Thomas Frey's blog

By 2030, we will see more changes to core infrastructure than in the combined total in all of human history. Our sacred cows are about to be set free, and the fundamental shifts we will see to the way society functions will be nothing short of breathtaking.

On May 24th, Gary Connery, a 42 year old stuntman from Oxfordshire, England jumped from a helicopter hovering over one mile in the air over southern England, and glided to the earth using a specially designed wing suit. His runway was comprised of a cobbled-up crash-pad fabricated from 18,000 cardboard boxes to soften the impact.

In December 2006, Britain made its final payment of $84 million on a $4.34 billion loan from the U.S. that was made all the way back in 1945. Germany wasn’t the only country to go bankrupt after WWII. This money allowed Britain to stave off its total collapse after devoting almost all its resources to the war for over half a decade....To put this in perspective, $4.34 billion in 1945 is roughly equivalent to $140 billion today, an amount that was double the size of Britain’s economy at the time.

Scarcity is defined as an economic condition that arises when people have far greater wants than the available resources. Most often we think about the limited supplies of natural resources, but it includes far more than that.

For colleges and universities, the great age of experimentation is now upon us. Harvard and MIT recently announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

The Minerva Project recently announced it will become the first elite American University to be launched in over a century, at the same time, transforming every aspect of the university-student relationship. The Ronin Institute is promising to reinvent academia, but without the academy.

All the way back in March of 2004, working in his laboratory at the University of Southern California in San Diego, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, was working with a new process he had invented called Contour Crafting to construct the world’s first 3D printed wall.

On March 24th, surveillance cameras at the Taylor Made Jewelry store in Akron, Ohio captured the startling image of a red SUV crashing through the front windows with two masked men jumping out, smashing display cases, and stealing over $100,000 of jewelry in less than 2 minutes.

Both men are seen grabbing what they can from the cases, jumping back into the SUV, and speeding away.

The year is 2032. You have just celebrated your 80th birthday and you have some tough decisions ahead. You can either keep repairing your current body or move into a new one.

The growing of “blank” bodies has become all the rage, and by using your own genetic material, body farmers can even recreate your own face at age 20.

In just 20 years, this is an industry that has moved from the equivalent of Frankenstein’s laboratory to the new celebrity craze, with controversy following it every step of the way.

Question: As physical books go away, and computers and smart devices take their place, at what point does a library stop being a library, and start becoming something else?

Somewhere in the middle of this question lies the nagging fear and anxiety that we see brimming to the top among library insiders.

People who think libraries are going away simply because books are going digital are missing the true tectonic shifts taking place in the world of information.

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.