Fast forward to 2024. Robots have not completely taken over but they and automation have definitely changed the landscape of work. This isn’t meant to be a crystal ball into our future world but rather an attempt to extend what we already see happening in work and the movement of these practices from the fringes of ‘innovative workplaces’ to the mainstream. Being a worker in this future world might look something like this…
The future consumer is a self-sustaining prosumer, a savvy maker/consumer empowered by their network and data.
Futurists help us envision what the far future will look like. Futurist Jeremy Rifkin’s recent book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet Of Things, The Collaborative Commons, And The Eclipse of Capitalism, is a robust 300-page work that crystallizes his thinking about the maturation of the sharing economy and the emergence of new Internets to manage energy and the transports-logistics infrastructure.
Continue reading… “What the consumer will look like in 2030”
Our visions of the future come in many different forms, but seeing real life images of what future life may actually look like can be very helpful.
SporoBot would increase the speed of production 20 – 30 times over.
What if you had developed a vaccine for malaria that, in early trials, was 100% effective. But you couldn’t get the funding you needed to produce enough of the vaccine to market it because of political wrangling over the budget. What would you do? (Video)
Continue reading… “Sanaria will use robots to mass produce a promising new malaria vaccine”
The data from Ericsson couldn’t be clearer: Go East if you want to sell a phone in the near future. The West is basically over as a growth market for phones. That’s because the U.S. and Europe is close to full penetration when it comes to high-end mobile devices.
Continue reading… “Asia will dominate the smartphone industry by 2019”
Futurist Thomas Frey: A few nights ago, I arrived at a very nice Radisson Blu Hotel in Minneapolis for my talk on the “hotel of the future.”
Continue reading… “Six Radical Trends Redefining the Hotel of the Future”
Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine
The Rotterdam-based tech firm The Archimedes has introduced its Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine, which is said to have an energy yield that is “80 percent of the maximum that is theoretically feasible.” That’s quite the assertion, given that most conventional wind turbines average around 25 to 50 percent. (Video)
The number of young Americans heading to college continues to increase where they are racking up debt to pay for rapidly increasing tuition costs.
Continue reading… “A third of 18- to -34 year olds in the U.S. live with their parents”
Brick-and-mortar retailers didn’t have a fighting chance these past few years to compete with the personalization and convenience provided by online shopping. By cultivating mountains of rich customer data, online retailers had the upper hand.
Continue reading… “The future of retail will blow your mind”
The National Alliance to End Homelessness sees the recent success as the “giant untold story of the homelessness world.”
Since 2005, there has been a 17 percent decline in homelessness because of a radical change in how states address homelessness. This trend has withstood financial panic, a foreclosure crisis, and the Great Recession.
Continue reading… “New thinking leads to a decline in homelessness”
The project is scoped to provide internet to areas around the world without wired connections.
Google plans to spend over $1 billion on a fleet of satellites that will be used to provide internet to parts of the world that currently lack digital connections, according to a report from Wall Street Journal.
Continue reading… “Google invests $1B on satellites to bring WiFi to the world”
Supernumerary Robotic Limbs
MIT creates robotic limbs that, when worn, give you more limbs than you’d normally have. The Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) are not designed to replace biological limbs that you might be missing, but rather robotic limbs designed to augment the number of limbs that you have already. (Videos)
Continue reading… “MIT creates wearable set of robotic arms to give a helping hand”