As motorists, we continually scan the areas of the road to our left, right, and behind us, but the most important place to examine is immediately in front of us. Therefore, our driving teachers have stressed the need to always focus on the roadway in front of us. While we are stuck in traffic and driving at a modest speed, we may not need to pay as much attention to what is happening in front of us; nevertheless, as our speed increases, we need to glance farther and further along the road to see what is approaching. Try going in the middle of the night on a very long, dark rural road while kee ..read more

Some people are fascinated by the past and enjoy reflecting on and learning about everything that has occurred up until the present time (possibly thinking that they will learn from it). Some individuals enjoy living in the present because it allows them to be aware of what is occurring here and now, but how many books have been written about practicing mindfulness and being in the here and now? Tons. (This may be an extension of our now hyper-connected selves, but if you ask me, this mindfulness movement is moving in the wrong direction; however, that is a topic for another post.) Both the pa ..read more

Utopia, what is it about? A positive vision of the future. What is it about human beings working together, living together being together without conflict that annoys people? Why is it that dystopia is so compelling to people? I mean, I could give you thousands of examples of this, but it’s something Gene Roddenberry wanted to do You know I’m a big Star Trek fan. Gene Roddenberry wanted to show his ideal future, and human beings would not be at each other’s sort in his perfect future. Human beings would work together no matter what their race was or no matter what their gender was, no mat ..read more

I have spent the better part of the past few years advocating for goods and services that cater to the inherent slothfulness in all human beings. I’ve concluded that the automation of many of the daily tasks would make my life significantly easier. If the automation is carried out correctly and is audited, it will free up our mental capacity so that we may focus on other matters and take appropriate action. As I’ve mentioned in the past, most of the activities we engage in are obligations rather than pursuits of our own free will. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a method to eliminate tho ..read more

Are You Looking Far Enough Into The Future? Since our earliest days as primitive savannah wanderers, we humans have had a natural tendency to prioritize immediate gratification above achieving more far-reaching goals. Along with the capacity for thought and reason, human beings are the only animals that are capable of planning and thinking ahead to the future, putting money aside for the day after tomorrow, and considering what comes after that. But just like the vast majority of other people, we are sluggish and only look as far ahead as is absolutely necessary. We have not progressed very fa ..read more

There are a lot of reasons why I enjoy facilitating our customers’ foresight initiatives. It is easier to help your inventors disconnect their current day-to-day jobs from the future which they are developing ideas for, and it is less restrictive than asking them to come up with an innovation that they can deliver today or even within the parameters of patentability when you ask them to think about a period that is more than ten years in the future. I think that we can have the most fun when we think about a period that is more than ten years in the future. The nice thing about futurist progra ..read more

There are still some tasks that can only be accomplished by people. I remember going to Yahoo! back in 1995, just before everything exploded here in Silicon Valley. I was there with a number of cable TV executives (we had come down from Toronto to meet with representatives from @Home, Netscape, and Yahoo! to get the lay of the land prior to launching our own cable internet service in Canada – think Xfinity), and we were there just before everything exploded here in Silicon Valley. In the end, we never met with Netscape; this was about a week before they went public on the stock market, and the ..read more

I went to a conference a few months back that was focused on the future of conversational interfaces. During this conference, one of the speakers described the current state of the art in cloud robotics, which is a very new field of study. Before the development of cloud robotics, machines had to be manually programmed and carried out their tasks on their own. Because the intelligence that powered the robot was stored in the cloud, cloud robotics made it possible for robots to learn from one another. Whenever a connected robot made a discovery, the other robots in the group would immediately p ..read more

According to Wikipedia, the idea of just-in-time only appears in three contexts: just-in-time manufacturing, a production strategy in which things are built as they are demanded; computer programming, in which just-in-time compilation can compile code just before use to improve run-time performance; and just-in-time teaching, a strategy to improve learning outcomes that were recently added. However, none of these tactics is a good fit for what I see as our just-in-time-and-place future, which is one in which cloud-based technologies will be able to provide us with whatever we want precisely wh ..read more

What is the true motivation behind the creation of the internet? Wasn’t it intended to link every human in the world to every other human on the planet, and maybe even lead us into a future where all people will be able to comprehend one another better? Instead, there is an overwhelming amount of marketing messages rather than actual communications. I’ve mentioned this previously on my blog, but the link between supply and demand isn’t as straightforward as it could be, which is one of the reasons why we are inundated with spam and advertisements on the internet. We have the supply situation u ..read more