Last week I went through the process of analyzing how much of what I learned in college that I’m still using today. This ended up being a difficult thing to assess and quantify.

While most of my undergraduate coursework was focused on human factors engineering, I ended up taking several general courses like humanities, math, history, psychology, and accounting.

Looking over my classes, the three least useful courses were – how to use slide rules, Fortran programming (taught with punch card machines), and calculus, which I have never used. I certainly can’t say these courses were worth zero, but they hold very little value in my world today.

Putting aside my conclusions, it does bring up a much larger question: What skills are being taught today that will have little or no value in the future? 

More importantly, as college costs escalate, and repayment plans extend for decades, does the usefulness of a college education wear out before the payments end?

Technology is blazing forward at a torrid pace making lifelong learning part and parcel to our ability to stay relevant. Education has value, but exactly how much value and for how long? And what happens to the massive debt incurred by students when the knowledge is no longer relevant?

Here are a few thoughts on how the massive changes coming to colleges are being driven by the decreasing half-life of education. 

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Last week I was speaking at the MD&M West Expo in Anaheim, California on the “future of manufacturing.” With over 2,000 manufacturing exhibitors filling the convention center, there was no small amount of interest in this topic.

With China and the rest of Asia making massive inroads in manufacturing over the past couple decades and automation threatening many of the remaining industries, a huge underlying theme of this event was jobs. Where will our jobs in the future come from?

Job loss is not an idle threat. As everyone attending this conference knows, businesses have an obligation to hire the fewest number of people they can get away with, and when automation eliminates the need for an employee, the employee has to go.

However, while job loss is very real and happening all around us, job creation is also happening, in way that many have not seen coming.

To be sure, the transition period we are in will cause considerable collateral damage, but we will also experience a period of unprecedented opportunity provided we create the right systems for capitalizing on them. 

As I mentioned at the conference, the fastest way to create new jobs is to automate them out of existence. Here’s why!

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How many pills do you take on a daily basis?

According to a 2010 study by Colorado State University, about 68% of American adults take multivitamin supplements. At the same time the average American fills 12 prescriptions a year.

After spending the past few days with my aging parents in an assisted living center in Arizona, daily meds and supplements have become a critical issue for them to deal with.

Yes, every person is different and their daily “pill cocktail” will vary, but the notion that virtually every problem has a “pill solution” is still very much alive and well in today’s culture.

On one end of the spectrum is my colleague and fellow futurist, Ray Kurzweil who takes upwards of 250 vitamins a day, and on the other end are those who don’t take any.

To be sure, future generations will refer to us as the “pill people” because of our addiction to the quick fix. But as with all cultural memes, they have a beginning, middle, and end. Sometime in the near future, pill taking will peak and other types of cures, therapies, and self-healing techniques will begin to replace our need for pills.

The average American today takes slightly over 10 pills a day. By 2050, that number may very well be zero. If that’s the case, what will be the next big thing destined to capture the money we spend today on pills? Here are a few thoughts.

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What are the odd of you ending up age 65-70 and having regretted your entire life? As people edge towards retirement, reflective moments like this can be a gut wrenching experience. If you’re like most, the odds are well over 90%.

For many, the jobs world has transitioned from a lifelong career path to frenetic stints of work with amping levels of stress at the beginning and end of each new gig. Many are desperate to gain some control over their own destiny, but few know how. 

Launching a new business can be a terrifying experience, especially if you go down the old school path taught in most entrepreneurial schools. The process of writing a business plan, raising money, and hiring a leadership team has killed far more businesses than it helped. Death by 10,000 distractions.

People launching a business have limited resources – limited time, energy, money, talent, and intellectual bandwidth. Chasing after meaningless accomplishments simply because a so-called “expert” told you to do it is a sure path to failure.

The new Empire of One business model we’re developing at the DaVinci Institute starts by building the mindset of an entrepreneur, before overloading people with extraneous options. As an example, the one-person entrepreneur doesn’t need to know about raising money, SEC rules, investor relationship strategies, HR requirements, hiring policies, or any of ten thousand other details designed for explosive growth businesses that only represent a fraction of one percent of the ones that succeed. 

Once people learn to be successful as a one-person entrepreneur, without putting their family, house, and lifetime savings on the line, they can consider larger endeavors. Let me explain further. 

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A recent TEDx talk about solving traffic jams started by asking the simple question, “Who is in charge of the daily bread supply for the city of London?”

Food supply chains have become enormously complicated, but as it turns out, there is no central “bread czar” for London or any other large city. The bread supply chain is a great example of a self-organizing system.

Most likely, if the City of London decided to appoint an official Bread Czar to oversee distribution, it would be fraught with daily bottlenecks and supply problems.

As society grows in complexity, how can we design systems that don’t require daily oversight, with self-regulating mechanisms capable of unleashing the true potential of humanity? 

Perhaps our most broken system, in dire need of reform, is education, and I’d like to start with college-level education.

So how can we put in the right mechanisms and sub-systems with built-in checks and balances along with monitoring points, and yet have it be tweakable enough to make the complex systems used to govern colleges and universities self-organizing?

Admittedly, the world of academia is exponentially more complicated than the London bread supply, but I’d like to take a few minutes to explore this idea using the concept of Micro Credits as the entry point.

So, after spending the past few days consulting with Senior Fellows at the DaVinci Institute, here is what I’ve come up with. 

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What, in your mind, will be the most powerful entity in the world 100 years from now?

As we look around us today, it’s easy to point to a single nation as being the most powerful. But will that still be true 100 years from now?

The most powerful entities in the future could be large multi-national corporations, giant associations of people or companies, religious groups, clusters of countries such as NATO, perhaps some new entity that controls technology like ICANN, or something else entirely?

Adding to the confusion of this question, what actually defines power? Is it money, clout, influence, an ability to control a large military, or some combination of all of these?

Will the notion of power be defined differently in the future than it is today?

These are all important questions to ask because powerful entities define who the powerful people are. And it is the underlying systems and technology that will determine status and clout.

Caught in the middle of all this influence-wrangling is the lowly city, an entity now subservient to states and countries, and often lost in the commerce of daily life. Are cities likely to remain at the lower end of the clout spectrum, or is there some new kind of power-shift afoot?

Here are a few thoughts about the rising influence of cities that may surprise you?

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When was the last time you used Google’s search engine? Were the results more or less relevant than the searches you did a year ago? 

Early on, after Google had developed its breakthrough search algorithms, they realized the Internet was a very fluid environment that would require constant monitoring and continuous changes to keep the people who were gaming the system at bay.

Currently Google is making changes to its main search algorithm roughly 40-50 times a month or slightly more than once a day. As the web evolves, this number will undoubtedly increase.

Now consider the possibility of a country using the same type of constantly evolving algorithms to determine its tax code.

Countries have similar problems with people trying to game the system to avoid paying taxes, so what if the IRS, or its equivalent in other countries, made similar algorithm adjustments to constantly close loopholes and determine the appropriate tax rate?

In case you’re thinking this is a ridiculous idea, the IRS is already making changes to the tax code at a rate of more than once a day – 4,680 changes since 2001.

But rather than thinking in terms of an income tax that is only filed once a year, what if it were applied to a national sales tax where literally billions of purchase transactions happen every day. Here are some thoughts on why this may or may not be a better way to go.

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The first time I watched Star Trek and heard Captain Kirk utter the phrase – “Set your phasers to stun!” – it occurred to me that these future weapons featured a number of different settings.

While most people assumed a simple two-position switch with only “kill” or “stun” options, I found myself dwelling on the possibilities of an eight or ten-position switch and wondering what the other options might be. Perhaps they would include stun 1 (with pain), stun 2 (without pain), giggle (make them laugh uncontrollably), amnesia (forget what they’re doing), slo-mo (causing them to move in slow motion), suicide (making them take their own life), seizure (all muscles fire at once), overwhelming guilt (immobilized by guilt and self loathing), or overwhelming pity (suddenly they become your friend).

These may sound silly, but since today’s weapons only have one setting, we have a hard time imagining a technology with more choices.

Similarly, when people show up in court, judges only tend to have one setting for justice – incarceration. With our existing infrastructure built up around jails and prisons, we have a justice system that has a hard time considering other options.

With incarceration rates in the U.S. now reaching epidemic levels, I would like to take you through the exercise of envisioning a world where prisons are no longer an option. If judges no longer had ‘incarceration’ as a setting on their gavel of justice, what kind of world would we live in? Here are a few thoughts.

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The year is 2018 and the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the organization charged with selecting the winner of the famous Nobel Peace Prize, has changed their process. They’ve decided to host a global election to allow the people of the world to decide which of the candidates is the most deserving.

Two months before the election, a slate of four possible candidates is announced. The election itself takes place over a 24-hour period and a secure online voting system allows voters to make their selection from any computer, tablet, or cellphone.

As a way to push voters to learn more about each contender, they are given a short test consisting of eight simple questions, two about each candidate, before the official vote is cast.

Peace advocates around the globe are anxious to participate, and once Election Day formally clicks to an end, a total of 740 million voters from 50 different counties have selected the winner.

With spotlights blazing and countless news cameras poised to capture the moment, the winner is formally announced. However, unlike previous winners, this person suddenly becomes the most famous person in the world, more celebrated than any king, president, or prime minister on the planet.

While on the surface this may appear to be nothing more than an ingenious PR stunt for selecting prizewinners, it is indeed much more. Voting software that crosses country lines fall into the category of “catalytic innovations” with the potential of creating new global mandates. Here’s why.

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There is great value in the unknown.

My good friend Jeff Samson put it this way. “If I am ignorant of something and it is suddenly presented to me, I may find it innovative. The other option is that I will be annoyed by it, but eventually when enough others have accepted it, I will buy in and consider it innovative. So ignorance is as important to innovation as knowledge!”

Ignorance is also a valuable part of the future. Once a future is known, we quickly lose interest. For this reason, our greatest motivations in life come from NOT knowing the future.

So why, as a futurist, do I spend so much time thinking about the future?

Very simply, since no one has a totally clear vision of what lies ahead, we are all left with degrees of accuracy. Anyone with a higher degree of accuracy, even by only a few percentage points, can offer a significant competitive advantage.

Using this as a backdrop, here are four unexpected macro trends that I see dramatically influencing our future.

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