Category: Futurist

  • 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…

  • My 2016 in Books

    This is the third 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 write on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2015 list here…

  • TechfestNW: Daimler’s Ambitious Vision for Self-Driving Trucks

    I was reminded this week of a 1983 episode of the classic TV show “Knight Rider” featuring a self-driving truck named Goliath as the villain-of-the-week who battled heroes Michael Knight (played by a young David Hasselhoff) and K.I.T.T., a self-aware and self-driving Pontiac Trans Am. This boyhood memory clanged into my awareness because now, 33…

  • First Thoughts on Amazon’s Echo and Alexa

    Based in large part on my friend Jeff Minsky’s enthusiast endorsement, I bought the Amazon Echo device that comes with its voice-activated, Siri-like, AI digital helper named Alexa.  “This is a no-brainer,” Jeff said.  “If nothing else it’s a terrific wireless speaker for under $200, and it does so much more.” I unboxed Echo on Wednesday,…

  • High Fidelity, Pillow Talk, The Music Man: on technology and on ideas that rhyme, but then don’t

    Hey, this looks like a piece about old movies, and it starts out that way, but it’s also about how to think about technology. I even throw in a little Douglas Adams at the end. Ideas can rhyme like words do. When words rhyme, the rhyme helps us position ourselves inside a poem: we know…