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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Industries: Energy
Embrace a New Dimension
It has been said that the reason doctors and surgeons have not embraced simulated training to the same degree as airline pilots is because they don’t “go down” with their patients. The implicit message is that pilots have an incentive to utilize the very best training tools.
This distinction is important because as 3-D display and virtual reality technology continues to improve it will soon reach a point where it is just as good if not better than current training techniques. The U.S. military has already embraced virtual reality training to prepare soldiers before they go into actual battle because it has been demonstrated to save lives. The same will soon be true in the health care industry, but first doctors and surgeons (and the medical institutions that train them) may need to unlearn existing training methods which they have relied on for the past many decades.
This lesson in unlearning, however, is not limited to the health care sector. As this article suggests, innovative leaders in the automotive industry are already embracing the technology. There is no reason educators and professionals in a host of other industries can’t do the same.
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Stretchy, Solar Shoes? Who Knows.
Ecogeek recently uncovered that Apple has filed a patent on a solar-powered iPod. Time will tell if the idea ever comes to fruition, but if it doesn’t I’m confident that something else will. One idea that I believe we will see in the near future is solar-powered clothes. The U.S. Army is already developing solar textiles and advances in the area of stretchable silicon suggests that even shoes could become solar collectors.
One additional application that we should see before long is shoes that “grow” with the wearer. According to this article, one company is already manufacturing shoes that can be manually adjusted as a child’s foot grow. Looking at the picture, though, they don’t look that comfortable. If, however, the shoes could gently stretch as the young wearer’s foot grows that’s seems a little more practical.
If someone can then combined a shoe that both collects energy and grows—well, that could be a real winner.
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Jack Uldrich Speaks on the Future
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Bone Up on Your Materials Sciences
There is an informative article in Technology Review on the topic of advance materials. To many, the subject undoubtedly sounds boring but I’d like to suggest otherwise and express the opionion that unless you keep with advances in the field you could soon find yourself out of business.
Without going into great detail, the gist of the article is that due to near exponential advances in scientists’ ability to program the self-assembly of nanoparticles, researchers are now poised to assemble new materials with novel optical, electronic and magnetic properties. More importantly, as savvy businesspeople begin to figure out how to exploit these properties they could soon be developing some very cool—as well as very efficient and effective—new products.
For example, I have written before about solar power’s potential. Due to advances in self-assembly, however, it is quite possible that photovoltaics could soon capture a broader range of the solar spectrum. And this, in turn, could mean that new solar cells will be efficient enough to work even in cloudy environments.
Another example is occurring in the field of fuel cell technology. This recent article discussing the possibility of cheap hydrogen is a perfect case-in-point. Researchers have now shown that by tweaking the atomic structure of titania they can more efficiently produce hydrogen. If hydrogen becomes easier and cheaper to produce this means that not only might fuel cell vehicles arrive sooner than expected, it is also possible that hydrogen can be used as a means to store solar energy (which would be generated during the day) and then used (in the form of hydrogen) in the evening.
Scores of other opportunities also await. I have written before about how new materials are already effecting both the semiconductor industry and the oil and gas industry; and new materials will also transform the building and manufacturing industries.
The bottom-line is this: If your business has anything to do with materials—and this is most businesses—it would behoove you to begin paying attention to the advances in the world of material science and nanotechnology.
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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Ship Bits, Not Carbon
It has been widely reported that the Internet can reduce greenhouse emissions by 1 billion tons over the next decade as result of companies such as EnerNoc and Verdiem developing better methods to monitor and control residential and business energy usage. This is undoubtedly true, but people to begin thinking even more broadly about the Internet’s ability to protect the environment.
Act Local
It’s a cliche to be sure, yet the old mantra about thinking globally and acting local still rings true and the growing power of social networks can greatly amplify this tendency.
For instance, as the father of two grade-schoolers, my wife and I regularly cart our kids to their myriad of extra-curricular activities. Not surprisingly, at every practice, an army of SUV’s and minivans fill the parking lot. Most vehicles chauffeured only one child and, more often than not, many of these children either live in the same neighborhood or attend the same school. Now, as much as I love my children and would love to believe they are imbued with extraordinary talents, it is not imperative that I—or any other parent—be attendance at every practice.
My point is that there is no reason why my fellow parents and I can’t better coordinate our activities and car-pool in the same way that today’s free-wheeling, net-savvy teens use social networking tools to plan their activities and share the burdens of daily life. (Alternatively, if a parent feels that he or she just can’t bear to miss a single karate chop, piano recital or soccer kick, perhaps they could convince the sponsoring organization to stream the event onto the web.)
Act Global
Often lost in the discussion about the Internet’s ability to protect the environment is a discussion about the power of the open-source movement. A few weeks back, I read about an innovative technology that might actually take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. (Yes, I know that trees also already do this but this technology might potentially to do it on a larger and quicker timescale).
The technology is still in an early stage of development, but this is where the Internet could help it along. There is a universe of bright, intelligent people who are accessible via the Internet and if given access to the right information might be able to build upon it and facilitate the technology’s entry into the commercial marketplace.
To opponents who question why anyone with such a potentially valuable technology would share it, I would answer that the Internet is already being successfully exploited by innovative companies to do everything from search for new gold deposits to develop new blockbuster drugs. There is no reason why this technology or other new clean technologies can’t be developed in a similar fashion.
Think Different
John Maynard Keynes once said that it is more efficient to “ship recipes than biscuits.” His point was that shipping information and knowledge—and not physical products—is the key to an efficient economic system.
The farsighted economist was absolutely right and the Internet provides society a grand opportunity to rethink this maxim anew—and in an environmental context. Consider the case of Amazon’s new electronic book-reader, Kindle. If we truly want to protect the environment and reduce our impact on the environment, does it really make sense to cut down trees to produce the paper for books; use tons of coal-power electricity to manufacture the books; and then transport those books across the country with gas-guzzling, fossil fuel-powered trucks—all for the privilege of then storing the books in rooms and libraries which must be heated?
How much better would it be to digitally transmit books to electronic devices in a way that leaves only a fraction of the book publishing industry’s carbon footprint?
This, however, is just the beginning. As advances in digital, computer-aided-design are coupled with advances in rapid prototype manufacturing (i.e. printing physical objects) and nanotechnology, the list of future products which might also be shipped in the form of information could grow exponentially.
What’s Really Need: A Change in a Behavior
These modest proposals only hint at the Internet’s potential to enhance the environment. The one common element is that they all also require a change in human behavior. And that, perhaps, is where those of us interested in protecting the environment might want to continue to leverage the Internet—to educate people on how their current behaviors are adversely impacting the environment and then convince them to act out their lives in new, different and more sustainable ways.
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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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Don’t Incrementalize Yourself into the Future
Knowledge, it has been said, is the key to success. It is a statement that is hard to disagree with unless you buy into that old adage that ignorance is bliss. Proceeding on the assumption that if you believed the latter you probably wouldn"t be reading this blog, I will go farther out on a limb and state that for years one of the world’s better recognized fonts of knowledge has been the Encyclopedia Britannica--a reservoir of 30,000-plus pages of information replete with titillating tidbits of data about everything from atoms to zettabytes.
In the late 1990s the revered encyclopedia came under assault from a new form of media distribution--the CD-ROM. Able to store vast amounts of information in a more convenient, colorful, and vivid fashion, Encyclopedia Britannica was forced to deal with this new competitive threat and proceeded in good haste to provide its information in a similarly fresh, snappy, and visually pleasing format.
By 2001 the company was back on its feet and headed down the sweet path of profitability. No sooner, though, had that storm passed when another began forming on the horizon. But just as a hurricane begins with a single molecule and is not immediately discernible, so was this one.
The storm was called Wikipedia, and it started in 2001 with nothing more than 100 encyclopedia-like entries drafted by a few amateurs and posted to a Web site. It seemed innocent enough. After all, how likely was it that a bunch of strangers, working for free, could someday produce an encyclopedia that would rival the esteemed Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of depth, breadth, and accuracy. It sounded about as plausible as a few molecules in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean turning into a Category 5 hurricane.
Yet in late 2005 Wikipedia smashed into the Encyclopedia Britannica. That year the prestigious scientific journal Nature announced after a comprehensive study that the average entry in Wikipedia was nearly as accurate as the typical Encyclopedia Britannica entry.
The advantage is still in Encyclopedia Britannica’s favor, but how much longer will it be able to withstand the gale force winds? The answer: not much. That is because we are now living in a world of exponential advances, and the scales are tipped in Wikipedia’s favor.
To begin, the very subject matter of the encyclopedia, which is to say knowledge itself, is growing exponentially. It has been said that human knowledge is doubling roughly every seven years. This leads to the almost ridiculously sounding (but mathematically verifiable) conclusion that by 2050 everything we know today will represent less than 1 percent of the sum total of the world’s knowledge.
Even if one disagrees with this statement, it is difficult not to acknowledge that radical advances in medicine, physics, chemistry, and biotechnology are changing both the content and value of the material in encyclopedias and that the old print-and-publish method of storing and displaying such information is, if not obsolete, at least impractical.
Neither a printed encyclopedia nor even a CD-ROM can react to this volume of change. Only Wikipedia, by posting information directly to the Internet, can respond in a timely fashion.
Wikipedia also has the advantage in terms of human horsepower. Advances are happening so fast, in so many different fields, that it is virtually impossible for the staff at Encyclopedia Britannica to keep pace. The challenge is not nearly so great for Wikipedia because it doesn’t have a staff. Instead it relies on a self-selected universe of experts and enthusiasts to keep track of all of these developments. (To this end, Wikipedia now has over 7 million entries in 200 different languages.)
Third, Wikipedia has a distinct economic advantage. Not only does it not need to print its material in either book or even CD-ROM format, it doesn’t need to pay an army of researchers and writers or underwrite the cost of housing any physical resources or employees.
The final kicker is this: Even if the Encyclopedia Britannica decides to put all of its content online for free, most people will still go to Wikipedia because its content consistently shows up near the top of most search engines.
What Encyclopedia Britannica is facing is a severe reaction to the exponential economy, but it is not alone. In fact, if history is any guide, a number of other companies, institutions, and organizations will soon be facing a comparable amount of change in the not-too-distant future.
What this means is that in order to survive in the Expoential Economy, we should all heed the words of Kurt Yeager, who once offered this sage advice: ”In periods of profound change, the most dangerous thing is to incrementalize yourself into the future.”
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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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What Could Be Better Than Free Money? Try Exponential Growth.
As a result of my new book, I have been asked on a number of occasions to describe what I mean by the title: “jump the curve.”
It is a fair question and when answering it I like to recall the words of that old sage, Albert Einstein, who once said that if a person—especially a scientist or technologist—couldn’t explain what he or she was working on to an 8-year old child then that person was either a fraud or a charlatan.
It’s an excellent test and because I have both an 8 year-old daughter and a 6 year-old son, I decided to put the topic of my new book to this test. Liking a challenge, I decided to see if my youngest child could comprehend the idea of “jumping the curve.”
Without using an example in the book, I asked my son, who has yet to lose any of his teeth, whether he would rather receive a single dollar for every one of his 20 baby teeth or if he would instead prefer to receive a single cent for his first tooth and then have that penny double for the next 19 teeth?
Being fairly good at numbers and knowing that his dad often likes to trick him, my son selected the second option—the penny doubling.
“Smart boy,” I proudly said. “Now, what if the tooth fairy gave you $5 per tooth?” (I was careful to suggest that I was not implying that the tooth fairy would leave him $5.) He pondered his options for a moment and, after calculating his total would come to $100, he selected the $5 option.
I asked him if he was sure and he confidently shook his head in the affirmative. “Well, son,” I replied, “I’m afraid that you have lost out on over $10,000.”
The look on his face was one of incredulousness, and that is precisely why I told him that he had to learn to “jump the curve.” Here’s how the chart reads:
1st tooth: 1 cent
2nd tooth: 2 cents
3rd tooth: 4 cents
4th tooth: 8 cents
5th tooth: 16 cents
6th tooth: 32 cents
7th tooth: 64 cents
8th tooth: $1.28
9th tooth: $2.56
10th tooth: $5.12
11th tooth: $10.24
12th tooth: $20.48
13th tooth: $40.96
14th tooth: $81.92
15th tooth: $163.84
16th tooth: $327.68
17th tooth: $655.36
18th tooth: $1310.72
19th tooth: $2621.44
20th tooth: $5242.88
Total: $10,485.75 ... or more than $500 per tooth!
To explain the concept of “jumping the curve,” I then drew him a graph and said that before a person can profit from any exponential trend he must first understand where that trend. The skill, I noted, “could be as significant as the difference between getting only $5 for a tooth or receiving $500.”
My broader point, of course, was that exponential advances are occuring in a variety of fields, including information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, brain scanning and even knowledge itself; and if he wanted to position himself for the future he would be wise to internalize this lesson now. The lesson is so important, I’d argue, that it is almost better than free money.
Interested in some other implausible ideas about the future? Check some of these past posts by Jack:
Voiceless Communication: It’s Coming and It’ll Augment Human Intelligence
The Robot Will See You Now
Operate on Yourself
57 Years is Now 41 Days
Death’s Slow Death
Self-Driving Cars
Do the Impossible
Enlarge Our Minds to a Space Elevator
Pong & The Future of the President’s Brain
Could You Really Love a Robot?
Do the Impossible: A Case Study
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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Future Technology & the Ability to Absorb It
I spend a great deal of time documenting how exponential advances in semiconductors, data storage, bandwidth, gene sequencing, brain scanning technology, robotics, algorithms and nanotechnology will fundamentally alter the business environment in the next decade. I am, however, aware of the fact that technology is already outpacing society’s ability to adapt to it. As such, I am always careful to temper client’s enthusiam about how quickly many of today’s emerging technologies will be incorporated into the fabric of our lives. (Frequently, I need to temper my own enthusiam as well).
To this end, I would like to offer this short history lesson which I pulled from Pip Coburn’s informative book, The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash:
-- The first mobile phone in the U.S. was available in 1946.
-- The first video game was played in 1961
-- The first personal computer was built in 1964
-- The first e-mail was sent in 1971.
Some of this slowness is a result of people’s and society’s resistance to change, some of it is due to legal and regulatory issues, sometimes it is a result over legitimate business concerns over the cost and the effectiveness of early versions of the technology. (For example, iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner is a great piece of technology, but many of us have a hard time coughing up $300 when a $5 broom still does a pretty good job.)
Bottom-line: Change does happen, but often it occurs a lot slower than most people generally recognize or appreciate.
P.S. Because I am a fan of thinking counter-intuitively, tomorrow I intend to write a piece that argues just the opposite—that technology adoption is actually speeding up.
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 So Clear … It’s Invisible
The Toronto Star is running an excellent article entitled ”Science has seen the future ... and it is invisible,” which profiles noted physicist, Michio Kaku—the author of the new book, Physics of the Impossible; A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel.
I’ll let the article speak for itself, but I want to highlight two quotes of Kaku’s because they fit quite nicely with the final chapter of my own new book, Jump the Curve. The chapter is entitled “Doing the Impossible” and it explains how exponential advances in technology will soon allow mankind to do a great many things which are today deemed “impossible.”
To this end, Kaku is quoted as saying ”In my own short lifetime, I have seen the seemingly impossible become established fact over and over again.”
He goes on to say that ”science is doubling 10 years.” Now, fans of Ray Kurzweil and exponential growth immediately understand the implications of this statement; but many people do not. So let me spell it out for you in more vivid terms: It’s is saying that everything we know today—about physics, biology, chemistry, the human body, etc—will represent just a fraction of what we will know in the year 2050.
(Here’s how you should think about it: Due to this doubling of knowledge, in 2018 everything we know today about science will represent just half of our future knowledge. In 2028, due to our continued accelerated understanding, what we know today will comprise only 25% of future knoweldge. In 2038, it will again be split in half (to 12.5%) and ten years after that our existing base knowledge (i.e. what we know today in 2008) will comprise just over 6% of future knowledge.
The implication of this is that as a result of all of this new found scientific knowledge, it is inevitable that we will be able to do many things which today seem impossible. Or to paraphase (and twist) the words of that 1980’s hit classic song, “The Future is So Bright, I’ve Got to Wear Shades,” the future will, in fact, be very bright but our technology—including invisible light-cloaking devices—will be so advanced no one will even need to know you’re wearing shades.
Interested in some other implausible ideas about the future? Check some of these past posts by Jack:
Voiceless Communication: It’s Coming and It’ll Augment Human Intelligence
The Robot Will See You Now
Operate on Yourself
57 Years is Now 41 Days
Death’s Slow Death
Self-Driving Cars
Do the Impossible
Enlarge Our Minds to a Space Elevator
Pong & The Future of the President’s Brain
Could You Really Love a Robot?
Do the Impossible: A Case Study
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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