New Viewpoints – Impact Lab

New Viewpoints, People Making a Difference

Oh, The Robots You’ll Meet! A Dr. Seuss Vision of Tomorrow

December 8, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

A Creative Epiphany on Mt. Soledad

My wife and I recently spent a few days in La Jolla, California, exploring the stunning coastline and wandering through neighborhoods that once inspired some of America’s most imaginative minds. Nearby sits Mt. Soledad, where Dr. Seuss—Theodor Geisel himself—lived and created his whimsical worlds of Whos and Things and impossible creatures doing impossible things.

Standing there, looking out at the Pacific Ocean with the creative energy of that place washing over me, I found myself thinking: How would Dr. Seuss describe the transition we’re living through right now? The arrival of AI, robots, drones, and driverless cars isn’t science fiction anymore—it’s our daily reality, arriving faster than most people can process. We need a way to talk about this transformation that captures both the wonder and the strangeness, the opportunity and the adjustment. And what better voice than the man who taught generations of children that change, however peculiar, can be an adventure?

So here, inspired by the creative spirit of La Jolla and Mt. Soledad, is how I imagine Dr. Seuss might help us understand the magnificent, bewildering, robotic future we’re building together.

New Viewpoints

The Two Products That Prove We’ve Lost Our Minds: A Personal Rant

December 4, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

When Good Ideas Meet Incompetent Implementation

I spend my professional life analyzing breakthrough technologies, envisioning elegant futures, and mapping pathways to better tomorrows. But some days I just want to ban two products from planet Earth: smoke detectors and public restroom toilet paper dispensers. Not the concepts—the implementations. Because both represent catastrophic failures of design thinking that have somehow become accepted as normal despite making millions of people miserable every single day.

Let’s start with smoke detectors, because I guarantee you’re reading this at 2 AM after being jolted awake by that soul-destroying chirp indicating low battery. Not a helpful notification at a convenient time—a piercing beep in the dead of night that requires stumbling through darkness, finding a step ladder, and reaching a ceiling-mounted device specifically positioned to be as inaccessible as possible.

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.

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, 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.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, New Inventions, New Viewpoints

The Tournament Center: Reimagining Public Recreation for the Competition Age

October 28, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

On the edge of a midsize American city, a massive new building gleams under the morning sun—half sports complex, half digital command center. Inside, you can hear sneakers squeaking on hardwood, drone motors whirring overhead, and the steady hum of gaming PCs running tournaments livestreamed to audiences worldwide. The crowd is wonderfully diverse: teenagers adjusting VR headsets, seniors playing pickleball, parents cheering from bleachers. This isn’t your grandfather’s rec center. It’s the prototype for something entirely new: the Municipal Tournament Center.

AI, future predictions, future report, future scenario, New Viewpoints

When AI Becomes the Clerk: Rethinking America’s 91,000 Forms of Government

October 26, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In a small Iowa town, Mayor Diane Carson starts her day not with a call to her city clerk, but with a login. Overnight, her digital deputy—ClerkAI—has already processed every permit, updated utility usage, flagged budget discrepancies, and even drafted the agenda for the next council meeting. It greets her with a summary of public sentiment scraped from social media and a list of policy options, complete with citations. At first, she thought it was magic. Now, she wonders whether she’s still the one running the town.

That’s the quiet revolution now brewing across America—a country with more than 91,000 distinct governments, each operating as a miniature bureaucracy, each clinging to its own systems, codes, and data silos. Counties, cities, townships, school boards, water districts—each with its own clerks, auditors, and administrators. It’s governance by duplication, built for a time when geography demanded separation. But AI, indifferent to borders and infinitely scalable, threatens to collapse that patchwork into a seamless web of digital administration.

New Discoveries, New Inventions, New Viewpoints

The Dream of SABRE: The Engine That Could Fly to Space

October 25, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In the late 20th century, a bold dream took hold of aerospace engineers—a single engine that could take off like a jet, soar through the atmosphere, and then ignite itself into orbit like a rocket. That dream had a name: SABRE, short for Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine. For a time, it seemed destined to change everything we thought we knew about flight. SABRE promised to merge two entirely different propulsion systems into one seamless process, creating a new class of vehicle that could turn the impossible into the inevitable.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future trends, Latest News, New Viewpoints

The Death of the College Degree: How the Credential Economy Is Being Rebuilt

October 23, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

For more than a century, “Go to college, get a great job” was the mantra of the American dream. But that equation has broken down. The four-year degree—the once-sacred passport to success—is rapidly losing both its value and its credibility. Higher education is not just in a slump; it’s in free fall. The numbers tell the story. In just 15 years, the share of Americans calling college “very important” has crashed from 75% to 35%, while those calling it “not too important” have quintupled to 24%.

Tuition has soared an astonishing 899% since 1983, leaving 42 million borrowers owing a collective $1.8 trillion—second only to mortgages. Meanwhile, one-third of the long-term unemployed now hold college degrees, up from one-fifth a decade ago, and job postings requiring degrees have dropped 6% since 2019. You’re paying a quarter of a million dollars for a private education that increasingly guarantees nothing. The credential that once opened doors is now closing them.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, New Discoveries, New Inventions, new technology, New Viewpoints

10 AI Businesses You Can Start This Week

October 22, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The window of opportunity for artificial intelligence entrepreneurship is wide open. While most people are waiting for the right time, others are already turning simple ideas into six- and seven-figure ventures using off-the-shelf tools that cost less than a monthly phone bill. These businesses don’t require coding, venture capital, or a large team—just initiative, curiosity, and consistent execution.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, future report, future scenario, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

The Irreplaceable Human: What AI Can Never Replicate

October 16, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

For centuries, every wave of automation has promised to free humans from labor. But artificial intelligence doesn’t just threaten to automate work—it challenges our understanding of what it means to be human. AI can already outperform us in memory, pattern recognition, optimization, translation, and reasoning under uncertainty. It learns faster, scales infinitely, and never tires. Yet beneath all that capability lies an unbridgeable chasm—AI’s fundamental lack of consciousness, embodiment, mortality, and meaning. These are not design flaws. They are what separate intelligence from existence.

The next two decades will not be defined by whether AI can replace us, but by how we define what it cannot. We stand at the threshold of a civilization where machines think, but do not feel. Where algorithms can simulate love, empathy, or fear, but never experience them. In a world dominated by synthetic intelligence, the rarest resource will not be more processing power—it will be genuine humanity.