Sci/Tech

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.

We published a Technology Foresight brief recently about the future civilian applications of UAVs, so it was fortuitous that I happened to meet Rich Goodwyn, a retired Navy captain who works at Prioria Robotics, for lunch last week. Standing by his car, he pulled out a large poster canister and removed the Maveric mini UAV.

originally posted at the Trend and Foresight Blog.

The topic of artificial intelligence was front and center at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive Conference...the result, I suspect, of Apple launching Siri around the time the panels were selected. Amber Case, a self-styled "Cyborg Anthropologist" got us started off right with a keynote Sunday about the recent history of man's merge with machine.

Computation is mathematical poetry. That may not be self-evident, but when you hear Stephen Wolfram talk about it, there is little doubt. Wolfram arrived to a packed hall at the South by Southwest Interactive conference Sunday, and he came to preach the gospel of computation. It is, he told us, one of the biggest ideas in human history.

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.