#1. First Heart A-Hack Victim. In January, an Arizona socialite will be charged with murder after it was uncovered she hired a former disgruntled employee of a leading medical device firm to hack into her cheating husband’s pacemaker and deliver a lethal shock to his heart. Shares of the company’s stock will plummet on the [...]

Earlier this week, I traveled to Waterloo, Ontario to deliver a speech on future technology trends. As I left the venue, I encountered an Amish family strolling down the highway in a horse-drawn wagon. The irony of this scene—especially when juxapositioned against remarks on our accelerating future—was not lost on me. I am not intimately [...]

I recently traveled to Vancouver to deliver a keynote presentation to an internationally recognized engineering and construction firm. The title of my talk was “Vuja De: Using the Past to Create the Future.” (In case you’re wondering, vuja de is loosely defined as “that feeling of entering a situation you’ve been in a thousand times, [...]

In his wonderful book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley reminds us that the amount of artificial light produced with an hour of work has increased a staggering 43,200-fold since the recording of the first sesame-oil lamp in Babylon in 1750 BC. Here's another way to think of this: In 1750 BC it [...]

Yesterday, it was reported that two students at the University of Virginia had created a 3D-manufactured airplane capable of cruising at a speed of 45 miles per hour. More impressive was the fact that the students created the 6.5 foot airplane in four months at a cost of $4,000. To appreciate the significance of this [...]

Nate Silver in his new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, makes a profound point: Certainty is actually correlated with making worse forecasts. Let me repeat that: Certainty is actually correlated with making worse forecasts. In other words, the more certain you are of your forecast or prediction, the less likely you are to [...]

Stay Humble, My Friends Nate Silver in his new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, makes a profound point: Certainty is actually correlated with making worse forecasts. Let me repeat that: Certainty is actually correlated with making worse forecasts. In other words, the more certain you are [...]

Ford Motor Company has publicly predicted self-driving automobiles may be a possibility as early as 2017 and the Wall Street Journal has proclaimed such vehicles are “inevitable.” At the turn of the 20th Century, the original automobile heralded a new age of personal freedom and lead to “drive-thru” restaurants, motels, express delivery businesses, the creation [...]