Global futurist and author Jack Uldrich offers essential strategic information on nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology, RFID and many other future technologies to help you prosper as exponential trends converge at this unique moment in history.
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An Opposing View: Learn from Robots
Earlier today, I wrote this piece: Learning From Robots. For an opposing view of why robots might never make good teachers, I’d invite you to review this piece from Gizmodo.
My only response is that history is littered with examples of scientists who said certain things were “impossible.”
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Get There Early: A Book Review
Recently, I had some time to kill in an airport and as I am wont to do in such situations I strolled into the bookstore. It was my good fortune to stumble across the book, Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present by Bob Johansen of the Institute for the Future.
I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the future. Among some of the key points I took away from the book were:
1. Uncouple the art of forecasting from prediction. As I stated in this piece a few days ago the future is unknowable, but this doesn’t diminish the importance of forecasting. It does, however, suggest that all of us should take everyone’s predictions with a healthy dose of salt. As Voltaire said, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” It is good advice to heed when contemplating the future. Far too many variables are at work to predict the future with much accuracy.
2. Don’t adopt a fixed mind-set. Related to this point was the author’s warning against adopting a fixed mind-set with regard to the future. Too often, people with a particular mind-set see only things that fit their pre-conceived worldview. For example, I tend to be very optimistic about the future. (A case-in-point is this piece I wrote on human longevity.) Therefore, it is all that much more important for me to guard against fitting all future technological advances into this optimistic mind-set.
3. Think the unthinkable. Some of the strategies the author offered to protect oneself against the latter problem was to work on “thinking the unthinkable” as well as learning to “hold multiple realities in your mind at the same time.” To use my own thinking on longevity as an example, it would behoove me to actively consider reasons why people in the future might have shorter life-spans or how the future of longeveity might be asymmetrical. That is: some people might live longer, while others could have shorter life-spans. (Interestingly, we are already seeing signs of this future as life expectancy rates in the deep South are actually decreasing due to obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle-related diseases.)
4. Learn to become “comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Johansen makes a compelling argument that in the future—due to growing complexity—leaders will need to “focus less on solving problems and more on managing dilemmas” (and even “trilemmas” and “multiliemmas.") A couple of his proposed suggestions include: “reflect more, and respond less.” All too often, people—especially leaders—have a bias toward action. That is all fine and well unless, of course, of action is wrong. Bottom-line: The future is going to be very fluid and people will need to work hard at staying flexible. His solution: ask a lot of questions; think before acting; and learn to embrace ambiguity.
All told, the book offers a wealth of other tools and concrete examples to help the reader become more effective forecasters. Again, I highly recomend it.
P.S. The inside of the book cover is worth the price of the book alone. It offers a visual map of the Institute for the Future’s latest 10-year forecast.
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Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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Invest in the Future of Energy
As regular readers know, in addition to authoring Jump the Curve, I also had another book, Green Investing: A Guide to Making Money through Environment-Friendly Stocks, published this past spring by Platinum Press.
In the past few days, BusinessWeek has run an intensive interview with me entitled ”Clever Plays in Cleantech” and today I appeared CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” The entire video can be viewed here.
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The Future is on Hold … Until April 8
Dear Readers:
I will be on vacation from April 1 through April 8. In the meantime, if you just can’t get enough of my blog, I’d encourage you to check out some past edition’s of my monthly newsletter, The Exponential Executive.
Sincerely,
Jack Uldrich
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The Future of TV Advertising
I have written before on the future of advertising—here and here—but I want to share with you this insightful article by Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch. It offers an intriguing vision of how the Internet and searchable video will, together, transform the future of TV advertising.
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Develop a Future Bias
In my new book, Jump the Curve, I make the case that one strategy for “jumping the curve” and helping organizations innovate into the future is to “develop a future bias.”
A future bias is the opposite of “hindsight bias” and hindsight bias is, quite simply, the idea that after an event occurs most people take credit for believing that the idea was pre-ordained and that they knew it would happen along. For instance, by 1920, most citizens claimed they knew that man would “always” fly.
Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Most people were completely blind-sided by human flight. Lord Kelvin, the world’s most renowned scientist claimed in 1899 that “Heavier than air machines are impossible,” and no less an authority than the New York Times wrote in an editorial in December 1903—just two weeks before the Wright Brother’s historic first flight—that human flight would not be achievable for “1 to 10 million years.” My guess is that if a poll had been commissioned at the beginning of the turn of the 20th century the overwhelming consensus among the American public would have subscribed to similar opinions or, alternatively, something along the lines of “If God had intended man to fly, He would have given him wings.”
In the future, as a result of exponential advances in technology, many things that sound impossible today are, in fact, not only going to be possible they are going to be commonplace. Therefore, in order to embrace this future, it will be necessary to think exponentially—and not linearly—about the future. As Ray Kurzweil says in his book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, in the 21st century humanity will experience the equivalent of 20,000 years of change (using the 20th century’s rate of change). What he is trying to do—in an indirect way—is to get people to develop a future bias.
I recently came across this photo to the right on Digg.com which shows the world as it is expected to look in 250 million years. I think it offers a wonderful metaphor for thinking about tomorrow’s world because tomorrow will look radically different from today. Therefore, one of the first steps a leader must take in order to prepare him or herself to lead an organization into the future, is to develop a future bias. To do so, it first helps if that leader can envision a world that will look radically different. Therfore, when thinking about the future, I would encourage you to keep the above picture always in mind.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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Insuring the Future
A few weeks back as I was flying all across the country from Hawaii to Wichita to Atlanta giving presentations on nanotechnology, genomics and robotics to a variety of different industry associations, I had the opportunity to read Peter Bernstein’s best-selling book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.
Although it was written in 1996, I highly recommend it for anyone seriously interested in contemplating the future. This is because—for better or worse—the future will largely be determined by the insurance industry’s ability to understand—and thus underwrite—the future of various technologies.
For example, while I am personally optimistic about nanotechnology’s ability to create everything from scratch-resistant car panels to tailor-made drug delivery vehicles capable of killing cancer cells at an early stage, these products will not be commercially mass-produced until the insurance industry understands the environmental and health-related risks associated with new nanomaterials and nanoparticles.
Similarly, RFID (radio frequency identification) technology and nanosensors have the ability to create a host of wonderful applications. But until the insurance industry can adequately assess the potential dangers of how prolonged exposure to wireless technologies might impact people, the RFID industry could advance at a much slower pace than many people (including industry experts) expect.
The same is true for the rapidly emerging fields of synthetic biology and robotics. I have written before about the amazing potential of each to transform the energy, agriculture and automotive industries, but these things won’t happen until regulators and insurance professionals are comfortable insuring these technologies. For instance, while Craig Venter (a leader in the field of synthetic biology) is quick to dismiss the potential of some new artificial life form or “designer bacteria” escaping from his laboratory and wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting public, I’m not as confident the insurance industry will be as quick to dismiss the risk.
The same is true with robotics. While it is easy to forecast that robotics will grow into a $50 billion industry within the decade—as Bill Gates has done—the figure could drop to a fraction of that amount if an iRobot PackBot goes haywire over in Iraq and inadvertently kills six soldiers or if a self-driven robotic car created by General Motors runs over a pedestrian.
Such events often cast a new—and less flattering light—on a promising new technology and often bring the industry (and its future hopes) into the cross-sights of the legal profession. As a historical example recall that at the beginning of the 20th century asbestos was hailed as a wonder material for its amazing insulating and fire-retardancy properties. Today, we hold a decidedly different—and less positive—view of asbestos.
It is not my contention that the insurance industry will slow down all emerging technologies. In fact, in some instances, just the opposite might occur—the industry might facilitate the adoption of certain new technological advances.
For example, in spite of genomics incredible potential to violently disrupt the insurance industry’s business model of pooling risk, it is possible the insurance industry will facilitate the adoption of genetic testing by mandating that patients for certain diseases be genetically tested prior to the administration of any new drug in order to make sure that that drug will work effectively on the patient.
The same holds true for RFID technology. It could soon be determined that the cost of embedding sensors and RFID chips into bridges, cars, buildings and a host of other products greatly enhances safety and performance. If so, regulation could work in favor to these technologies by getting them mandated for certain applications.
If it seems as though I am speaking out of both sides of my both (i.e. that the insurance industry might either hamper or help RFID and other technologies) that is because I am. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas in your head at the same time.”
It is a concept that all people interested in the future should adopt because professionals in the insurance industry are schooled in this very idea and they calculate not just the benefits of future technologies but also its potential risks and costs. And where the industry comes out in these calculations will, to a large degree, determine which technologies shape our future.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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Your Mother’s Little Helper
After flying all night from Hawaii, I arrived in Wichita this morning in time to give a presentation to the Kansas Hospital Association on the future of rural health care. Of the many trends I discussed, I strongly encouraged the members to consider how the emerging field of robotics will impact their industry. The reason I emphasized this trend is because the demographics of rural areas skew heavily toward the elderly.
With this in mind, I’d like to share this article from CNN about how the use of robotics is surging in Japan as a function of needing to address the needs of that country’s rapidly aging population.
Rural areas are already short of doctors, nurses and other skilled workers and they are likely to continue to face considerable pressure to “do more with less.” Therefore—just as in Japan—it is almost inevitable that robotics will come to play a greater role in both staffing and cleaning rural hospitals as well as taking care of many of the elderly patients in the years ahead.
To borrow a phrase from the Rolling Stone’s, in the future your elderly mother’s little helper might not be a pharmaceutical product—it could very well be a robot.
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The Future of Agriculture
On the inside pages of today’s Wall Street Journal is a half-page advertisement from BASF touting its ability to get “48 miles per kennel.” The claim is a clever bit of hyperbole, but it does hint at a promising future for the entire agricultural sector.
A Replacement for the Tractor? Not Quite.
For centuries, the agricultural industry has been adept at applying the latest advances in technology to improve both yield and productivity. There is no reason to believe this trend will stop anytime soon and one unlikely hero in this unfolding technological revolution will be the humble supercomputer.
Earlier this week, researchers at Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories announced they were developing an exascale computer. For those of you counting at home an exascale computer will be 1000 times faster than today’s petaflop computers—which as I explained in this piece are already wickedly powerful.
Now these supercomputers won’t be tilling the fields or harvesting crops anytime soon, but they will allow farmers to reap more from every kennel of corn and acre of land. This is because supercomputers are the engines fueling the new discoveries being made in the rapidly maturing field of genomics.
This past week witnessed two noteworthy breakthroughs. First, a team of scientists announced that they had completed a working draft of the corn genome. Among other things this development is expected to lead to better crops varieties that can meet society’s growing demand for food, livestock, feed and fuel.
Last week I wrote about how agricultural scientists had identified a key gene that boosts the yield of oil and oleic acid and explained how this could be a windfall to various agricultural companies.
With the corn genome now unraveled researchers will be able to take this advance many steps farther, including making corn both more nutritious and more efficient for ethanol production. In addition to being a boon for large ethanol producers it could also alleviate some of the tension over the “fuel versus fuel” debate by allowing farmers to squeeze more ethanol from each bushel of corn.
Bone Dry ... in a Good Way
A second area where genomics promises to yield some important breakthroughs is in the creation of drought-resistant crops. In a paper published in Nature this week, biologists at the University of California, San Diego outlined how they have isolated a gene responsible for opening and closing the stomal pores which regulates water loss from plants.
This might not sound like that big of a deal until one considers that plants under drought stress lose 95% of their water through evaporation through such pores. If successfully developed at a commercial scale—and this is still a big “if” at this time—the advance could open up vast regions of the planet to productive farming.
Farming Looks Good in Genes
As significant as these advances are, I would strongly advise readers to keep an eye on the work of geneticist Craig Venter. At a presentation at the prestigious Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference this week, he disclosed his potentially world-changing “fourth generation fuel” which, as you may have guessed, is being fueled by advances in genomics.
As Venter noted, he has 20 million genes which he can genetically reengineer to “eat” agricultural feedstocks and “excrete” pure fuel. If he is successful, agriculture could not only feed the world, it could fuel it.
Advances in genomics are going to impact a great many industries, including health care and pharmaceuticals; but for my money if you’re looking for an industry that might look really good in “genes” you should consider the agricultural sector.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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Tesco Jumps the Curve
Tesco, one of the most innovative retailers, is at it again. Yesterday, the company announced it would be deploying “MediaCarts”—grocery carts which can sense their location in the store and trigger advertisements for nearby products—at a store in Singapore.
It would be easy to think that the technology will just be employed for advertising purposes but that is only a small part of Tesco’s plan. (In fact, if the company just plans to use it for advertising the technology will likely fail.) Rather, my hunch is that Tesco plans to use the carts to dramatically increase sales by using them to engage customers in “swarm shopping.” Swarm shopping is the practice of providing consumers with information about other shopper’s behavior.
If you have ever purchased a book on Amazon.com you have been the recipient of this practice when the computers tells you that “if you bought X then you might be also interested in Y.”
The MediaCart will operate on the same principle only it will “read” what you have already put in your cart and then try to encourage you buy other additional items which other people with a similar mix also purchased.
Think it won’t work? Perhaps, but 40 percent of all purchases are “impulse pruchases.” Often, a little nudge can go a long way.
If other retailers want to “jump the curve” and increase sales, it would behoove them to explore this technology.
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Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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Innovations and Opportunities
On a weekly basis I write a regular article for The Motley Fool -- an online investment newsletter—discussing how scientific and technological breakthroughs from just the past week might impact a variety of different industries and companies. Although it is written primarily with the individual investor in mind, the column is also a useful read for executives and managers who are interested in jumping the curve. This week’s article reviews how progress in the fields of agricultural genomics and atomic force microscopy could transform the energy and consumer electronics industries.
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Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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