Isolated, the words all sound so cliché. Organic. Flowing. Curvy. But set to the backdrop of Chicago’s blocky skyline, they assemble a brash thesis on the city’s future: The new George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a low-slung knoll inside a landscape of towering Lego, an Egyptian pyramid reimagined for the year 2020.
Toronto’s Illan Kramer, Inventor of Spray-on Solar
Illan Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Center has invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using minuscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)—a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.
“My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof,” says Kramer.
Futurist Thomas Frey: I’ve been closely watching the debate on artificial intelligence with people like Rodney Brooks saying it’s only a tool, and others like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking giving bone chilling warnings of how it could lead to the destruction of all humanity.
Futurist Thomas Frey
Thomas Frey, executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute estimates that billions of jobs will disappear in the next 15 years due to the Internet of Things (IoT) and many associated technological advances, but these extreme and accelerating changes will also create many new industries and countless new jobs to replace those they’ve eliminated.
Continue reading… “The technology-driven future will bring upheaval and opportunity”
Evacuated Tube Transport Technology
Evacuated Tube Transport Technology is magnetically levitated capsules in vacuum tubes. Propulsion energy required is 100,000 times less than required by a car. ET3 will achieve 50 times more transportation per kWh (or ton of CO2) than electric cars or trains. The cost is ten times less. They calculate they can build an ET3 system for about $7 million per mile. (Videos)
Continue reading… “Evacuated Tube Transport Technology (ET3) is 50 times more efficient than rail”
Futurist Thomas Frey: A few weeks ago I got into a discussion with some friends centered around this question. “What, in your mind, will be the most powerful entity in the world 100 years from now?”
Continue reading… “What Industries will produce the First Trillionaires?”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Business owners today are actively deciding whether their next hire should be a person or a machine. After all, machines can work in the dark and don’t come with decades of HR case law requiring time off for holidays, personal illness, excessive overtime, chronic stress or anxiety.
Futurist Thomas Frey: Whatever happened to that young child you were not so many years ago?
As a baby, life was all about eating, sleeping, and dry diapers. Even though you are learning new things quickly, not much else really mattered.
Continue reading… “You will be a different person by the time you reach the end of this article”
Futurist Thomas Frey speaking at Steamboat’s 20th Economic Summit.
Futurist Thomas Frey took an audience of Steamboat Springs business leaders last week into a future where 3-D printers are printing clothes and food, cars no longer need drivers and drones deliver packages.
Continue reading… “New technologies will be key for job growth: Futurist Thomas Frey”
Library designed by architectural firm Snøhetta.
Shaunacy Ferro: Hanging out at the library might just become cool as Calgary, Canada has plans to build a new lending library. The library will be designed by Snøhetta, an architecture firm. The library will have a 240,000-square-foot center and will be more than just a repository for plastic-protected books. Twice as large as Calgary’s existing public library, it’s designed to be both a circulating public library and a community gathering space, a combination bookstore/computer lab/cafe/event space/social hub that provides a pathway between two disconnected neighborhoods. (Photos)
Continue reading… “Calgary’s Snøhetta-designed public library will be the Apple Store of libraries”
Futurist Thomas Frey: I had great difficulty completing this column. This is partly due to the complex nature of the technology and partly because its implications may indeed be so far reaching that I’ll sound over-reaching in describing it.
Continue reading… “Computing’s Next Big Transformation – Semantic Intelligence”
NIBIB Bionic Man
The “NIBIB Bionic Man” is an interactive Web tool that showcases cutting-edge research in biotechnology that has recently been launched by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. The bionic man features 14 technologies currently being developed by NIBIB-supported researchers.
Continue reading… “Interactive Bionic Man features 14 novel biotechnologies”