engaged user community with over 10,000 online product mentions and over $50,000 in product sales per month for six months in a row.

2.) Master of Entrepreneurship - Starting a business is easy, but turning it into a sustainable enterprise requires a combination of skills, processes, and talent capable of generating continuous revenue streams while still overcoming the challenges and adversities commonly inherent in this type of undertaking.

Criteria for Graduation: To graduate, each student will need to demonstrate a sustainable business operation with at least five unusual competitive advantages, 10 definable market differentiators, over 100 separate sales cycles, and over $1 million in annual sales over a 12 month period of time.

3.) Master of Free-Agency – Free Agents are freelancers who work on a variety of projects. To be successful, free agents need to position themselves as experts in a specific field and begin to form business relationships with key individuals who routinely hire outside talent.

Criteria for Graduation: To graduate, each student will need to demonstrate a definable market niche that closely aligns with their own personal expertise, work with at least five clients per month generating at minimum of $25,000 every month for 12 months straight.

Naturally, the examples I’m using here will need to be expanded, refined, and explained in far more detail. This type of master-level certification will have profound implications

Final Thoughts

Attending an Ivy League college is a significant status symbol for young people today. But what if there were an even better status symbol?

What if the students in this institution were surrounded and mentored by other highly accomplished people, each of whom had achieved their own Master-Level Certification? And what if this type of learning could be achieved in less than two years for a fraction of what today’s colleges cost?

Envision, if you will, a group of 20 students entering a classroom sometime in the future. After a brief orientation period and a little time spent getting to know each other, each student is given the option of choosing a project to complete from a list of ten possible projects. Each of these course-projects is designed around a mobile app that drives students towards a specific accomplishment.

Over a period of time, students will be tasked with completing the assignment they have chosen, and once their “accomplishment” has been completed, they can move on to their next course. Their interaction with other students would be on an informal basis, and teachers would serve more as coaches than traditional instructors.

Their accomplishments would range from online activities such as building a website with a specific feature set, to launching a blog site with a specified number of entries, to creating a database with designated properties for interaction.

All of these activities would be carefully orchestrated to drive students towards a specific end goal.

Is this type of institution a real possibility? My prediction is that it is not only feasible, but someone will attempt to create it within the next couple years.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Imagine walking up to a building and having it recognize you. Not only does it recognize you, but it also makes changes in temperature, lighting, and music to make you feel like you’re at home.

Maybe it’s not a building, but a car, a bicycle, pair of shoes, or a pillow? And each of these objects will somehow adjust themselves to match your body size and shape, and somehow sync up with your needs and personality.

Going a step further, what if the objects around us had more than an ability to make one-time adjustments? What if they could learn from us and grow in their understanding of us over time?

If you think what I’ve described is a long time off, think again. The scenario I just described will soon become a common occurrence because of the interplay between three converging forces – Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) technology, cloud computing, and the processing power of smartphones.

Wearable and implantable sensors are already making serious inroads, and once combined with smartphones and private clouds, we’ll begin to see an entirely new style of living emerge. (Pics and Charts)

History of Body Area Networks

About the same time I was leaving IBM in the early 1990s, another IBM researcher, Thomas Zimmerman, was making major inroads into Personal Area Network (PAN) technology. While much of the human body’s internal electrical system remains something of a mystery, Zimmerman began researching the use of the body’s external wiring for use with sensors and other devices.

Working with MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab, Zimmerman devised ways to send data through the human body for some rather groundbreaking applications including the exchange of electronic business cards with a handshake and preventing air bags from injuring children in the Honda Accord.

By adding wireless to the equation, PAN technology became WPAN. Later around 2001, this application of WPAN was renamed as the wireless body area network (WBAN) to represent the communications on, in and near the body.

In the future, WBAN will enable inexpensive and continuous health monitoring with real-time updates to medical records through the Internet. A number of intelligent physiological sensors are already being integrated into wearable vests, clothing, and jewelry for early detection of medical conditions.

Processing Power

The processing power of smartphones is still a bottleneck in developing the true potential for wearable tech.

Average processing power has been on a continuous growth curve for PCs over the past 25 years, with Moore’s Law holding steady as processing doubles every 18 months. This growth is being further accelerated by the adoption of multicore processors.

In addition to PCs, we now see an increase in processing power on smartphones, Internet-connected televisions, and tablets. This is driving the mobile computing boom and enabling much richer experiences on these screens, with typical processor speeds over 1GHz. Even so, the processing power across these screens is comparable to what the personal computer experience was about seven years ago.

While mobile computing power increases, we will continue to have an ongoing processing power gap between PCs on the one hand, and smartphones, TVs, and tablets on the other.

This creates a challenge for anyone building digital experiences, as they will attempt to deliver effective experiences to mobile devices.

The number of linked sensors, cameras, and complex peripheral devices will soon be exploding around us, and we will see efforts to link this information into a cohesive intelligence layers that we can interact with in our daily lives.

As you might imagine, attempts to improve our sphere of knowability for purposes of convenience will be challenged with serious resistance from those wishing to maintain our privacy. These will be tough decisions to wrestle through and the resulting public policy decisions will have far-reaching implications.

Wearable Technology and Sensors

The field of wearable technology and sensors is growing rapidly. Here are a few recent examples of how this field is changing.

Smart Skin

Band-Aid-like circuits created at University of Illinois are flexible enough to be worn on human skin.

The Smart Skin’s electronic circuit is first mounted on a super-thin sheet of soluble plastic and laminated onto the skin with water, much like a temporary tattoo. Once it’s on, it can bend, wrinkle and stretch along with a wearer’s skin — it doesn’t pop off or snap, which is no small feat considering this is a sophisticated semiconductor.

When it’s no longer needed, it peels off like a layer of sunburned skin.

Touch-Hear

Finger implant: Optical character recognition system, Body Area Network transmitter

Singapore’s Touch-Hear system uses finger implants so readers can gain additional information about a word they’re confused with. By touching a word or phrase. the reader can listen to its proper pronunciation, or find its translation or definition.

Person demonstrating the Touch Hear system to read books using its own unique word recognition system

This ear attachment, devised for the Text-to-Speech system, employs a Body Area Network receiver

WeatherMood

WeatherMood is a personal weather armband worn on a jacket. People can use it to “feel” the weather at a certain location, or adjust the display of their weather settings to reflect their present mood.

Thimble

The finger-glove named Thimble was developed as part of a collaboration between Artefact and the Industrial Design Department at the University of Washington

Thimble is a wearable finger glove that gives the visually impaired access to ambient as well as surrounding information.

Nano Tattoo

Diabetics who hate their daily blood test will soon have another option. A team of scientists at MIT have created a new iPhone glucose monitor that can test blood glucose levels by illuminating an otherwise invisible “nano tattoo.”

Desktop Vs. Mobile Internet

We are currently witnessing a major transformation from desktop to mobile right now. Below is a chart from a recent Morgan Stanley report, showing that desktop connections to the Internet are continuing to increase. Even so, in the next three or four years mobile computing will soon exceed desktop computing on the Internet.

All of these changes together represent a far bigger shift in computing than the personal computer revolution.

With over 5 billion people already using cellphones around the globe, over the next ten years, today’s 400 million smartphones will grow to become 5 billion.

Cloud Computing Growth

The market for cloud computing services is large and growing, even if the forecasts vary widely. Here are a few recent statistics:

• 50 percent of the 8 million servers sold every year end up in data centers, according to a BusinessWeek report.
• Google currently controls 2% of all servers or about 1 million servers. They plan to grow to upwards of 10 million servers within the next 10 years. That means that 98% of the market is controlled by everyone else.
• The data centers of the dot-com era consumed 1 or 2 megawatts. Today data centers using 20 megawatts are common – 10 times as much power usage as a decade ago.
• IDC estimates the market for public cloud products and services were at $16B in 2010 and will grow to $56B by 2014. Gartner more optimistically estimates the cloud market at $150B by 2013. Whatever the actual numbers turn out to be, everyone agrees it’s a rapidly growing field.

Both mobile and social computing are growing faster than anything before in the history of technology, and enterprise applications will need to adapt.

Final Thoughts

The key drivers behind this trend is the convergence of WBAN technology, cloud computing, and the processing power of smartphones

Phones have transitioned from landlines, to mobile phones, to smartphones, and they are about to undergo another revolution. They have already shifted from devices designed for phone calls to computers that connect us to the web, but in the years ahead, they will also enable people to capture physical and analog data about the world both “on” them and “around” them and transfer it to the web.

The rapid growth in physiological sensors, low power integrated circuits and wireless communications has enabled a new generation of wireless sensor networks. These wireless sensor networks will tell us when our food doesn’t agree with us, when we have a cut or bruise on our skin, and where exactly our pain is coming from.

Over time we will be developing predictive models that anticipate our physical problems and recommend counter measures.

We will soon wear our digital body cloud like a piece of protective clothing where the information is used to enhance our performance, ward off potential problems, and improve our overall awareness of our surroundings

Yes, we are on the verge of being invaded. But we won’t mind. In fact, I for one will be going out of my way to encourage it.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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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.

Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones

A while back I came across the term “self-licking ice cream cones.” It caught my attention because it conjures up a rather comical image in my head.

A “self-licking ice cream cone” is a term used to describe organizations that serve no purpose in life other than to sustain themselves. One of the telltale signs for spotting this type of organization is the prominent display of academic credentials by its leaders.

These organizations have the right look and feel of something legitimate, but tend to go over the top as a way to convince the world they’re doing something legitimate. And somewhere in the mix is a sense of entitlement that comes from all their credentialing.

Certainly this is not to say there is anything wrong with people who are proud of their university degrees. But the true trailblazers are far more focused on their next accomplishment rather than the trappings of where they’ve come from.

Four Fundamental Myths

The pace of change is demanding that we produce a faster, smarter, better grade of human being. Our current education systems are preventing that from happening.

Education today is far too slow and far too expensive.

Information is growing at exponential rates, and our ability to convert that information into useful knowledge and skills is being hampered by some fundamental myths about the parts and processes students need to learn.

In the future, learning will become hyper-individualized with students learning what they want, when they want to learn it. That’s not possible with the clunky systems currently in place.

Those learning impediments will eventually go away, but not until we can overcome the following four myths.

1.) Students cannot learn without teachers

Education has traditionally consisted of two fundamental elements: teaching and learning. From an operational standpoint, the greatest emphasis has always been on improving the quality of the teaching, figuring the learning will take care of itself.

While lecture-style teaching has been used for centuries to build today’s literate and competent society, it ends up being a highly inefficient system ill-suited for the coming hyper-individualized, on-demand learning systems of the future.

Over the coming decade we will begin to see a marked shift from teaching to learning, with online instruction taking the place of most teachers. The primary goal will be to bridge the gulf between experts and students, making this “learning from the experts” as seamless and timely as possible.

The critical point to understand is that teaching requires experts, but learning only requires coaches.

Coaches don’t need to be the topical expert on every subject. Rather, they need to be process experts with a great penchant for finding answers whenever a student gets stuck.

Not all teachers will go away, but many will. Tasks and duties will shift over time.

In general, the number of coaches needed for future schools will be less than the number of teachers currently employed, but we won’t know exactly how many fewer until future experimentation is done.

Some coaches will operate virtually, appearing when needed. Others will be resident advisors to help in situations where only a physical person makes sense.

2.) Learning does not happen outside of the classroom

In 2008, Roger Bohn and James Short, two researchers at the University of California in San Diego, decided to do a study to determine how much information people have entering their brains on a daily basis.

Everyone today is being exposed to vast amounts of information, and their study was intended to quantify the amount of information we are all being immersed in.

But they added a rather interesting twist to the study. Because of the varying forms of information, and the difficulty in comparing video to magazines and newspapers, they decided to convert all information into one standard form of measurement – words.

Based on their final 2009 report, the average person in the U.S. has 100,500 words flowing into their heads on a daily basis. And this number is increasing by 2.6% per year.

So where are all these words coming from? In rough terms, 41% comes from watching television, 27% – computers, 11% – radio, 9% – print media, 6% – telephone conversations, and smaller amounts from recorded music, movies, games, and other information sources.

As it turns out, the average American spends 11.8 hours every day consuming information. Many other countries are posting similar numbers. People today are being exposed to far more information than ever in the past.

Buried deep within the “other category,” constituting far less than 1% is our formal education. Even for students attending college, their classroom studies constitute a relatively small percentage of the information they are exposed to on a daily basis.

Most educational institutions haven’t found a good way to leverage the current data streams flowing into the minds of students, instead simply regarding it as irrelevant.

Somewhere in the middle of all these information streams is the next next next big thing waiting to be mined.

3.) Completion equals competency

Just because you’ve competed a course doesn’t mean you know how to apply the information.

The college process today has been designed around helping students transition from coddled family life to contributing members of society, self reliant and confident in the choices they will make.

They graduate with a complex set of experiences that have taken place against a backdrop of scholarly moments in a classroom.

This quest to achieve greater understanding cannot be achieved by simply reading books and taking courses. It can only be realized through the struggles involved in a personal journey – a journey that requires far more than cognitive reasoning and test-taking, but hands-on problem solving, working on real-life situations that matter, in moments of stress and dire urgency.

Without the struggle, the stress, and the urgency, people only surface knowledge to ply forward.

4.) When you graduate, you are done learning

Who is it that came up with the notion that someone’s education is ever finished? This is the single biggest flaw in our system today.

One of the core principals of business is to never sever ties with good customers. So why is it that colleges hand their graduates a diploma, dissolving all formal relations with them? Clearly educational needs do not end, and the student’s allegiance to the institution does not end, yet all income streams are broken.

The biggest failure point here is that colleges need to charge unreasonably high tuition rates for the short duration of their student-college relationship, when the learning and payments can more easily be spread out over a lifetime. The fact is that most students continue to pay off their student loans over their lifetime with only distant memories of what they learned.

In most cases, the value of the learning has become obsolete by the time the final bill has been paid. If it wasn’t for government guarantees, banks would be considered terrible collateral.

What will Tomorrow Bring?

Until now, students have been motivated to attend college for very selfish reasons. They are looking for prestige, status, and jobs that pay lots of money. It is my contention that the “good life” motivation is far too shallow for the world that lies ahead.

Rather than a world with people fighting people, the true battles that lie ahead will test us on every conceivable level. On the grandest of scales, we will find ourselves confronted with forces larger than our entire solar system, and on the tiniest of scales, nanotechnology and sub-atomic particles will confound us with challenges we never dreamed could exist. These battles will require far more than brilliant minds, personal tenacity, and military might.

The students of tomorrow will need to be prepared for a higher calling. This higher calling will be to pre-empt crisis before it occurs, anticipate disasters before they happen, and solve some of mankind’s greatest problems, starting with the problem of our own ignorance.

Much like a person walking through a dark forest with a flashlight that illuminates but a short distance ahead, each step forward gives a new perspective by adding light to what was previously dark. The students of tomorrow need to have a bigger flashlight.

Until now, ours has been a dance with the ordinary. History shows us that we are immersed in cycles, systems, and patterns that repeat again and again.

Tomorrow’s history books will show us that patterns are made to be broken, and our cycles are waiting to be transformed.

Colleges will need to position themselves on the bleeding edge of what comes next. We will always need one eye on the past to understand where we have come from, but a new breed of visionaries, equipped with unusual tools for preempting disasters, will become our most esteemed professionals.

If there were one phrase that best describes the mission of future colleges and universities, it would be this: “Preparing humanity for worlds unknown, preparing our minds for thoughts unthinkable, and preparing our resolve for struggles unimaginable.”

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Over the past couple years, internet-fueled uprisings in Egypt, Lybia, Syria, and other parts of the world have made Chinese officials very nervous. They have exerted a firm hand in controlling any communications deemed detrimental to the ruling party and have now gone so far as to block any Google searches of the English words “democracy” and “freedom.”

But this kind of conversational scrutiny has proven to be a double-edged sword.

In late July a tragic high-speed train crash occurred in Wenzhou, China. Instantly, Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, became a focal point for information about the accident, letting victim families know the status of their loved ones. At the same time, Weibo became a transparent medium for personal commentary and incendiary speculation about the cause of the accident.

The Communist Party sees a huge threat, and it’s a tough one for them to control.

On one hand, they feel control of the Communist Party is at risk unless they takes firmer steps to stop Internet opinion being shaped by the opposition. But at the same time, the Internet is becoming a very popular medium and a central tool for business and industry.

This is as much a business issue as it is a free-speech issue. So where does China go from here?

Code is Law

In the world of computers, the word “code” refers to the binary “1s” and “0s” that processors decipher. As a legal term, the word “code” refers to the written edicts used to interpret the law.

However, these two uses of the word began to merge in the 1999 book “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” written by Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig. Going beyond traditional interpretations, he explored ways in which computer code can function both to control its internal code as well as an instrument for social control. This has led to his famous maxim that “Code is law.”

For this reason, China has been exerting a heavy hand over the Internet code as it flows in and out of the country.

Early Internet Thinking

In 1998 President Clinton visited China and even visited one of the growing number of Internet cafes to mingle with the people. Later he quipped about what he saw. “There is no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet – good luck. (laughter). That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. (laughter).”

In the 2006 book, “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World” authors Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith explain why Clinton’s thinking was wrong.

“When President Bill Clinton visited China in 1998, he pledged to spend time talking about freedom of information and human rights. While in Shanghai, Clinton stopped at an Internet café to mingle with young Internet users. He said afterward, “I had an incredible experience in one of these Internet cafés in Shanghai.” Access, he declared, was now open to all. “Even if they didn’t have computers at home, they could come to the café, buy a cup of coffee, rent a little time and access the Internet.” Clinton later joked about China’s prospects for controlling the Net.

While Clinton was visiting China, Wang Youcai, a political activist, decided to test Clinton’s theory. On the morning of June 28, 1998, Wang went with two friends to the Civil Affairs Bureau in Hangzhou, China. The bureau is located near the famous and picturesque West Lake, former summer residence of the emperor, about eighty miles south of Shanghai. As part of a careful plan devised via e-mail, Wang decided to register, openly, an opposition political party, with a name similar to President Clinton’s party: the “China Democracy Party.”

Wang was aware of the risks but felt the time was ripe. Clinton was in China; the regime had begun to signal some degree of political relaxation – yet another “Beijing Spring” in the history of Chinese politics; and the China Democracy Party had the liberating power of Internet technology on its side. Even if the registration failed, Wang had set up overseas websites, and used a U.S.-based e-mail newsletter to communicate his ideas to thousands of Mainland Chinese. The China Democracy Party would, they thought, follow a long history of overseas Chinese opposition movements and conduct its resistance in cyberspace. Wang was putting the Internet’s capacity for political liberation to the test.

Wang’s application was, unsurprisingly, rejected. The next day, June 29, police officers came to his home in Hangzhou. While his wife and children watched, they took Wang away. As his wife, Hu Jiangxia, later said, “Plain-clothes police came to our house around one o’clock and talked to my husband about his activities and about the Chinese Democracy Party. They took him away just before four o’clock.” The detention came just as Clinton arrived in Shanghai, 80 miles from Wang’s home.

Wang and others were formally charged, several weeks later, with “fomenting opposition against the government.”

His wife wrote an impassioned letter to President Ziang Zeming. “Does he deserve to be treated like this just because of the pursuit of democracy and freedom?” she asked. Her letter, available only outside of China, went unanswered.

On December 18, Wang was tried in a Hangzhou court without a lawyer. Facing a possible penalty of life imprisonment, he pled out guilty and conducted his own, unsuccessful, defense. His trial lasted only a few hours. He was sentenced on December 21, 1998, to eleven years imprisonment and three years deprivation of political rights for subversion.

Around the same time, most of the other founding members of the China Democracy Party were tried and imprisoned. Wang and his colleagues had become Clinton’s Jell-O, nailed to the wall.”

The Censorship Engine

Emboldened by control theories described in “Who Controls the Internet?” China’s censorship engine came into its own in mid-2008, and restrictions once thought of as temporary, such as bans on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, are now considered permanent. Government-friendly alternatives have sprung up and are amassing a considerable following.

Web sites in China are required to employ people who monitor and delete objectionable content – no porn, online gambling, or political organizers. Untold thousands are now paid to oversee and guide Web conversations in a manner the government views as favorable.

In December 2008, a pro-democracy movement called Charter 08, led by highly regarded intellectuals, released an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. The group’s Web site, bulldog.com, was instantly shut down.

Under the guise of a campaign against pornography and other deviant behavior, government censors launched a campaign that shut down over 1,900 websites and 250 blogs. Not surprisingly it wasn’t just the porn sites that got shuttered. Online discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphone text messages in which political and other sensitive issues surfaced, quickly found themselves in the information landfills of Eastern society.

In 2009 the government went so far as to require the installation of a new software program called “Green Dam-Youth Escort” on all new Chinese-made computers. The software was effectively designed to monitor and report on all user activity. This, however, received a powerful consumer backlash and the government finally backed off, indefinitely delayed enforcement of the rule.

Ironically, even though China is building one of the most technically sophisticated Internet firewalls in the world, they have still managed to cultivate a very vibrant and dynamic community of Web users. Today there are over 70 million bloggers in China, over 200 million accounts on the Chinese version of Twitter – Weibo, and over 485 million Internet users, more than in any other country.

In a less caustic approach, the government employs thousands of writers to act as regular web users and offer their thoughts to counter any criticism of the Communist Party. These people have become known as the “50 Cent Party” because the government pays them 50 Chinese cents for every post that helps reshape public opinion in a positive way.

The China-Google Showdown

In January 2010, the festering battle between China’s government’s policy and one of the world’s most high-profile companies, Google, was coming to a head. Google announced that it would cease operations in China unless its search engine results were no longer filtered. The government responded by saying that companies doing business in China must follow the law.

Google shut down it’s primary .CN search engine in March 2010 and began directing users in China to its uncensored sister search engine based in Hong Kong. While this decision to skirt censorship rules without violating the letter of Chinese law first appeared okay with officials, resentment continued to brew.

In June 2010, Google announced that the Beijing government had renewed its license to operate a Web site in Mainland China. The license renewal was viewed as a peace offering to diffuse tensions. But the story was far from over.

In March 2011, Google once again accused the Chinese government of disrupting its Gmail service in the country and making it appear as if technical problems at Google — not government intervention — were to blame.

What was so clever about China’s attacks (assuming Google has it right) is that the failures are intermittent, designed to appear to be Google miscues, not products of state security actions.

At the same time, several popular virtual private-network services, or V.P.N.’s, designed to evade the government’s computerized censors, have been crippled. V.P.N.’s are popular with China’s huge expatriate community and Chinese entrepreneurs, researchers and scholars who expect to use the Internet freely.

Google, while uncomfortable with operating in China and censoring its search results on Beijing’s behalf, is determined to keep a foot in China, which now has more Internet users than the United States.

The Next Generation Internet

Chinese officials and media have recently complained about the spread of damaging and unfounded “rumors” on the Internet. But while they are very skilled at controlling the Internet conversation inside their own country, they are like a fish out of water when it comes to managing the global conversation.

Few analysts believe that the government will loosen controls any time soon, with events it considers politically sensitive filling the calendar, including a turnover in the Communist Party’s top leadership in 2012.

On one hand, China controls the largest base of Internet users in the world. If China continues down the path of prosperity, their current $6 trillion GDP will overtake both the $15 trillion GDP of the U.S. and the $16 trillion GDP of the European Union.

The number of billionaires in China has shot up to 271, more than double the 130 who achieved this rare status in 2009. And this growing wealthy class is beginning to exert considerable influence on public policy.

As Michigan State’s Professor Peter Yu puts it, “The question is no longer how the Internet will affect China. It’s how China will affect the Internet.”

That said, information walls are never permanent.

In much the same way one lie can lead to another lie, and that one leads to an even more sophisticated tangle of untruths, filtering conversations over time becomes an increasingly incestuous, and often self-crippling, network of separating rights from wrongs.

Businesses inside China are at a considerable disadvantage because they can’t “see” the whole picture. At the same time, businesses outside of China will find it increasingly difficult to break into thier market.

Final Thoughts

Certainly China is not the only country exerting local influence and control over the Internet. There are literally thousands of other examples.

When the U.S. shut down access to all online gambling sites in 2005 by disrupting the credit card company’s flow of money, the Internet moved one step further down the path of location-based regulation and control.

Today, if someone in the U.S. sends a series of text messages or emails using the right combination of “terrorist” words, you can bet they will be getting a visit from someone at Homeland Security very soon. So how different is the U.S. from China?

Many users look forward to the days when spam is under control, viruses are a thing of the past, and identities are far more protected from theft. We long for the days when online searches point us to exactly what we are looking for without having to weed through tons of garbage. And virtually no one wants to have to remember what Internet laws come into play when we travel with increasing ease from one country to the next.

In the coming years we will begin to see a number of technologies designed to circumvent the barriers – impenetrable private clouds, satellite-based Internet connections, and encrypted websites.

But the hard cold reality is that the unrestricted freedoms of the past will never return to their earlier form.

Governments now have a variety of techniques for controlling offshore Internet communications by enforcing their laws through coercion within their borders. In reality, the Internet is splitting apart, growing elaborate new borders.

Far from flattening the world, the Internet is being reformed around the geography of place.

But contrary to what the fatalists may be imagining, the next version of the Internet will have many virtues and opportunities to offset the freedom we are losing. It will be neither better nor worse, just different.

Over the coming months I will work towards uncovering next generation of opportunities. In the mean time, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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