study – Impact Lab

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

When Forgetting Becomes Optional: The End of Human Memory by 2040

November 18, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

There’s a moment most of us know too well: standing in the kitchen, drawer half-open, completely blank on what you came for. Or that sickening realization that you forgot your mom’s birthday. Again.

By 2040, these moments won’t just be rare—they’ll feel quaintly obsolete, like missing a phone call because you were out of the house.

We’re approaching a peculiar threshold in human experience. For the first time in our species’ history, forgetting will become optional.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

Beyond Unanswerable Questions: What Stumps the World When AI Can Answer Anything?

November 6, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

For years, I’ve been known as the “unanswerable questions guy”—the person who asks questions that make people pause, scratch their heads, and admit they genuinely don’t know.

I’ve asked questions like “What comes after the Internet?” and “How many galaxies will humans eventually colonize?” Questions that neither science nor religion could definitively answer. Questions about managing systems that don’t exist yet, about unintended consequences we can’t foresee, about futures we can barely imagine.

But something fundamental has shifted. With AI, there are no questions that AI cannot answer. Some answers are speculative, some are wrong, some are poorly reasoned—but there are no “I don’t knows.” Ask an AI anything, and it will give you something.

So what’s the equivalent moving forward? What stumps the world when machines can generate plausible responses to anything we throw at them?

AI, future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

The Acceleration of Generations: Why Gen Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Will Rewrite Everything We Know

November 5, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

We’re entering an era where generations don’t just differ—they inhabit completely different realities. The gap between a Baby Boomer and Gen Z is vast, but it’s nothing compared to what’s coming. Technology isn’t just changing how generations communicate; it’s fundamentally altering how quickly they evolve, what they value, and how they see the world. Let me explain why understanding this matters more than ever.

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, future tech

When Robots Become Us: The Robot Turing Test Timeline

October 31, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

I’ve been thinking about an unsettling question: if a humanoid robot looked exactly like me, talked exactly like me, moved exactly like me, and showed up at my favorite coffee shop to order my usual drink—would the barista notice?

Not “could experts with sophisticated equipment detect the difference?” That’s a technical question with technical answers. I’m asking something more profound: in ordinary social situations, with ordinary people paying ordinary levels of attention, how long until robots can convincingly impersonate specific humans?

This is what I call the Robot Turing Test—not whether a machine can think, but whether it can be someone well enough that casual human observers can’t tell the difference. And the timeline might be shorter than you think.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

Our Urgent Need for Global Authorities

October 31, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In early 2025, the European Union fined Meta $1.3 billion for violating data privacy regulations while simultaneously allowing different content moderation standards across borders. The same week, TikTok faced bans in multiple countries over national security concerns, while X (formerly Twitter) battled governments over misinformation policies that varied wildly by jurisdiction. Meanwhile, deepfake videos of political leaders proliferated across platforms, with no coordinated response to determine authenticity or manage distribution.

The chaotic patchwork of regional regulations attempting to govern global platforms has reached a breaking point. What was manageable complexity in 2020 has become ungovernable chaos in 2025.

We urgently need global authorities for the digital age.

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.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

The Whole Earth Genealogy Project: Mapping Humanity’s Living Story

October 23, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Every person alive today carries within them an invisible library—the record of every life that came before. Yet for all our technological brilliance, humanity still can’t see itself as one continuous family. Genealogy remains fragmented, privatized, and incomplete. But that’s about to change. A project of global proportions—the Whole Earth Genealogy Project—could soon map every human connection stretching back thousands of years, creating the world’s first true biological atlas of humankind.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

The Rise of the Personal Education Streamer: Redefining Learning in the Digital Age

October 20, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Education is no longer confined to classrooms or course catalogs—it’s becoming a living, breathing spectacle. Imagine a world where the most captivating teachers aren’t professors or institutions, but passionate learners broadcasting their own study journeys in real time. These are personal education streamers—curious minds who turn their process of discovery into an interactive global classroom. In an era where information is everywhere but attention is scarce, this model could transform how billions learn, earn, and connect.

Science & Technology News

The Pill That Prints: How Internal Bioprinters Are Rewriting Medical Reality

October 18, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In 2025, a small capsule changed the course of medicine. Researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) unveiled a swallowable bioprinter—small enough to pass through the gastrointestinal tract, guided by external magnets and triggered by a near-infrared laser—to deposit living bio-ink directly onto internal tissue damage. They call it MEDS (Magnetic Endoluminal Deposition System). This device doesn’t just deliver medicine—it prints living scaffolds where the body is broken, redefining what “non-invasive” means.

We tend to view surgery, stents, pills or drug infusions as the high point of modern intervention. But what if the next frontier isn’t cutting or injecting—but printing inside you?

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.

future predictions, future tech, New Discoveries, new technology

Invisible Warriors: When Immune Cells Vanish into the Body to Slay Cancer

October 11, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In a laboratory somewhere between audacity and necessity, researchers at MIT and Harvard have reprogrammed natural killer (NK) cells to become “invisible”—able to slip past the body’s own defenses and annihilate cancer with ruthless precision. These engineered CAR-NK cells don’t just confront tumors; they duck under the radar of immune rejection. Tested in humanized mice, they wiped out cancers while avoiding dangerous immune reactions. This isn’t incremental immunotherapy—it’s a step toward internal assassination of disease.