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 [...]
Last December, I published my annual list of predictions for the coming year. Number 9 on the list was "Networked Traffic" and I wrote: The labor union representing Munich taxi drivers will seek an injunction against the social networks claiming they enable individual drivers to act as taxi companies and should therefore be subject to [...]
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 [...]
In my latest book, Foresight 20/20: A Futurist Explores the Trends Transforming Tomorrow, I devote an entire chapter to how 3D printing will transform not only the manufacturing sector but everyday life. To understand how rapidly 3D printing is advancing, consider just these three unrelated developments from the world of music: 1. Bloomberg News is [...]
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 [...]
Last week, I posted an article on five future trends in agriculture. To better understand how these trends might play out on a real farm, I invite you to watch this new 5-minute video produced by John Deere. It's called "Farm Forward" and it provides a glimpse into the future of farming: Interested in some [...]
In the coming months, I’ll be keynoting four agri-business conferences where I’ll be addressing future trends in agriculture. In my talk, I’ll cover a number of business, political, social, economic, demographic and technological trends, including precision agriculture, data mining/business analytics, biofuels, hydroponics, vertical farming, synthetic biology, cloud computing and supercomputing. What follows, however, are the [...]
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