Recent Articles from Thomas Frey
The futurist: Ten unanswerable questions
Perhaps this is nothing more than a form of therapy for me, but I’d like to take you along on a rare inner personal journey into how I think about the biggest of all big picture issues. And it all starts with one simple question. “Why are there exceptions to every rule?”
The futurist: Technology’s threat to the future of sports
If computers can win at chess and Jeopardy, are we about to see similar contests between robots and basketball players, driverless cars and NASCAR drivers, or robots and golf champions? More importantly, do we run the risk of automating these sports out of existence? Yes, we will see many more hum...
More on wasting our time should be a crime
(Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Read Part One.) Virtually everyone from businesses to government has had free reign to impose a time-tax on our lives with little regard as to whether it’s acceptable to us. This needs to change! Arriving at the “Formula of Acceptable Interference” Whenever our doctor insists on […]
The futurist: Wasting our time should be a crime
Every time I delete spam from my inbox, I feel a tiny piece of my life flitter away. Sitting needlessly at stoplights, or watching the minutes tick away as I wait in some line, or being forced to fill out yet another form, our precious time is being co-opted by everyone from inconsiderate business...
The futurist: Optimizing evil
While many people will argue over who exactly was the worst of the worst, with names like Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, Nero, Osama bin Laden, Attila the Hun, and Hirohito entering the conversation, it’s easy to attribute a face to the evil we all despise. But w...
More on the coming era of super-employment
(Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Read Part One.) Here are the rest of the 24 emerging and rapid growth industries that will be employing millions of people in the coming years. 7.) Cancer Immunotherapy – Immunotherapy will train your immune system to attack cancer cells, giving it an advantage over traditional cancer […]
The futurist: The coming era of super-employment
yes, we are automating tons of jobs out of existence and we will continue to do so. Every downloadable app has the potential of eliminating small fractional jobs. But cumulatively, this amounts to millions of positions around the world. The second part of the question, however, is a bit more compl...
More on the 100 million jobs at stake
(Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Read Part One.) Elon Musk first mentioned that he was thinking about a concept for a “fifth mode of transport”, calling it the Hyperloop, in July 2012 at a PandoDaily event in Santa Monica, California. He described several characteristics of what he wanted in a hypothetical […]
The futurist: 100 million jobs at stake
Daryl Oster likes to call it, “space travel on earth.” Even though tube travel like this will beat every other form of transportation in terms of speed, power consumption, pollution, and safety, the big missing element is its infrastructure, a tube network envisioned to combine well over 100,000 m...
More on the lean, mean micro-college model
(Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Read Part One.) On a recent “Future of Beer Tour,” an event we produced at the DaVinci Institute that took us on a futuristic bus tour of five local craft breweries, one of our on-board experts mentioned that a local college was planning to offer an […]
The futurist: The lean, mean, micro-college model
With literally millions of people needing to shift careers every year, and the long drawn out cycles of traditional colleges being a poor solution for time-crunched rank-and-file displaced workers, we are seeing a massive new opportunity arising for short-term, pre-apprenticeship training. Many mi...
More snapshots from the future
(Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Read Part One.) In looking at generational changes, it’s important to put everything into context – what things have changed and what has stayed the same. I’ve chosen to frame this discussion around middle class teen-agers in the U.S., an influential, trend-setting segment of American society. […]