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The World’s First Flying Car Race Just Happened (And Changed Everything)

December 31, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The Moment Personal Aviation Became Sport

Four electric vertical take-off aircraft screaming through a pylon course in formation flight. Pilots banking hard around checkpoints. The crowd roaring as Jetson’s founder Tomasz Patan pulls a solo aerial display that looks like something from a science fiction movie. This wasn’t a concept demonstration or computer simulation—it was the world’s first competitive flying car race, held at UP.Summit 2025, and it marks the exact moment personal aviation stopped being experimental technology and became legitimate sport.

The “Jetson Air Games” concept unveiled at UP.Summit represents more than clever marketing for Jetson’s ONE personal electric aircraft. It’s the declaration that we’ve crossed a threshold: the technology works reliably enough, the pilots are skilled enough, and the aircraft are safe enough to race competitively. And once you can race something, once you can turn it into spectacle and competition, mass adoption accelerates exponentially.

Let me walk you through why this demonstration matters far beyond the impressive aerial acrobatics, and what it signals about the timeline for personal aviation becoming accessible reality rather than futuristic fantasy.

Great New Product, Latest News, New Inventions, new technology, New Viewpoints

CES 2026: The Year Robots Finally Leave the Lab and Enter Your Kitchen

December 30, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The Conversation Everyone Will Be Having

Walk the CES 2026 floor in Las Vegas this January and you’ll witness something remarkable: robots that actually do your laundry. Displays running at 720Hz—faster than human eyes can perceive. AI so deeply embedded in everyday devices it becomes invisible infrastructure rather than feature to market. But one exhibit will dominate every conversation, every social media feed, every “you have to see this” moment: LG’s CLOiD robot with human-like articulated arms performing actual household chores.

This isn’t another cute rolling assistant that plays music and tells jokes. This is a machine that folds your clothes, loads your dishwasher, and handles the mundane physical tasks that consume hours of your life. And it represents something bigger than one company’s product—it’s the moment home robotics crosses from novelty to necessity.

Let me walk you through the standout technologies that will define CES 2026 and why this year marks the inflection point where consumer tech stops being about screens and starts being about systems that think, see, and act autonomously in physical space.

future report, future tech, Latest News, new technology

2025: The Year Systems Started Running Themselves

December 12, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

When the Future Stopped Being Tomorrow

2025 will be remembered as the year the future finally felt like it arrived. Not with a single breakthrough or dramatic announcement, but with dozens of overlapping inflection points reshaping our expectations for work, health, money, cities, and civilization itself.

For decades we imagined a world filled with autonomous tools, intelligent machines, and self-improving systems. In 2025, those ideas stopped being science fiction and quietly embedded themselves into daily life. The theme of the year was unmistakable: systems began running themselves.

This wasn’t gradual evolution—it was convergence. Technologies that seemed years away reached commercial viability almost simultaneously, creating compound effects that individually they could never achieve. Here’s my review of the most consequential shifts that defined 2025 and what they signal about the decade ahead.

Latest News, New Discoveries, People Making a Difference

The Year Everything Changed: 2025’s 13 Tech Breakthroughs That Rewrote Reality

December 9, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

When Science Fiction Became Tuesday Afternoon

2025 wasn’t just another year of incremental tech improvements. It was the year AI agents started working autonomously, robots learned by watching, and machines began managing their own money. It was the year gene editing moved from labs to clinics, batteries finally broke their improvement plateau, and brain-computer interfaces crossed from experiments to everyday applications.

Most importantly, 2025 was the year we stopped talking about the future and started living in it. The technologies we’ve been predicting for years didn’t arrive gradually—they hit commercial viability almost simultaneously, creating a convergence that’s reshaping every industry faster than institutions can adapt.

Here are the 13 accomplishments that made 2025 the inflection point where everything changed.

Latest News, New Inventions, new technology

The Rainbow Chip: How One Laser Becomes Many Colors Without Trying

November 19, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute just solved one of photonics’ most frustrating problems: they’ve designed and tested new chips that reliably convert one color of light into a trio of hues, and remarkably, the chips all work without any active inputs or painstaking optimization.

This might sound like an incremental improvement—better lasers, more colors, so what? But it’s actually revolutionary. These chips take a single invisible telecom laser and passively transform it into red, green, and blue light automatically, with no tuning, no adjustment, and no delicate calibration. And that changes everything about how we build quantum computers, ultra-precise atomic clocks, optical communication systems, and photonic processors.

future predictions, future scenario, Latest News, New Viewpoints

Search Is Broken: The Chaotic Transition from Links to AI Answers by 2040

November 16, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Search is dying. Not dramatically—gradually, messily, in ways that make finding information simultaneously easier and harder than it was five years ago.

Traditional search doesn’t work like it used to. Google’s AI Overview appears on top of search results with AI-generated summaries that have been found guilty of bias, hallucinated facts, and misquoted sources. The blue links you click are increasingly buried beneath AI-generated answers that may or may not be accurate. Google’s AI Overviews reduced organic click-through rates by an estimated 20-40%, meaning the websites that used to get traffic from search are starving while Google feeds you AI-summarized information without sending you anywhere.

AI search works better for some things—ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question and you get direct answers instead of links. But it’s early, unreliable, and breaking the internet’s economic model in ways we haven’t figured out how to fix.

By 2040, search as we knew it will be unrecognizable. But the transition between now and then will be chaotic, economically destructive, and fundamentally change how information flows online.

Latest News, New Inventions, new technology, Robotics, Robots

Beyond Human: When Robot Eyes See Better and Bodies Become Upgradeable

November 15, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology have created a robotic eye that sees better than human eyes. Not just “pretty good” or “comparable”—actually superior. It can detect details as small as hair on an ant’s leg, focus instantly without mechanical parts, and operates without external power. It’s made from squishy hydrogel, requires no batteries, and changes focus by responding directly to light.

This isn’t incremental improvement. It’s a fundamental demonstration that biological human components can be exceeded by engineered alternatives. And once you’ve proven that principle with eyes, a profound question emerges: What other parts of our body can be radically improved?

The answer is: almost everything. We’re approaching an era where “human” becomes the baseline, not the ceiling. Where biological limitations become choices rather than constraints. Where upgrading your body becomes as normal as upgrading your phone.

And it’s coming faster than most people realize.

Latest News, New Inventions, new technology

Submarine Medicine: Steering Microscopic Robots Through Your Bloodstream to Fight Disease

November 14, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Imagine this: You’re having a stroke. Instead of flooding your entire body with massive doses of clot-busting drugs—which could cause dangerous internal bleeding—doctors inject a microscopic robot smaller than a grain of sand into your bloodstream. Using external magnets, they steer it through your arteries like a tiny submarine, navigating precisely to the blood clot blocking oxygen to your brain. Once there, it releases its medication payload directly at the blockage, dissolving the clot with minimal side effects.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s happening now. Researchers at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich have developed magnetically-guided microrobots that successfully navigate through blood vessels, delivering medication with unprecedented precision. In 95% of test scenarios using pigs, these tiny devices reached their intended destinations, demonstrating that the era of medical microrobots has arrived.

This represents a fundamental shift in how we think about medicine—from systemic treatments affecting the entire body to targeted interventions at cellular and molecular scales. And stroke treatment is just the beginning.

Housing, Latest News, New Viewpoints

The Housing Crisis: How We Got Here and What Comes Next

November 13, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Housing has become the defining economic battleground of our era. A Gen Z worker in San Francisco needs to earn $200,000 annually to afford a median-priced home. In Sydney, Toronto, London, and dozens of other cities, home ownership has transformed from middle-class expectation to luxury reserved for the wealthy or those with family money.

This isn’t a temporary market fluctuation. It’s a structural crisis decades in the making, accelerated by technology, exacerbated by policy failures, and threatening the social contract that promised each generation could achieve what their parents had.

Understanding how we arrived here—and how we escape—requires examining who’s at fault and what solutions might actually work. The answer is more complex and more solvable than most coverage suggests.

Latest News, new technology, New Viewpoints

Memorial Gardens: Creating Living Sanctuaries of Remembrance and Community

November 13, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Death is universal, but how we remember the dead is rapidly evolving. Traditional cemeteries—static rows of headstones requiring perpetual maintenance—are giving way to something more alive, more interactive, and more meaningful: memorial gardens that combine nature, technology, and community into spaces that honor the past while serving the living.

By 2040, memorial gardens will have transformed from simple graveyards into sophisticated living sanctuaries where AI systems maintain ecological balance, robots handle physical labor, and communities gather to remember, celebrate, and find solace in spaces that grow more beautiful and meaningful over time rather than deteriorating.

This isn’t just about better cemeteries. It’s about reimagining how we honor memory, create community spaces, and integrate technology with nature in ways that serve both ecological and emotional needs.

future report, future tech, Latest News, New Inventions, People Making a Difference

America’s Secret Weapon: Permissionless Innovation

November 12, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

There’s a reason Silicon Valley happened in America and not Brussels. A reason SpaceX launches rockets while European equivalents remain grounded in regulatory review. A reason generative AI emerged from American garages and labs rather than through government-planned initiatives elsewhere.

The secret isn’t better universities, more capital, or smarter people. It’s a principle so deeply embedded in American culture that we barely notice it: permissionless innovation. The radical idea that you don’t need anyone’s approval to try something new.

This isn’t just policy—it’s America’s civilizational advantage. And in an era where AI, biotechnology, and space exploration are reshaping human capability, the nations that embrace permissionless innovation will lead, while those demanding permission before progress will fall hopelessly behind.

Future, future trends, Latest News, New Viewpoints

The 8 Most Important Quotes About the Future Made in 2025

November 2, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Every year produces thousands of predictions, pronouncements, and prognostications about what’s coming next. Most fade into obscurity. But a handful of quotes capture something essential—a turning point, a warning unheeded, or a vision that shapes how we think about tomorrow.

2025 gave us several such moments. These eight quotes—from tech leaders, scientists, policymakers, and unexpected voices—defined how we talked about the future this year. Some will age well. Others will look foolish in hindsight. All of them mattered in the moment and revealed something important about where we think we’re headed.