Blogs

I had the good fortune to attend The World Technology Summit and Awards 2012. This year's event was held at the Time - Life Building in NYC on October 22nd and 23rd.  The conference started with a welcoming remark from Damian Slattery, Executive Director of Integrated Marketing at Time Magazine. Slattery pointed out that “TIME is not a magazine, it is a dashboard."  He was highlighting how companies and organizations are changing and morphing into complex platforms with new digital extensions. These extensions include web, social, smartphone apps and new technologies that are multilayered.

“I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they’re going to look like in ten to fifteen years’ time…A long-term or durable competitive advantage in a stable industry is what we seek in a business.”
Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett did not become one of the most successful investors of all time by being a bad futurist.

In July 2011, as a cost cutting measure, the U.S. Postal Service put together a list of 3,700 post offices that it wanted to close. Like most organizations that have faced a full frontal assault by online automation and technology, the USPS has been working its way through a very uncomfortable transition. They have no clear picture of what the service will look like 10 years from now.

We cannot set aside our values, feelings, ideas, and interests, even for an instant, but a question that may receive some attention in efforts to put a value on foresight profession is how to calculate the real worth of a futurist. What is worthy of acknowledgement and praise for a professional futurist?

What is a futurist? Every self-described futurist you ask will likely give you a different answer. A more interesting question is what do these people say about the future? Brian Bethune from Maclean's magazine recently put that query to a grab bag of inventors, technologists, geneticists, business consultants, and writers he encountered at WorldFuture 2012, the Society's recently concluded conference in Toronto, Canada.

When I was a kid it seemed like every refrigerator had a bottle of Thousand Island dressing in it.

Now, it seems nearly every refrigerator has a bottle of Ranch dressing in it.

Progress under consumer capitalism is marvelous and inexorable. Who knows what salad dressing will grace the refrigerators of the future?

The DaVinci Inventor Showcase is an annual event produced by our amazing team at the DaVinci Institute. Now in its 8th year, we attract inventors from all across the U.S. to be part of what has become one of the nation’s most prestigious inventor events. As a futurist, it is the brilliance of these visionaries that breathes inspiration into the work that I do. But this is only scratching the surface. Here’s what you really missed.

On Day 1 of the World Future Trends conference, Daniel Epstein of the Unreasonable Institute, blew the minds of a fairly sophisticated audience that by all accounts lives and breathes trends and innovation for a living.

originally published at The Trends and Foresight blog.

We assume that what we taste, smell, feel and see in our world are all "real'' experiences.  However, physicists are now saying that we may be able to find proof that we are really living inside a simulation. This unbelievable theory is not a new concept. The Matrix, Plato's Allegory of the Cave , The Brain in a Vat Theory, and the Simulacra and Simulation are just a few examples of this theory told from different perspectives.

By Michael Lee, founder of the Southern African Chapter of the World Future Society, Institute of Futurology and author of Knowing our Future - the startling case for futurology.