Twenty-five years ago, 20 megabytes of storage cost approximately $800. Today, Google and a handful of other cloud-based storage providers offer 100-times as much storage for free. Fifteen years ago, the idea that a world-class encyclopedia could be created and maintained by free labor would have seemed impossible. Today, Wikipedia is routinely access by millions [...]

This ad from the late 1970's imploring its readers to "think ahead for the 1980s" is a wonderful reminder that future has a curious way of getting cheaper and cheaper. My quick back-of-the-envelop calculation estimates that if your $29.99 32GB jump drive were priced at a level comparable to the late 1970's it would today [...]

“We are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native of that land.” --Marina Gorbis “We are all immigrants to the future.” I love this statement, which I’ve pilfered from fellow futurist Marina Gorbis’ insightful new book, The Nature of the Future. The metaphor of an immigrant is useful to individuals and [...]

Let me rephrase that: Sports aren’t preparing your child for the future in the same way as in the past. I am a strong proponent of athletics and an even stronger proponent for how sports help prepare kids for the future by teaching them the importance of hard work, teamwork, discipline, persistence and goal-setting. (In [...]

I recently returned from a two week vacation in Italy. One of my favorite locations was Venice. While there, I came across a Venetian proverb: The sea gets deeper as you go further into it. This is how I feel about the future--even as a professional futurist: The future gets murkier as you go further [...]

On many early maps, there was often a Latin phrase, HC Svnt Dracones. It translates into 'Here are dragons." In reality, the slogan was little more than the cartographers attempt to conceal their ignorance. Of course, with time and better technology, our maps got better and the dragons disappeared. This metaphor is worth keeping in [...]

Meghan Uldrich rockin' Google Glass Last week, I flew to New York, where as a Google "Explorer," I was fitted for my first pair. I am just in the early stages of my "exploration" and I have yet to reach a firm conclusion about the technology. Nevertheless, I am fascinated by its potential. To [...]

"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." The above quotation is from J.B.S. Haldane, a 20th Century British geneticist, and I have always enjoyed it because it elegantly captures the idea that even our imaginations are limited in their ability to "suppose." [...]