Sci/Tech

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.

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.

The international Consumer Electronics Show is just winding down in Las Vegas and I wanted to share my picks for the most innovative, impressive, best-designed, or most future relevant of the gadgets that I saw. More than 20,000 products were scheduled to debut at the show this week. Not all of them will be making it into the future. Here are a few that might be around in 2030.

The future has descended on the Venetian in Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES). I was unable to pass up the chance to join a small handful of my fellow reporters (by which I mean thousands of bloggers) for CES unveiled, the official pre-conference press event on Sunday night. The preview offered a sampling of the thousands of new products, apps, and startups that will be launching here over the next few days. Everything on display in the ballroom last night was shiny, but not everything was of relevance to the average futurist. Of those products that most impressed me were the ones that epitomize the biggest technology trend of the next ten years, devices that make use of the data you provide, even when you don’t know you’re providing data:

In the next decade, the United States will use increasingly capable artificial intelligence (AI) to greatly reduce the cost of health care, accelerate research and development into new medicines, improve cars and roads to reduce gridlock, and even regain much of the manufacturing base we lost to countries like China, say researchers in computer science, robotics, and management.

Russian spacecraft fleets have been busy the last few months: With the U.S.