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: Telecommunications
If These Walls Could Talk
Scientists at John Hopkins have reportedly created a new material that someday might be able to transmit sounds through something as thin as wallpaper.
In addition to leading to some kick-ass home entertainment rooms, the technology might have some other practical applications as well. Recently, I finished reading the book, Get There Early, and in it the author discussed how Chip Davis (the founder of the musical group Mannheim Steamroller) is now developing a prototype hospital room of the future whereby digital color displays in the ceiling will be synchronized with the music. Perhaps, soon, the digital display and the music will simply merge into one as a result of this technology. (BTW, Davis’ hypothesis is that natural lighting and sounds can speed the healing process.) If the wallpaper speaker technology doesn’t come to fruition, though, we can at least take some comfort knowing that Sony is now making speakers as small as a golf ball.
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Get the Skinny on the Future
This morning as my daughter was leaving for school she asked if she could watch the “fat, chunky” movie this weekend. I gave her a perplexed look and replied that I’d never heard of it. I probed a little further and although it took me a few moments to determine what she was talking about, I eventually understood that she wanted to know if she could watch a VHS-format movie.
This incident, along with another this past weekened where she gazed unknowingly at a record player that was for sale at a garage sale, has gotten me to thinking about what else might seem “fat and chunky” to her in the future.
Already televisions, phones and iPods are impressively thin and are likely to grow more so in the future. Alas, it won’t stop there.
A few months back, I wrote about solar energy’s long-term potential and one reason I’m so optimistic about its potential is that I believe thin-film photovoltaics are only going to grow more efficient and cost-effective over time. Among other things this implies that today’s bulky silicon solar cells are likely to fade away.
The field of nanotechnology is also leading to thinner and more effective materials. Therefore, walls made out of aerogels; car panels constructed of new nanocomposites; and automobile batteries (which utilize various nanomaterials) should also become thinner. As will lights which will take advantage of advances in organic light emitting diodes.
Next, as flexible electronics grow more mature and as more people grow comfortable reading information from such flexible displays, there is good reason to believe that books and newspapers will also become thinner. (In fact, they will become so “thin” that their digital content will simply be displayed in atom-sized pixels on the electronic substrate.)
Finally, as I highlighted last week in this piece, obesity - due to advances in genomics—could soon be addressed. In other words, it is entirely possible that we humans (especially Americans) will become less, well, “fat and chunky.”
Of course, just as “boom boxes” staged a surprising counter-trend in the late 1980’s and gigantic wearable clocks became all the rage, I am open to the idea that some products might become larger in the future but, in general, I think “thin” will definitely be “in” in the future.
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Jack Uldrich Speaks on the Future
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The Swiss Army Phone of the Future: Part 2
Sometimes the world is moving so fast that even I have a hard time keeping up with the pace of accelerating technologies—and I devote a good part of my day to making it a point to stay on top of these things. Well, anyways, yesterday I wrote a posting on the swiss army phone of the future in which I decribed how the phone of the future will not only serve as a phone, address book, MP3/video player, Internet browser and video recorder, but also as a medical diagnotician and a personal cash dispenser.
No sooner had I posted the article, though, than I came across this article from Technology Review explaining how advances in software will soon help business travelers more easily read their documents on a cellphone screen; as well as this slightly older article from BBC News entitled ”Hand-held supercomputers on the way.”
The latter article wasn’t terribly insightful, but it did remind me that due to advances in nanotechnnology—especially in the fields of nanowires (such as this one announced today) and carbon nanotubes—the cellphone of the future will likely have the processing capability of today’s most powerful supercomputers. If you wondering where this might lead, I’d encourage you to watch the short video posted below that shows how researchers at Accenture have developed an algorithm that allows phone users to snap a picture of an object and then have that object searched over the Internet.
Among the other things that this will allow users to do is take a picture of a food item in the store and not only do a quick price comparison as well as learn about its calorie count, the users could even find out if all the ingredients are organic and discern what other food types or wines might go with the product in question.
In short, I think it is safe to say that the phone of the future will become an even more indispensable part of our life than it already is.
Related Posts
The Swiss Army Phone of the Future: Part 1
Voiceless Communication to Augment Human Intelligence
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 trends, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and 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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Think 10X, Not 10%
One of my favorite quotes comes from Kurt Yeager who once said: ”In periods of profound change the most dangerous thing is to incrementalize yourself into the future.” I was reminded of this quote because although I often speak to businesses about the future of technology, I frequently encounter push back from executives who are mostly interested in identifying ways to incrementally improve their businesses or products. In short, they are looking for improvements in the range of 10%.
I constantly remind them, however, that we are no longer living in an era of linear growth—a 10% improvement might have been sufficient to keep them competitive in the past, but it is no strategy if they desire to be in business in 10 years. To achieve that goal, they must be on the lookout for how 10X improvements will transform their business. (Ray Kurzweil, in this excellent editorial in today’s Washington Post, also emphasizes this point.)
To this end, I recently came across a couple of articles that highlight this point. The first addresses how a number of researchers are looking to increase data storage by “a factor of a hundred.” It is difficult to contemplate how a 100X improvement in data storage might transform education, media, advertising and even health care, but it is imperative that professionals in these fields start thinking along these lines immediately. Here’s why: according to this recent Technology Review article, a new type of memory technology that uses 99% less energy could be on the market within 18 months. In other words, in the near future not only will your iPod or cellphone be able to hold 100X data (perhaps all of your genetic data), it will also be able to operate using only one one-hundredth of the battery power of your existing device.
Data storage, of course, is just one field experiencing exponential growth—semiconductors, Internet Bandwidth, genomics, robotics, RFID technology, nanotechnology, and even brain scanning technology are all doing the same. With regard to the latter, late last year reseachers at Harvard University announced that they could illuminate brain neurons with 100 different colors -- a 20X improvement.
Now, you might not think that brain scanning technology will impact your business that much, but I would encourage you to think otherwise. As researchers learn more about how the brain operates you can expect these professionals to also develop new strategies for learning; to create more effective marketing and advertising campaigns; and even to optimize strategies for bolstering people’s decision-makings processes. Bottom-line: If you are just focused on a 10% improvement, you are already behind the curve. You need to learn to “jump the curve” because the future belongs to those people who can think 10X—or more.
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The Future is So Clear ... It is Invisible
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Do the Impossible: A Case Study
Develop a Future Bias
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 trends, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and associations.
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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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Tracking the Future … With Sensors
The picture to the right is from yesterday’s New York Times article entitled ”My Life in a Video” and it shows a dancer with a variety of sensors embedded in her leotard. Among other things these sensors can automatically control music to correspond with her dance tempo.
To be sure, it is a cool technology and I’m sure it will soon be showing up in some avant garde theatres; I, however, would encourage you to think even more broadly about how embedded sensors and RFID tags will soon transform our lives.
To do so, I invite you to read these two recent articles. The first is from Roland Piquepaille over at ZDNET and he explains how researchers at the University of Washington have deployed 200 antennas (RFID readers) to track the movements and activities of 12 students.
I would also encourage you to watch the six minute YouTube clip posted below. It is a little academic at times, but toward the end you will witness two exciting applications. In the first, a student hears a song that a colleague is listening to and he is able to instantly download it to his cellphone. In the second, the same student downloads information from a wall poster. (At a minimum, this latter application holds great relevance for advertisers and retailers who might soon be able to employ the technology to download electronic coupons to consumers as a means of either enticing them to purchase the product or, at least, receive more information about it).
The second article comes compliments of NewScientistTech and it describes how researchers at MERL (Mitsushishi Electric Research Lab) have outfitted a 3000-square meter office with 215 sensors. What is interesting about this system is that it is slightly less “Big Brothery” than the UW project, but is still has some really practical applications. For instance, by monitoring people movements, companies could gain a better understanding of how they might want to heat or cool a building (e.g. if few people use a certain space it could be kept cooler). At a more practical level I can envision how retailers and grocers might redesign store layouts (and product placement) based on information obtained from these sensors.
Like the UW project, this article also has a short two-minute YouTube clip. After watching it, you should get a better feel for how the technology works.
If you then put the content from the three articles (and two YouTube clips) together and consider how in the near future sensors may very well be embedded in our clothing; in our phones; and in the walls of our buildings, I believe a clearer picture of where the future is headed emerges.
As always, I’d be interested in your thoughts.
Related Posts:
RFID Gets Untracked
RFID is on the Job
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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