A Futurist on our Future

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Jared Lindzon – Mining asteroids, an activity that could produce the world’s first trillionaire by 2030. 3D-printed cruises ships and hospitals. But no more taxi drivers, firefighters and (gulp) journalists. Indeed, the future of the world according to Thomas Frey is not quite what you might expect.

Frey is executive director and “senior futurist” at the DaVinci Institute, a 17-year-old think tank where he gathers a group of high-profile intellectuals for deep conversations about tomorrow. And we mean high profile: regular contributors to these “mastermind groups” include nearly every sitting governor of Colorado (the think tank’s home state), CEOs like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, the commissioner of the U.S. patent office, university presidents and science fiction authors like David Brin.

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The Coming Era of Mega Systems, Part 1 – Transportation

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Futurist Thomas Frey – Let me begin with a couple questions.

Question #1: The U.S. has two countries that touch its borders – Canada and Mexico. But what is its third closest neighbor?

While most would probably look at the island nations in the Caribbean, the third closest is actually Russia, a scant 2.4 miles away, the distance between Alaska’s Little Diomede Island and it’s sister Big Diomede Island on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. During the winter an ice bridge usually forms between the two islands and a person can actually walk from the U.S. to Russia.

Question #2: Is it possible to drive a car from North America to South America?

The answer to this question is “no,” because plans for the highly publicized Pan-American Highway were never completed, leaving a 60 mile gap across a dense jungle region, known as the Darian Gap, between Panama and neighboring Columbia.

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Will big data change the music industry?

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Future music monetization remains a mystery

 – Where will the big money be in the music industry in the future? The topic of royalty payouts from streaming services comes up every year. The arguments remain the same, yet no progress has been made.

Industry leaders continue to focus on streaming royalties as the only future of artists’ revenue. As of yet, the fate of music monetization remains undecided. Some argue the goal is — and always will be — to simply get artists’ music in the ears of consumers. Others seek to continue getting consumers to pay for music. Still, it’s unlikely that subscription models will be the only answer to how music creators, both signed and independent, get compensated for their art in a sustainable way.

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The First Lady of Graphene

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The birthplace of graphene – the one-atom-thick carbon – is Manchester University, where it was created by two physicists. But Cambridge could become the adopted home of the so-called wonder-material.

A vast new facility that can make up to five tons of the ultra-valuable black dust each year is being built in the city and is due to open in 2015.

Cambridge Nanosystems, a university spin-out, led by chief scientist Catharina Paukner, 30, has built the factory with the help of a £500,000 grant from the Technology Strategy Board.

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Flexibility is critical for young people because ‘whole careers are vanishing overnight’

2012 College of Medicine Graduation

Recent college grads

As the digital sector grows, jobs that rely on older technologies are rapidly becoming obsolete.

According to the census, between 2006 and 2011 there were some occupations where the number of people employed across the country dropped by up to two-thirds in just five years – corporate services managers, for example, fell from 21,804 in 2006 to 7365 in 2011.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1966, 46% of workers in Australia were employed in production industries. 30 years later, that proportion has diminished to 28%.

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Iowa is Creating the Digital Drivers License for Smart Phones

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Iowa residents may become the first in the U.S. to use a smartphone mobile app as their driver’s license.

The Iowa Department of Transportation wants to let drivers keep an electronic version of a license on an app, in addition (or in lieu of) the traditional plastic one you’d keep in a wallet.

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FAA Drags Feet on Drone Rulings

Many new drones are now making their debut – Image by media.salon.com

In August, the Federal Aviation Administration missed a key deadline for developing rules for small commercial drones. That failure has infuriated businesses that want to test and use drones for delivering goods, monitoring crops and doing other awesome things. Some have even threatened to move their drone research overseas if they can’t get permission to operate in the United States.
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Facebook is the most Complained about Brand

Facebook Study

We complain 879 million times/year (and Facebook is our top target)

We complain about brands an astonishing 879 million times a year on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media networks. A full 10 percent of us find something to be angry about publicly every single day.

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Sneak Peek: George Lucas’ Future Museum

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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.

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Exploring the Future of Jobs and Education

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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?

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.