What will intelligent machines mean for society and the economy in 30, 50 or even 100 years from now?
That’s the question that Stanford University scientists are hoping to take on with a new project, the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100).
Continue reading… “Stanford to Research the effects of Artificial Intelligence”
Over the past year we’ve delved into a variety of different topics on FuturistSpeaker.com and naturally some have been more popular than others. Sometimes it’s the headlines, other times the graphics, but in the end it’s the subject matter and content that will determine which ones rise to the top.
Overall, we’re still finding a pervasive fear over jobs, privacy, and the economy, and a strong desire to understand what comes next. Our confidence in government has plummeted and the newest evil villain is artificial intelligence gone awry.
On the positive side of the equation, both flying drones and robots are hot, even though both have serious downsides. The Internet of Things is gaining in popularity along with its magical junior categories of enchanted objects and smart homes. The sharing economy is becoming a more defined niche and tiny homes are an emerging category that will soon be replaced with 3D printed disposable houses.
Even though Bitcoin hasn’t been a good investment in 2014, it’s been a banner year for cryptocurrencies in general. No, we still haven’t minted any cryptocurrency billionaires just yet, but as national currencies become increasingly dysfunctional, with security holes affecting nearly everyone, new opportunities are just around the corner.
At the DaVinci Institute, our work on Micro Colleges are paving the way for future generations to reboot their careers quickly to better match the emerging talent needs of business and industry.
With that in mind, here are the 2014 columns that attracted the most attention over the past 12 months.
Continue reading… “Top 10 Most Influential Columns by Futurist Thomas Frey in 2014”
In the coming year, mobile will continue to strengthen its hold on the industry, smart data will outshine big data, and real-time marketing will become an achievable goal.
With just a few weeks left in 2014, it’s time for some of my annual digital marketing predictions for the upcoming year.
Continue reading… “Top 10 Trends in Digital Marketing”
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.
Continue reading… “FAA Drags Feet on Drone Rulings”
There’s a stereotype that left-handed people are clumsier, but that might have something to do with the fact that they live in a world of objects optimized for the right-handed: scissors, the computer mouse, surgical tools, and guns, to name a few. The discrimination against the 12 percent of the population who are lefties has disarming historical roots. In the Middle Ages, left-handed writers were said to be the devil’s voice boxes, and the Jewish scholar Maimonides included sinistrality in his list of 100 imperfections that should preclude someone from priesthood.
Continue reading… “Why Left-handed People Make Less Money”
How long will it be before we see the first worker fired by a robot manager?
It is rather significant that economists are shifting their belief. Up until now, economists have believed that new jobs will replace lost jobs. Now the numbers suggest that is changing for the first time in history, and the trend is accelerating.
It’s also interesting to note the term, second economy. Defined as transactions between computers. That is measurable. It can be compared to the first economy. When the second passes the first, people matter less, in real numbers.
Continue reading… “What changes should we expect when robots replace workers?”
The International Energy Agency has come out with an in-depth analysis of Africa’s energy sector. According to the IEA report, there are 620 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who don’t have any electricity at all — and fixing that could require burning a lot more fossil fuels.
Continue reading… “Here’s where 620 million people in Africa live without electricity”
Does a greater number of years in school mean more learning?
When you compare education systems around the world to see what’s working and what isn’t, one of the metrics we often see is ‘school life expectancy.’ This is known as how many years students go to school. We most often assume that students go to school for at least 13 years (K-12), plus “some” college or post high school education in the U.S. In schools in developing countries, we hear about children who can’t go to school past a young age (sometimes around 8 years old) because they need to make money for their family’s survival, because they don’t have the opportunity to do so, because of their gender, or because it would be dangerous or prohibitively expensive to do so.
Continue reading… “How much time do students spend in classrooms worldwide?”
The guidelines state that “the general policy of the U.S. Government is to neither confirm nor deny an individual’s watchlist status.
There has been a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system and it has been quietly approved by the Obama administration. It authorizes a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.
Continue reading… “The U.S. government’s secret rulebook for labeling you a terrorist”
The origin of the phrase “You get what you pay for” – the origin of that phrase is sometimes attributed to the fashion mogul Aldo Gucci, who said, “The bitterness of low quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded.” But Americans get neither quality nor affordability when it comes to healthcare.
San Francisco is in the top 10 of most expensive counties.
A report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows how much a worker would have to earn to afford what the Department of Housing and Urban Development considers “fair market rent” in local communities across the country. The government sets these housing rates, which include rent plus utilities, based on the local market for decent-quality apartments of different sizes — neither dumps nor luxury flats. These are also the rates that HUD uses to establish local housing subsidies.
Mobile viewership will double by end of 2015.
TV isn’t just a box in the living room anymore, it also includes smartphones and tablets. A new report from video services company Ooyala provides more evidence of that trend. By analyzing viewing data from 200 million people, the Global Video Index report found mobile and tablet viewing increased 719% from 2011 to 2013. In 2013 alone, the share of videos watched on mobile phones increased by 10 times.
Continue reading… “Mobile video viewing increased 719% between 2011 and 2013: Ooyala”
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