A WorldFuture Sneak Preview: Mitch Altman, Jeff Coker, and Thomas Frey

Come to the WorldFuture Conference in Toronto this July, and you’ll meet innovators and experts from far and wide, all gathered to present on where the world is heading. Here are a few of the many great minds you’ll get to see.

Mitch Altman

What do you get when a hundred aspiring inventors gather in one room? Ask Mitch Altman. This tech entrepreneur co-founded Noisebridge, a San Francisco “hacker space”—slang for a locale where people with a common interest talk, brainstorm, and collaborate. Nearly 900 such spaces have sprouted across the globe in the last five years, and rightly so: Creative people need communities, just like anyone else. Altman knows. He has a repertoire of creating and inventing. He co-founded 3ware, an electronics company that pioneered innovations in disk drives; was president and CEO of Cornfield Electronics, which patented the TV-B-Gone remote-control keychain; invented the Brain Machine, a device that induces altered states of consciousness; and led studies of virtual reality.

Altman will join this year’s WorldFuture conference in Toronto to present on hacker spaces and what they mean for creative types. Attendees of his session, “HackerSpace Movement: Hacking the Future,” will hear about the acceleration effect a hacker space has on idea generation. Then they will learn how to create their own hacker spaces, and why they should: The more that people everywhere encourage each other to better themselves and to create positive change, the richer all society will be.

Jeff Coker

“This is an exciting time to be a biologist” are the first words you’ll see on the Web page of Jeffrey Scott Coker, associate professor of biology at Elon University in North Carolina. Coker is an enthusiastic scholar of the natural world, and his enthusiasm shines through not only in his copious writing (which includes a new book, Reinventing Life: A Guide to Our Evolutionary Future), but also in his courses on cell biology, microbiology, species evolution, and cutting-edge biomedical tools, such as genetic engineering. And when he’s not teaching about nature, he’s working to protect it: He chairs Elon University’s Forest Advisory Committee, which administers the university’s 56-acre nature preserve.

He will join this summer’s WorldFuture conference to host a session, based on his book, assessing how the human species is co-opting nature and evolution. He will discuss positive activities, such as genetically modifying crops to resist pests and droughts; destructive ones—i.e., ecosystem degradation; and the ambiguity surrounding the new capabilities that we are slowly acquiring, including the power to enhance humans’ mental and physical capacities, or to resurrect extinct animal and plant species. Then he will lay out ethical principles for an optimal evolutionary future.

Thomas Frey

He’s the “Dean of Futurists,” according to the Denver Post and the Seattle Post Intelligence; and the “Father of Invention,” in the words of the Boulder Daily Camera. Whether these newspapers’ reporters are futurists or not, they recognize the special gravitas that Thomas Frey, director of the DaVinci Institute, holds as a foresight expert. Hundreds of startup businesses say that his advice contributed to their success, and established corporations regularly book him to speak at their events. He has delivered keynote addresses for AT&T, IBM, Capital One, Direct TV, and the Times of India, to name a few. He himself started 17 companies, and he worked for 15 years as an engineer for IBM, during which time he won 270 awards—a company record.

He will visit this year’s WorldFuture conference and present a session, “When Ivory Towers Fall: The Emerging Education Marketplace,” on the great shake-ups that lie ahead in higher education. Session participants will learn about the shifting ground on which higher education stands, the nascent businesses of today that will morph into major “next-ed” industries in coming years, why many existing colleges and universities will collapse, and what opportunities for better systems their demise will create.