Thomas Frey's blog

On Wednesday I was invited to speak on a panel at the 2012 National Electricity Forum, an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, in Washington DC. As the kickoff speaker on the panel, my message to them noted that the power industry is an industry that is under attack. An attack not being carried out by terrorists or invading armies, rather it is being attacked by emerging new technologies that have been advancing quickly and are currently beginning to boil around the edges.

Yesterday I was honored to be one of the featured speakers at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul, Turkey where I predicted that over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030. Since my 18-minute talk was about the rapidly shifting nature of colleges and higher education, I didn’t have time to explain how and why so many jobs would be going away. Because of all of the questions I received afterwards, I will do that here.

November 2009 was when Michael Migliozzi and Brian Flatow started a website called BuyaBeerCompany.com who’s lofty goal was to buy the ailing century old Pabst Blue Ribbon beer company. In less than two years, working to match the $300 million sale price, the pair attracted over 5 million investors pledging upwards of $280 million, with an average pledge of $40.

If you were traveling between Boston and Washington, DC, and had the choice of either flying or riding in a driverless car, which would you choose?

Under good conditions this is an 8.5-hour drive vs. 4-5 hours flying – driving to the airport, wading through security, boarding the flight, landing, and commuting to your destination when you arrive.
Keep in mind that the first wave of driverless vehicles will be luxury vehicles that allow you to kick back, listen to music, have a cup of coffee, stop wherever you need to along the way, stay productive with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for roughly the same price.

Two hundred years ago, the most stable jobs involved the needs of a community and the work of a skilled craftsman to meet those needs. People holding jobs such as cobblers, blacksmiths, chandlers, and butchers found themselves in high demand. But those jobs hold very little relevance in today’s world. So is there such a thing as a “forever” job.

What will the television-watching experience be like 20 years from now? Will watching TV still be a communal experience? Will we be looking at a device, or will the image be projected? Or will it appear on some sort of digital wallpaper? Will it be portable? Will it be 2D, 3D, or perhaps 4D or 5D? Will it be interactive, reactive, immersive, or participative?

To understand the city of the future, we must first understand the importance of proximity and the changing dynamic of our personal relationship with the physical community we find ourselves in.

Innovative new technologies will transform the home by creating what will approximate an intelligent organism, a living, breathing life form. Not only will the smart home become a key interface for electric power, there will be more sophisticated monitors and controls for water, sewer, trash, air, entertainment, work, security, transportation, and more.

The total number of governmental bodies in the U.S. is approaching a staggering number – 90,000. During normal economic times there is plenty of money to go around, but now every city, state, county, parish, township, and special taxing district is competing for the same tax dollars that the federal government is.

The weirdness of future of wars will make us wish
we were dealing with knives and swords again.

The way I see it, the larger the death toll and the greater the path of destruction, the longer it will take to heal the deep-seated emotional wounds festering among the masses. While property damage can be repaired, and economies can be rebuilt, it is the emotional wounds that carry hatred and other significant problems from one generation to the next.