Thought Leadership: One hundred years ago, if you were an elevator operator, you likely feared the creation of “humanless” elevators. Seventy-five years ago, telephone operators feared for their jobs. Today, grocery clerks have the same fear. In the near future, an increasing number of jobs will be automated, including those of Uber and taxi drivers. [...]

Thought Leadership: What if most people have the political situation wrong? What if the true threat to American jobs is not human immigrants pouring across borders but rather the accelerating advances in artificial intelligence? To better understand this possibility, think of AI bots as “digital immigrants” and then think of these bots as “amassing” along [...]

Thought Leadership: “The Coming Sonic Boom:” Last week, I gave a presentation on artificial intelligence. At the time, I didn’t use this analogy, but this is how you may want to think about the technological era we are currently living: When I was in the Navy, I served aboard an aircraft carrier, The USS John [...]

Thought Leadership: A few centuries ago, producing light was a difficult, costly, and time-consuming endeavor. For instance, to produce long-lasting candles, humans had to harvest spermatici oil from whales. Today, of course, producing light is incredibly inexpensive, and it has produced a great many benefits for society. It has also created the undesirable situation where [...]

Urgent:  This is the most important TED talk you can watch. If you are concerned about AI--and you SHOULD be--Tristan Harris' brilliant and heartfelt 15-minute presentation offers the most clear and concise definition of the problem humanity faces regarding AI I have yet to hear. It also offers a detailed description of what we, as [...]

Thought Leadership: One definition of leadership is the following: “Leadership means making happen what otherwise would not.” This, however, begs the question: How do leaders “make happen what otherwise would not happen”? One answer is that effective leaders use new, different, and better questions to probe the future. To this end, I like this quote [...]

Thought Leadership: To the right is a partial list of the books I’ve used to put together my course on “Foresight: Why Thinking About the World of Tomorrow is Today’s Most Important Skill”--which I am teaching this Spring semester at the College of St. Benedict’s and St. John’s University. I do not show it to [...]

Thought Leadership: In the coming age of AI, what might be one of humanity’s last remaining superpowers? In light of the news I shared last week suggesting that AI is about to become 1000-fold more powerful within 6 years, now is a good time to begin thinking about this question. One of my answers to [...]