Thomas Frey's blog

Today, literally thousands of alternative transportation vehicles are coming out of the woodwork and they nearly all have the same problem – no place to drive them. Most are banned from biking and hiking trails, and they are neither licensed, nor licensable, for use on the streets. I’d like to discuss some new possible solutions and why Colorado is poised to take the lead in the alternative transportation marketplace.

Failures attract attention. Much like a car accident causing a gawker’s block along the highway, failure attracts onlookers, some with offers to help, others moving quickly to avoid being painted with the same failure brush. So what causes failure? Turns out that failure is just one relentless driver being perpetuated by a series of other relentless drivers. As we lift up the hood on this eight cylinder engine, here is what’s really going on.

Google Glass is an attempt to free people from their desktop computers and remove the quirky need to check their portable devices every couple minutes. Glass places all the same information into a viewing surface right in front of your eyes. Glass does not have a typical earpiece but instead transmits sound through bone conduction. The use of this kind of non-obtrusive sound amplification creates the possibility for a device used as a hearing aid for those with low-level hearing loss.

Fifteen years ago in an article I wrote for The Futurist, I made the prediction that once we had talking computers, we would soon have downloadable personalities to create a more human-like experience. I went on to suggest that most of us would actually download multiple personalities so we could interact with the right persona at any given moment. So how far have we come and what are the downsides?

Two overarching trends that get little attention today are those of rapidly increasing precision and awareness. As both travel up the exponential growth curves of the emerging big data industry, what inevitably becomes possible is an ability to distinguish a person’s identity from a distance, even space. On the surface this may be a frightening prospect. Having someone know where I am at any moment of the day, does indeed make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Over the past year I’ve been developing a theory about what I call the “Field of Knowability.” Parts of this were described in a column I wrote on the “12 Laws of the Future.” My theory begins with the assumption that there is a small gap in time between when the future is formed, and when we know about it. The point when we become “aware of the present” is what I refer to as the field of knowability. This means that the “present” would exist for a tiny period of time, perhaps just a fraction of a second, before we ultimately experience it. Think of it as a staging area for what occurs next. Here’s why I think this is important.

Over the coming years we will be seeing a mass disassembling of traditional schools, with pieces reassembling around some new system architecture. Some of the missing elements are testing centers, micro-credits, and credit banks. Here is a brief overview of how and why this transition is about to occur.

A few years ago I was taking a tour of a dome shaped house, and the architect explained to me that domes are an optical illusion. Whenever someone enters a room, their eyes inadvertently glance up at the corners of the room to give them the contextual dimensions of the space they’re in.

It will probably come as a surprise to most to learn that the first revival of an extinct species has already occurred. It happened in 2003 when scientists cloned a bucardo, an Iberian wild goat, that had gone extinct three years earlier, by inserting its DNA (which they got from frozen bucardo skin) into the eggs of an existing goat. The cloned bucardo was born, but then died just ten minutes later.

Yes, drones have been around for a long time and the military has already committed countless billions to drone R&D, but when a U.S. Senator dedicates 13 hours to filibuster the topic of drones, it signals far more than a token political move. Drones have taken center stage and an anxious and eager public is waiting to see what comes next.