Impact Lab – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

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Critical Skills for the AI Age That Are not Taught in College

November 9, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In 2011, I wrote about 11 critical skills for the future that weren’t being taught in school. The list included things like pattern recognition, creative problem-solving, and systems thinking—skills that seemed essential for navigating an increasingly complex world.

Now, in 2025, I need to completely rewrite that list. Not because those skills aren’t important anymore, but because AI has fundamentally changed which skills actually matter. Most of what I recommended in 2011—pattern recognition, data analysis, information synthesis—AI now does better than humans ever could.

The gap between what colleges teach and what you’ll actually need has widened dramatically. Universities are still preparing students for a world that’s vanishing while the AI age demands entirely different capabilities.

Here are the critical skills you’ll actually need—and why no college is teaching them.

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The 1,000 Revenue Stream Lifestyle: How AI Is Enabling Hyper-Diversified Income

November 9, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In 2011, I wrote about the future of income diversification—the idea that people would eventually have dozens or even hundreds of revenue streams instead of a single salary. At the time, it seemed aspirational, almost impossible. Managing even ten income sources was overwhelming for most people.

Now, in 2025, I need to revise that prediction dramatically upward. We’re not heading toward dozens of revenue streams. We’re heading toward thousands. And AI is making it not just possible, but inevitable.

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The Futurist’s Dilemma: When AI Can Predict the Future Faster Than You Can

November 9, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In 2012, I wrote about the eight critical value points of being a futurist. I explained how futurists provide unique value through pattern recognition, trend analysis, cross-disciplinary synthesis, and the ability to see connections others miss. It took years to develop these skills. They were rare, valuable, and in demand.

Now, in 2025, I can ask Claude or ChatGPT to analyze emerging trends, identify patterns across disparate domains, and generate plausible future scenarios—and get sophisticated answers in seconds rather than the weeks it would take me to research and synthesize the same information.

This isn’t just humbling. It’s existential. If AI can do in seconds what took me decades to learn, what’s the value of being a futurist anymore?

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: I’m not alone. Almost every knowledge profession is facing the same reckoning.

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The Vitalists: How Gen Z Women Decided to Populate the Universe

November 8, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In 2031, Ashley Willows announced on social media that she was pregnant with her fourth child. She was 26, unmarried, and had no intention of ever getting married. Her three older children—ages 5, 3, and 18 months—were being raised primarily by AI-powered robotic caregivers in a communal housing complex in Austin specifically designed for women like her.

“I’m not a welfare mom,” she told the reporter interviewing her. “I’m a Vitalist. My job is to populate the universe, and I’m damn good at it.”

The Vitalists are the most unexpected social movement of the 2030s, and they’re rewriting everything we thought we knew about family, work, gender roles, and the future of civilization itself.

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The Evolution of Robots: When the Lines Between Human and Machine Disappear Completely

November 8, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

We’re approaching a threshold that will fundamentally change what it means to be human. Not because robots are becoming more human-like—though they are—but because humans are becoming more machine-like, and the distinction between the two is evaporating faster than anyone predicted.

When I first wrote about the blurring lines between people and machines, humanoid robots were clumsy prototypes and brain-computer interfaces were experimental medical devices. That was then. Now we’re watching those lines dissolve in real-time, and the implications are staggering.

AI, Blockchain, future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

The Invisible Crisis: Why AI Interoperability Will Define the Next Decade

November 8, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

We’re building the future one incompatible system at a time, and nobody seems to notice we’re heading for disaster.

Right now, across the world, brilliant engineers are creating autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, warehouse robots, surgical robots, agricultural drones, and thousands of other AI-powered systems. Each one is remarkable. Each one represents years of innovation. And almost none of them can talk to each other.

This is the interoperability crisis, and it’s about to become the defining challenge of the AI era.

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The Megaproject Explosion: Why AI and Robotics Will Enable Humanity’s Grandest Ambitions

November 7, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Something remarkable is happening to human ambition. For the first time in history, we’re approaching a moment where the limiting factor on what we can accomplish isn’t capability—it’s imagination.

Over the coming years, AI and robotics, along with other exponential technologies, will enable a single person to accomplish more during their lifetime than entire civilizations could achieve a century ago. And as individual capability explodes, our collective sights are shifting toward megaprojects—huge, massive, grandiose undertakings that would have seemed impossible just years ago.

The numbers tell the story. In my original analysis, I predicted megaprojects would reach 24% of global GDP within a decade. That was before generative AI, before humanoid robots reached commercial viability, before we fully understood how rapidly these technologies would compound. Now? That estimate looks conservative.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

25 Shocking Predictions About the Coming Driverless Car Era (Revised for 2025)

November 7, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

I’ll admit it: I got some things wrong about autonomous vehicles.

Back when I made my original predictions about the driverless car era, I was too optimistic about timelines and too conservative about what would actually change. I thought we’d have fully autonomous vehicles everywhere by 2020. I underestimated regulatory resistance. I didn’t anticipate how COVID would reshape urban transportation priorities.

But I also got some things right—and more importantly, I’ve learned what questions to ask differently. So here’s my revised take on 25 shocking predictions for the driverless car era, updated with what we’ve learned and what’s actually coming.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

Beyond Unanswerable Questions: What Stumps the World When AI Can Answer Anything?

November 6, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

For years, I’ve been known as the “unanswerable questions guy”—the person who asks questions that make people pause, scratch their heads, and admit they genuinely don’t know.

I’ve asked questions like “What comes after the Internet?” and “How many galaxies will humans eventually colonize?” Questions that neither science nor religion could definitively answer. Questions about managing systems that don’t exist yet, about unintended consequences we can’t foresee, about futures we can barely imagine.

But something fundamental has shifted. With AI, there are no questions that AI cannot answer. Some answers are speculative, some are wrong, some are poorly reasoned—but there are no “I don’t knows.” Ask an AI anything, and it will give you something.

So what’s the equivalent moving forward? What stumps the world when machines can generate plausible responses to anything we throw at them?

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The Island That Became The Home of the Global Privacy Council

November 6, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The delegation from Indonesia touched down at Singapore Changi Airport at dawn, then caught the thirty-minute ferry to Meridian Island. Director Jordan James was there at the dock to greet them personally—not because protocol demanded it, though it did, but because every visiting delegation still seemed surprised that “Privacy Island” was real.

A functioning microstate of 47,000 people, just twenty miles off the Singapore coast. Recognized by 156 countries. Home to the Global Privacy Council, the AI Governance Authority, and the International Data Rights Tribunal. An island that had somehow become the world’s operating system for managing technologies too complex for any single nation to regulate alone.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

The Great Unraveling: When Three Generations Decide to Burn It All Down

November 6, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Harper James sat across from her mother at Thanksgiving 2034, and for the first time in years, they weren’t arguing about politics or money or whose generation had it worse.

They were planning which system to dismantle next.

Harper’s Gen Z cohort had already kneecapped the prison industrial complex with Ward the Warden. They’d begun the great banking exodus, routing around traditional finance entirely. They’d started rebuilding healthcare from scratch. Now her Gen X mother and Millennial brother were joining the fight—not as allies of convenience, but as co-conspirators who’d finally admitted they’d been screwed by the same con.

The American Dream, they agreed, had been the greatest rug pull in history. And they were done pretending otherwise.

AI, Banking, Crypto Currency, future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

The Great Banking Exodus: How Gen Z Is Making Traditional Finance Obsolete

November 5, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Harper James got her first overdraft fee at nineteen—$35 for being $2.47 short on her checking account. The coffee she bought for $4.50 ended up costing her $39.97. When she called the bank to protest, they explained it was “policy” with the sympathy of a recorded message.

That was 2019. By 2029, Harper hadn’t stepped inside a bank in a decade. And she wasn’t alone.

Gen Z had successfully dismantled parts of the prison industrial complex with Ward the Warden. They’d begun revolutionizing healthcare with optimization protocols. Now they were turning their attention to an industry that had either raped them with fees and interest or systematically excluded them from financial opportunity altogether.

Their target: the entire traditional banking system. Their strategy: make it irrelevant.