Foresight 20/20: A Futurist Explores the Trends Transforming Tomorrow with Jack Uldrich
Jacks latest book provides eleven easy-to-read scenarios spelling out what the world may look like in just 8 short years. In addition to providing future scenarios in education and healthcare, the book addresses how technology will transform the agriculture, energy, retail, and manufacturing sectors and provides an in-depth exploration of how robotics, gaming dynamics and artificial intelligence will change everyday life by the beginning of the next decade. Buy here.
Higher Unlearning with Jack Uldrich
In this highly provocative book, best-selling author, acclaimed global futurist and the iconoclastic “chief unlearning officer,” Jack Uldrich turns the world as you know it—or think you know it—on its head and makes the compelling case that unlearning will be the most critical skill for charting, navigating and, ultimately, conquering the brave, new world of the 21st century. Buy the Book
Bestselling Books By Jack Uldrich
Keynote Speeches with Jack Uldrich
Jack speaks to a variety of audiences about future trends, emerging technologies, innovation, change management and leadership.
In case you need help connecting the dots, this development suggests that the idea of an invisible gun may soon move from the realm of science fiction to science fact.
The world and its new emerging technologies are converging at warp speed and they are spinning off in some crazy directions.
3D printing is becoming more affordable and soon increasingly complex objects will be able to be printed with the help of advanced algorithms and nanomaterials. (This is now the invisible gun will be created.)
The madness won’t stop there because the CAD file for the printable invisible gun will be uploaded to BitTorrent (or some other cloud-based file-sharing service) where it will exist forever to be downloaded by both well-intentioned and ill-intentioned individuals.
And lest you take some small comfort in law enforcements’ ability to “follow the money” and track individuals who are selling or profiting from 3D-printed guns, this is highly unlikely because the creators are likely to be financially compensated via digital crypto-currencies such as BitCoin which are untracable.
Technology, in and of itself, is neither good or bad. It is how the technology is used that ultimately matters. Nevertheless, society is now at the point where lone individuals can wield extraordinary power for good–or evil.
There is no satisfying answer to the age-old dilemma of the doubled-edged nature of technology and, perhaps, the best we can hope for is that the responsible “invisible gun owners of the future” act as a check on those less responsible.
Still, before society gets to this point, it needs to be asking more–and tougher–questions and we may want to start with this one: Just because we can do something does that necessarily imply we should do it?
At a recent healthcare event, I shared the stage with Dr. Richard Migliori, Executive Vice president of Health Services at United Health Group and, in his opening keynote presentation, he identified six factors driving higher-than-necessary health care costs:
In total, these six factors add an estimated $675 billion in unnecessary costs to America’s $2.1 trillion healthcare bill.
Help is on the way and, not surprisingly, it isn’t coming from Washington, DC. It is coming in the form of a computer.
I have written before about IBM’s Watson supercomputer but I encourage you to watch this 90-second video on how the computer—and the artificial intelligence behind it–is working its way up the healthcare food chain.
It is unrealistic to expect Watson or other supercomputers to eliminate the entire $675 billion but the tools will help farsighted healthcare administrators and hospitals reduce the total by:
–Better questioning which services and procedures are necessary and appropriate; –Identifying those areas where services aren’t being delivered efficiently (i.e. which hospitals have higher than normal complication rates) and where prices are inflated in comparison with neighboring hospitals; –Lowering administrative costs by freeing personnel from time-consuming tasks such as searching electronic healthcare records; –Sifting out fishy and fraudulent claims in much the same way banks can today spot suspicious activity on a person’s credit card; and –Helping hospitals and healthcare providers deliver more timely preventative medicine by identifying at-risk individuals and then ensuring time-appropriate action is taken on their behalf.
Interested in other popular healthcare-related posts by leading healthcare futurist Jack Uldrich? Check out these articles:
Warhol was wrong. In the future, everyone won’t be famous for 15 minutes. If we are lucky, we’ll be anonymous for 15 minutes.
As Juan Enriquez shares in an insightful and provocative 6-minute TED talk (posted below) all of us are being plastered with “electronic tattoos” as our Facebook posts, Tweets and even our physical features and movements are being constantly recorded and uploaded to the Internet where they are forming a sort of digital immortality.
This issue, however, is getting even more complicated because some of the world’s future citizens are now being “tattooed” before they are even out of the womb–in the form of embryonic genetic screening.
The technology has obvious positive attributions but, in the wrong hands, it could also be exploited for nefarious purposes.
The same thing is true for many aspects of our digital identity. There are plenty of benefits to recording and storing many aspects of our lives, but there is a also darker side.
I don’t have an answer to this question, so I’d like to throw out to you: How do we wisely balance the benefits of continuous and pervasive identification with the benefits of anonymity?
Yesterday, I delivered the closing keynote presentation at Optus Vision2013 in Sydney, Australia. The title of my talk was “Tomorrow’s Technology Today.” As I recently said, tomorrow is rapidly catching up with today but to further appreciate just how quickly mobile, social, and cloud technologies are converging with “Big Data” and the “Internet of Things” watch this short video on a new app called MindMeld. Then ask yourself this question: Why are Intel, Samsung and Telefonica all backing Expect Labs, the innovative start-up company that is producing this technology?
The answer is because none of these companies can afford to consider themselves just a chip manufacturer, an electronics company or a telecommunication provider. All of today’s technological trends are melding together under the accelerating pace of change to deliver to the customer a seamless and transparent experience that connects them with their friends and the wider world. The companies that understand this powerful paradigm shift will be the ones to prosper in tomorrow’s world.
My further guess is that these companies are also looking at Google’s latest project, Project Glass, and wondering how they stay relevant in the coming era of wearable computing.
As a futurist, I spend a surprisingly large amount of time simply helping my clients and audiences see what is already here today.
To put this in a contemporary context consider the photo to the right of Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), the “brash but brilliant” main character in the upcoming sci-fi thriller Iron Man 3. His head-mounted displayed has a decidedly futuristic look to it, right?
Well, consider this photo of Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, displaying the company’s latest technological gadget, Google Glass.
It may not be quite as cool but it’s a close approximation of Iron Man’s head-mounted display.
What Glass has going for it is that is already in production and is widely expected to be commercially available by the end of 2013.
To me this is yet another example of how the present is catching up with the future.
Who knows you might even be able to watch the next installment of the Iron Man series on your own pair of Google Glasses.
Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed delivered a real “shot heard around the world” last week when he demonstrated an operational 3D printed gun.
