Category: Futurist

  • The future that’s already here

    The digital revolution is just getting started: more changes to more facets of our everyday lives are coming. In the same way that it would be challenging for us to explain life in 2018 to somebody in 1968 (what — no phone booths?) my kids’ kids will look back on our lives today as if…

  • Why using cash won’t protect your privacy

    We need to upgrade our nightmares, thank and excuse the monsters under our beds, and tell our bogeymen that it’s time to make room for a new generation of things that make us go “eek!” Some of our fears are analog antiques in a digital world. Here’s an example of what I mean: in our…

  • My 2017 in Books

    This is the fourth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2016 list here,…

  • Death Star Scenario: Amazon Prime Bank

    If Amazon decided to move into the world of commercial banking, would the company then revolutionize how people relate to their money as profoundly and irrevocably as it has already changed how people read? Why do I pose this question? A provocative finding from our forthcoming Future of Money and Banking report inspired it: when…

  • Brief review of “Autonomous” by Annalee Newitz

    Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is a just-released and consistently interesting near-future dystopian science fiction novel set about 120 years in the future at the intersection of robotics, AI and biotech. Newitz, the author (with whom I went to grad school many years ago), has created an intriguing world that combines golden age science fiction tropes about…

  • What comes after smartphones?

    With all the press and the inescapable ads for new iPhones, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel and other snazzy devices, it’s hard to think of the smart phone as a transitional technology. But it is. Here are three recent indicators: The Third Generation Apple Watch that was announced last month does not need to be anchored…

  • Car ownership is changing, not dying (yet)

    On Monday, Business Insider published an article with the headline, “Uber and Lyft could destroy car ownership in major cities.” It’s a provocative headline, but it misrepresents the carefully worded findings of a recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan, Texas A&M and Columbia. The study took shrewd advantage of a “natural experiment”…

  • The Fall and Rise of the Visual Internet

    I’m pleased to announce that my role with the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg has expanded, and I’m now the Chief Strategy Officer. This column is cross-posted from the Center’s website, and is the first of many regular pieces from me and my colleagues. And now, onto the column…  Bennett and I…

  • WTF: How Quickly Will Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus’ New Political Platform Get Hacked?

    I had mixed emotions as I read yesterday’s Recode story by Tony Romm about how LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Marc Pincus are creating a new political platform called “Win the Future” (shortened amusingly to “WTF”). On one hand, I agree with so much of what they want to achieve: the two WTF…

  • CES 2017 for Brands: a Skeptical Review

    Most years at CES you can spot me leading tours, and most years after the show is over I sit down to ponder what I made of it all, what the pundits got right and what they missed. While in past years I’ve given presentations on these things, this year I wrote it up for…