Futurist Thomas Frey: My wife Deb and I just returned from a weeklong trip to South Korea where much of our travel inside the country involved riding on the high-speed KTX Train (Korean Transit eXpress) from city to city.
Continue reading… “The Great Barrier Backlash”
Created by Best Computer Science Degrees has just created the “Understanding The Internet Of Things: Towards A Smart Planet” infographic that breaks down the technological development of networked appliances into a digestible format. (Infographic)
Continue reading… “The Internet of Things brief history (Infographic)”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Throughout history, speed has been synonymous with greatness. In sports, those who ran the fastest were heroes. In times of war, those with the fastest chariots, ships, planes, and weapons had a significant advantage. In the business world, a company’s competitive edge has typically been formed around speed – quickest delivery, fastest transaction times, or speed of information.
Continue reading… “The Next Bold Step in Transportation: Personal Rapid Transit Systems”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Yesterday my wife Deb and I had lunch at one of our favorite Chinese restaurants, and afterwards we’re given the typical fortune cookies that come with the bill. Jokingly I broke open the first one and asked, “I wonder if it’d be possible to create a real fortune sometime in the future and put it into these cookies?”
Continue reading… “Passing the Fortune Cookie Test”
Futurist Thomas Frey: I’ve always loved ideas and I think it stems from the fact that I’ve had so many to choose from. But it wasn’t about the sheer number of ideas I got to play with. Rather it was finding that one truly remarkable gem, the golden epiphany, hiding in amongst the others.
Continue reading… “A Journey into the Land of Epiphany”
Arthur C. Clarke predicted the iPad and online newspapers in 1968.
Arthur C. Clarke declared in 1964, “trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation,” and yet he got it astoundingly right in his own predictions, including his 1968 vision for the iPad. Isaac Asimov predicted online education, Douglas Adams predicted ebooks, Ray Bradbury predicted that we would reach Mars (though, so far, we’ve only done so with robotic extensions of ourselves), and Jules Verne envisioned the hi-tech Nautilus “at a time when even a can-opener [was] considered an exciting new concept.” In fact, science-fiction authors have a formidable track record of predicting the future — but why? (Video)
Continue reading… “Science fiction writers are really good at predicting the future”
Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language in 1995
Have you ever wondered how computers got started and where programming languages came from?
In the beginning, Charles Babbage’s difference engine could only be made to execute tasks by changing the gears which executed the calculations. Thus, the earliest form of a computer language was physical motion. Eventually, physical motion was replaced by electrical signals when the US Government built the ENIAC in 1942. It followed many of the same principles of Babbage’s engine and hence, could only be “programmed” by presetting switches and rewiring the entire system for each new “program” or calculation. This process proved to be very tedious. (Photos)
Continue reading… “The history of programming languages”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Many of us suffer from a sinister and often contagious disorder, something I call just-in-case disease.
We own toolboxes full of tools, just in case we need to fix something. We have kitchens full of appliances just in case we want to prepare a meal. We have cars in our garages just in case we need to go somewhere. We even have closets full of clothes we know we’ll never wear just in case we get desperate.
Amelia Earhart – 1st Woman to Cross the Atlantic.
Futurist Thomas Frey, wrote a very interesting article about a year and a half ago titled 56 Future Accomplishments: Waiting for Someone to go First. It was a fascinating piece on some of the “firsts” that have occurred, such as:
Continue reading… “What will be the ‘firsts’ in HR?”
Futurist Thomas Frey: “2014 will be the year the ’quantified self’ goes mainstream.” Those were the words Silicon Valley prodigy Marc Andreessen used in a recent article to describe changes about to happen to American healthcare.
Continue reading… “Eight Reason Why Future Computers will make better Decisions than Doctors”
On November 7, 2014, I attended the “Idea Jam – Innovating for the Future” session put on by the Pacific Center for Workforce Innovation in San Diego. The purpose of the session was to identify the major challenges to the San Diego workforce in the coming years and to generate audience participation in visioning exercises to explore new and innovative workforce development ideas. The event was held at Colman University, and major sponsors were SDG&E, Qualcomm, the Eastridge Group, Point Loma Nazarene College, and Cal State University, San Marcos.
To get our creative juices flowing, Master of Ceremonies Susan Taylor, San Diego’s TV news icon, introduced futurist speaker, Thomas Frey, of the DaVinci Institute as the keynote speaker. It is difficult to do justice to his very visual presentation of images of break-through technologies, but his statements alone created much food for thought about the future. He stated, “We are a backward-looking society…the future gets created in the mind. The future creates the present…Visions of the future affect the way people act today.” He rhetorically asked, “What are the big things that need to be accomplished today?
Continue reading… “Exploring the Future of Jobs and Education”
Futurist Thomas Frey: 2013 has been a year of considerable change for both me and the rest of our team at the DaVinci Institute. While most of what you see here on Futurist Speaker is about my research, thinking, and philosophy on the future, I thought this might be a good time to step back and fill you in on the people behind everything you’re reading.
Continue reading… “Top 13 ‘Futurist Speaker’ Columns in 2013”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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