Blogs

The idea of an animated talking head on a screen giving your annual review may sound fanciful, but AIs (of a sort) have been making headway in the worker oversight arena for a number of years. MetLife customer service representatives have been getting an ongoing review in real time in their screen corner with icons prompting them to “slow down speech,” “increase empathy,” and “up energy levels” (with a coffee cup) developed by Cogito.

Just as manufacturers "stand down" operations to focus their teams on safety issues, other organizations should stand down to brainstorm about the future. As Future Day approaches (March 1), here are some tips for organizing a Future Stand-Down Day for your organization.

The COVID-19 pandemic is and has been a singular event in the development of postindustrial econometrics, greatly accelerating several massive ongoing trends and technologies. The totality of these trends and technologies is changing and will continue to change where we live, our costs of living, independence, modes of transportation, econometrics, health, communications, housing, and the climate and ecosystem. By Dennis M. Bushnell

Victor V. Motti “fell” into future studies from an initial intention to pursue a career in engineering, he tells readers at the opening of A Transformation Journey to Creative and Alternative Planetary Futures. Motti is now an international writer, speaker, foresight adviser and, since 2017, the director of the World Futures Studies Federation.

Change in race relations is coming faster, in part because of Donald Trump’s racist talk and his lack of empathy. That, plus the murder of George Floyd by a smiling police officer in Minneapolis has made Americans look themselves in the mirror. And they don’t like what they see. By Bob Chernow

It has been said that foresight as a field has occasionally been short on systems thinking. I do not mean systems thinking as a discrete discipline in itself, which has had its ups and downs over the years, but instead as a through understanding of logistic structures and cross-disciplinary dynamics. In this context, it is also the case that engineering (especially electrical engineering) has not always had a significant voice in setting policy on renewable energy systems development, especially in the United States.

Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, once said to me (when I worked for him) that studying the future was not so useful as the past, as that was where he found guidance for most of his business decisions. Unfortunately, this was less than a year before he overleveraged his massive merger and acquisitions campaign and the stock value of WPP on the London Stock Exchange fell almost 80% in under a week.

Urbanization seemed like an obvious trend, and then COVID-19 changed the world. Can cities flourish after a pandemic? They often do. New York, Paris, and London experienced rapid growth after the Spanish Flu of 1918. People will always search for the connections that cities provide. By James H. Lee

Imagine you could visit your grandparents (or great-grands) 100 years ago, and you want to bring them the gift of the future. Create a time capsule from today for yesterday. What would you put in it to bring to the year 1920?

The development of digital reality (DR)—virtual, nonphysical presence—began with the telegraph, progressed to the telephone, then moved to telephones with screens, and now to computers. The nearer-term developments of DR include augmented reality and advanced virtual reality (VR), and it is heading toward five-senses VR and holographic projection. Going forward with the availability of ever greater bandwidth and direct machine-to-brain communications (bypassing the senses), DR is projected to be as good as, or better than, physical reality.