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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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Anyone driving down a typical stretch of highway in the U.S. will encounter an endless barrage of traffic signs designed to dampen our aggressiveness, forcing drivers to drive slower.

At the time, our speeds in the digital world are never fast enough. In fact a 2010 study done by Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah at the University of Nebraska concluded that the amount of time an average person is willing to wait for a web page to load has decreased to just 2 seconds.

However, our online patience has been parsed into far tinier increments than we humans can consciously comprehend. Tests done by Amazon in 2007 showed that every 100-millisecond delay in load time translated into a 1% decrease in sales.

Speed sells. At the same time, delays will cannibalize sales, erode customer loyalty, stifle brand awareness, and smother a myriad of other enterprise building attributes.

So it should only be logical that dampening the speed of a website – using a slow link – may become an effective weapon in the hands of the puppet masters who wish to control the purse stings of online companies.

Going one step further, the same type of radar guns used to hand out speeding tickets in the physical world will soon be used to hand out “slowing tickets” online.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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Over that past week I’ve had the great honor of working with both the good people at the North Dakota Bankers Association in Bismarck, ND and the good people at Rabobank in Napa, CA on the rapidly evolving topic of the future of agriculture.

Growing up on a grain farm in the little town of Mobridge, SD is an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything. But over the past several decades, the farming profession has evolved into a very sophisticated industry, with technology permeating virtually every aspect of the seeding, growing, and harvesting of today’s food production systems.

U.S. farmers are clearly on the cutting edge of the world’s ag industry, an industry now tightly interconnected with global distributors and food manufacturers who are insuring a far safer and more durable food supply chain than ever in the past.

But at the same time, we are sitting on the cusp of a new wave of innovation. The same information layers that have invaded our homes and offices are now creating information layers that will touch every plant and animal on our planet as well.

Our mobile communication systems are just beginning to make these connections, and on a certain level, this back and forth information flow becomes a rudimentary form of language between us and our plants. Little did we know, the plants have always been talking, but we haven’t been listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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