Frederic Bastiat, author of The Seen and Unseen, was one the first economists to explore the interaction between policy and and unintended consequences: In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only…
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In 1987, before I was a professional futurist — or professional anything — I jotted down a list of what I wanted the world of the future to deliver. I happened to look at that list yesterday, and the future isn’t doing too badly: “cheap ties to library-size databases” — which we would now call…
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The not-yet launched social rating app Peeple recently caught the attention of the Internet, and the reaction was not kind. By the admission of its founders, Peeple seeks to be “the Yelp for people,” a succinct tagline that detractors immediately seized upon. According to its creators, Peeple seeks to consolidate reviews of ordinary people. Have…
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Last year I suggested that someone will be killed by robot car technology relatively soon, indirectly: a driver would attribute autonomous capabilities to a car before they were truly in place. Some Tesla drivers seem bent on proving me right sooner rather than later. Technology Review reports that as soon as Tesla upgraded its Model…
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At a Brookings event this week, panelists made some provocative forecasts on the future of work in the face of automation. The two speakers, Nick Hanauer and Scott Santens, are in some ways in opposing camps: Hanauer believes that technology is providing better jobs, and will continue to, while Santens foresees a need for new…
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We’ve spent much of the last year looking at the future of work. For me that study raises a further question: What’s the future of the meaning of work? Turns out that the TED Radio Hour recently did a series of presentations on The Meaning of Work. Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College,…
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Lately I’ve been wondering if the future of work in the developed world and the future of work in the developing world are converging in some important ways. Let me explain by introducing a fascinating scenario for the future of innovation in Africa. In 2013 the Open A.I.R. project (Open African Innovation, Research, and Training)…
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Today is “Back to the Future Day,” the day Marty McFly travels forward to in the 1989 movie, the second in the series. Like all futurist movies, “Back to the Future” wasn’t meant to be a forecast. Many of its future elements — the flying cars, the garbage-powered fusion — were meant more as jokes…
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I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since a trip to the wonderful Aquarium du Québec in Quebec City last summer. There I saw, among many other interesting things, a poster comparing the odds of being attacked by a shark to the odds of experiencing various other traumatic events. Unfortunately I’ve lost my photo…
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Foresight is all about the present. Sounds paradoxical, but I firmly believe it. Let me explain. What started me on this train of thought is a passage in The Screwtape Letters, 20th century scholar C. S. Lewis’ droll version of advice offered to a junior devil by his more experienced uncle Screwtape. In one of…
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