Category: Futurist

  • Face: The Final Frontier

    A decade after Google Glass, are smart glasses finally becoming a thing? Although we’ve all had our individual journeys with the internet, the journey of the internet itself has been one of increasing intimacy. At first, we had to go somewhere else to get online: to a lab somewhere at a business or university. Then…

  • Off the Grid: Is it Possible?

    Until recently, evading some forms of digital surveillance was as easy as leaving your phone at home. That’s no longer the case. Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called The Ride about a CEO who needed to get closer to one of her board members, and the elaborate…

  • The Ride, a Microfiction

    Trix returns! When her CEO needs to chat with a privacy-protecting board member, Trix combines detective work with drones to find a way in. As regular readers already know, I’ve been experimenting with microfictions, short SF stories (1,000 words or less) that help me explore and illustrate aspects of how our lives might evolve within the technology…

  • Retro Futures and Who Counts as Human

    What lessons does a 1985 Isaac Asimov novel have to teach us about AI and algorithmic bias today?  After months of failed attempts and carting the book around the planet, I finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s magnificent and challenging Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. (Don’t take the word…

  • Piercing the AI Wall, a Microfiction

    When an executive needs to reach a reclusive CEO who has AI agents protecting his privacy, it takes an analog approach to get through the AI wall. As regular readers already know, I’ve been experimenting with microfictions, short SF stories (1,000 words or less) that help me explore and illustrate aspects of how our lives might evolve…

  • Liquid Behavior

    Companies launching new products and services would be wise to focus on their target customers existing behaviors and moving them. PROLOGUE, 2025: I wrote the article that follows back in 2017. It was the first time that I dug into something that I believe strongly: businesses and organizations focus too much on their products and not enough…

  • Retro Futures: War Games

    Can a 1983 movie thriller about computers and the military tell us anything about drone warfare today?  In 1984, my lifelong friend Juliet and I were watching a then-recent movie, War Games, at my parents’ house. This was in the early years of home video. The first Blockbuster store had yet to open, and Tim Berners-Lee…

  • Will Ozempic Kill Movie Theaters?

    The social disruptions that new, injectable, weight-loss drugs like Ozempic will create go far beyond health and health care. We humans organize our mental worlds with categories and consideration sets, so it can be hard to see when trends from different categories collide. Back in the day when I worked at EarthLink, a dial-up ISP,…

  • Who Are We?

    When technology enables us to change our personalities to help us achieve our goals, what duty does the first personality have to the second and vice versa? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Mr. Hyde’s Letter about Tim and Timothy—two aspects of the same man—in which Timothy…

  • Police Drones versus the Unhoused 

    MIT Technology Review’s daily email newsletter surfaced this older story from February of 2023 this morning, which was a good thing. I’m always interested in colliding trends and stories that gather additional context when placed together.  In this case, the article concerns the way that police in Chula Vista, California—as well as across the nation—are…