Recently by Christopher Kent

For the past 10 years, one of the key indicators Hollywood has used to indicate a story is taking place in the future (or at least not in our ‘universe’) is the African-American president.

Movies like Deep Impact and The Fifth Element featured black Presidents, and the television show ’24’ had not one but two black Presidents (and if spoilers are to be believed, a female President this season). So with the election of Barack Obama, what will be the indicators of fictional futures? Will we have to continue to make do with overly-lit, white interiors and odd looking road vehicles that emit an electric whine? I once more call on our readers: What will replace the black President as Hollywood’s shorthand for the future?

Image: ColinEdwards99, Flickr

As part of its 10th anniversary celebration, Google has provided a link to its search engine from 2001. When you search, you can see what results would pop up in 2001, and then you are able to look up the archived web pages of those results. It's a blast.

Futurists look at the past... a lot. It helps us understand how we got to where we are, and allows us to project where we might be going. So I decided to see how we've changed since 2001 by comparing search results on popular subjects, then and now.

• Paris Hilton: 1,400 hits in 2001; 52 million hits in 2008
• Lindsay Lohan: 3,200 hits in 2001; 32 million hits in 2008
• George W. Bush: 700,000 hits in 2001; 52 million hits in 2008
• Peak oil future: 615 hits in 2001; 1.74 million hits in 2008
• Energy independence: 5,080 hits in 2001; 1.99 million hits in 2008
• Hybrid engine: 1,980 hits in 2001; 256,000 hits in 2008
• Prius: 48,000 hits in 2001; 18 million hits in 2008
• Blog: 76,000 hits in 2001; 3.2 billion hits in 2008
• Google: 3 million hits in 2001; 3.1 billion in 2008
• Global warming: 390,000 hits in 2001; 53 million hits in 2008
• Barack Obama: 670 hits in 2001; 74 million hits in 2008
• Sarah Palin: 0 hits in 2001; 19 million hits in 2008
• Starbucks: 166,000 hits in 2001; 34 million hits in 2008
• Subprime mortgage: 2,000 hits in 2001;2.4 million hits in 2008

This is not a complete list, but still representative of today's interests and concerns. And, of course, some of the growth in hits is partially due to the explosion in the amount of information on the Internet. Still, our challenge as futurists is to look around today and determine what items that get less than 10,000 Google hits today will return 74 million hits in 2016. I open up this discussion to you, dear reader. Feel free to hit the comments section below with your ideas.

A recent story on social networks surpassing porn as a leading Internet search term sparked some mildly salacious conversations around the office last week, but also some deeper examination of what the researcher in the article was trying to articulate. Bill Tancer, in his new book Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters, looks at aggregate Internet search terms and mines interesting data from them. One example I found interesting was that searches for anti-depression medication spike after Thanksgiving, seemingly validating long held ideas that the arrival of the year-end holidays upsets many people.

But it was his search results on pornography that grabbed headline writers and got our tongues wagging here at S)T. Tancer found that search for porn sites has dropped to 10% of web searches, down from 20% of all searches a decade ago. He posits that this is due to interest in social networking, which leads all search terms today. And then Tancer says this:

As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased. My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites.

Wait, what?

The other day, Miss Manners fielded a question in her newspaper column about the ethics and etiquette of posting pictures of past boyfriends on Facebook.

Congrats Facebook, you've arrived!

Image: luckywhitegirl (Flickr)

The music industry's latest attempts to get a handle on digital music and media seem a little off. For those who choose not to hit the link, four music labels are teaming up with memory card maker SanDisk to offer music albums on SanDisk's MicroSD cards for people to load on their portable MP3 devices.

This strikes me again as "not quite getting it."

Those people who like music on CD will still be buying their music on CD (and burning it to their computer if they want.) Those people who want mobile music don't want to have to physically buy and then transfer music to their players, while also trying to find some way to store the discs after the music has been transferred--they want all of their music on their portable device, easlily downloaded and available with a few clicks of the scroll wheel or button. The last thing I need is 10 SanDisk cards with all my U2 tracks on them loose in the bottom of my messenger bag. If I wanted my music like that, I'd dust off my portable CD player.

The music industry needs to stop equating rights with control. I know the two issues are linked, but they are focusing too much on the control idea, and not enough on how to protect rights.

One possible solution for the industry is the looming shift to cloud computing, where everyone's data is stored on servers (not local hard drives) and is available anywhere, anytime there is an Internet connection. The cloud could be what finally makes music services like Napster or Rhapsody--where you pay a fee for access to music, rather than buying a song and downloading it to your computer--the standard model. If the music is going to be stored remotely anyway, what does it matter if you own it or rent it? A shift to the cloud would be a tremendous relief to music labels as it would allow them to still control the rights and earn their share, while making their entire library open for any user who wishes to listen.

Image: Håkan Dahlström (Flickr)

I was fast forwarding through whatever I was watching on TiVo the other night when I spotted this commercial for Ethan Allen Furniture. I don't know if it is the first to take advantage of viewers fast forwarding through commercials, but it's the first I've seen. The commercial has no voice over, and the images and title cards are still readable even at the top fast-forward speed.

It was effective for me as I not only noticed it, I went hunting for a clip, which you can view below. It's one way for television advertisers to address their main fear regarding DVR use: fast-forwarding through commercials.

The changing nature of television, including how new platforms and content delivery methods are being developed, is something I've been working on for a while. A great example of the changes afoot is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a new project of writer-producer Joss Whedon. Bored during the television writers’ strike, Whedon—the mastermind behind cult fave Buffy the Vampire Slayer—along with his brothers devised a short-form musical story to be broadcast over the Internet. The result is a perfect example of what we mean when we talk about power shifting to content producers with the advent of these new delivery platforms. Following the "airing" of the first (of three parts), the show racked up more than 300,000 Google hits and more than 100 Google News hits, and is the top selling video on iTunes. (That people are paying $1.99 for something they can watch for free is the subject of an entirely different blog post.)

Granted, the popularity and seeming success of this is due in part to Whedon’s large and enthusiastic fan base, but nevertheless, television programming execs should be nervous. You can hit the link at the top to watch but hurry, it is only online for a limited time.

Iron Man? Incredible Hulk? Hellboy? What do they all have in common? Besides opening number one at the box office this summer, they are all characters or properties that began as comic books. There has been a veritable invasion of page-to-screen in the past five years, and with The Dark Knight, set to open Friday ahead of rave reviews, I was asked by a reporter about the proliferation of comic-based movies.

I believe there are a number of reasons for this comic book invasion of movieland:

Technology: New filming techniques, digital cameras, and computer designed and executed special effects make it easier to translate the fantastic from page to screen. James McAvoy dodging bullets in Wanted could not have happened pre-CGI (or pre-Matrix, which really set the bar for what could be done).

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The case of the “MySpace suicide" has finally found its way to the courts. (Quick recap: Neighbor-mother creates fake Myspace account to spy-on/harass neighbor girl who was once friends with her daughter. After tricking the 13 year-old neighbor into thinking she was in an online relationship with a boy, the neighbor lady ended the “romance” with series of hurtful emails, after which the 13 year-old killed herself.)

This case could be interesting for all sorts of precedents it might set. For example: where is cyberspace? According to the legal filings, it is physically co-located with the Internet server farms that support it. That raises other questions: if the perpetrators were in Missouri, but the alleged crime occurs and the charges are filed in California, where the server farm is located, how is the case affected? Does California have stricter or laxer laws regarding the charges? Stricter/laxer sentencing guidelines? Could the defendant appeal based on the fact she committed no crime in California?

As more daily interactions and transactions occur online and in virtual worlds, more questions about what is legal and what is not are being raised. How do you apply laws and bring justice to what we call World 0? And are crimes that take place only in virtual spaces still crimes? For instance, is creating online images depicting child-like avatars in sexual situations child pornography? No child is involved, but some governments say yes.

The charges brought in this case reflect the difficulty in applying real-world laws online: the defendant is charged with technicalities (conspiracy, unlawfully gaining access to a computer) in her misuse of MySpace in representing herself as someone else. And, as some have mentioned, the defendant herself seems guilty or nothing more than childish behavior, poor judgment, and cruelty. But looking at the issues this case raises, it could be an important step in developing online legal codes. I myself think some old-time justice is merited -- perhaps some time in the stockade or a public flogging?

Image: Bloomsberries (Flickr) 

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On his blog yesterday, marketing guru Seth Godin raised the generalists-vs.-specialists debate and asked what benefit generalists bring. Before I had time to dash off a response, Godin himself defended the need for generalists, writing,

"It's okay to specialize in being a generalist, of course. By that, I mean that there are many problems ... where someone who can see wide and doesn't have an allegiance to a particular solution is exactly the right person to call. I rely on generalists all the time, and so do you."

To be fair to Godin's argument, he adds, "My point is that you never call on these people when there's a better specialist available."

We at S)T pride ourselves on being generalists--our staff of futurists is composed of Ph.D. chemists, historians, English majors, MBAs, and--yes--the occasional trained futurist. Collectively we thrive because we bring a divergent set of training, backgrounds and worldviews to our clients. We are generalists because, as foresight professionals, our job is to look at the big picture and to make the connections that experts often miss. Experts, while knowledgeable, often see trees, rather than the forest, mountain, river etc. We don't lack for expertise, for in many cases our clients have all the expert knowledge we need and our job is to tease it out of them in order to help them see the larger picture of the future or futures.

My answer to Godin would be that all of my non-futures-trained colleagues combine to create a specialized knowledge base, and that it does our clients no good for us to know everything they do. That is a pointless duplication of resources. The benefit to hiring a firm of dedicated generalists is that collectively we create/own a specialized knowledge. This is reinforced as we bounce from project to project, so that one of our futurists may be writing on mobile telecommunications on Monday and infant formula on Friday. The generalist mindset allows our team to see the connections that exist between disparate businesses, consumers, and technologies. As a result, the sum of the whole is greater than its attendant parts.

That is why we are generalists.

Image: Angelrays (Flickr)

At our November Futures Consortium meeting on discontinuities, Barry Lynn, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, spoke about the dangers to the world economy posed by today's globalized, single source, just-in-time manufacturing system. Lynn stated in his presentation that "because globalization is so bound up, catastrophe is inevitable ... a globalized system with no redundancies is at greater risk to be unsettled by negative discontinuities."

A perfect example of this phenomenon came this week. Because of a March 3rd fire at the second-largest laptop battery manufacturer in South Korea, HP and Dell are reporting shortages of replacement batteries, and prices for existing batteries are starting to climb. Asustek, Taiwan's second-largest computer maker, said the shortage would likely affect 40% of its orders in the second quarter of the year. The Korean battery factory won't be back online for another 2-3 months.

A global battery constraint will not cripple the computer industry, but it serves as a reminder of how our entangled, globalized economy is vulnerable to random events--discontinuities--and how important it is, as Lynn stated, to build resiliency and redundancy into our economic system.

Link via Engadget.

As part of our Technology Foresight program, Social Technologies conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy to determine the top 12 areas for technology innovation through 2025. Personalized medicine is the first innovation area in the series.

Personalized medicine: "one drug for all" to "one drug per case" 

Personalized medicine includes the use of gene therapy, pharmacology and information technology to treat each patient individually. The ultimate goal of personalized medicine is the use of a person’s genome to move medicine from a reactive to a preventive stance, fixing a potential problem before it occurs rather than after it manifests. Changes in the medical and healthcare sector will give consumers more information about the interplay of disease and their own genomes, providing them the opportunity to take greater control of their healthcare and enable treatments tailored to specific genomes, which will thereby move medicine from “one drug for all” to “one drug per case.”

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One of the hazards of being a futurist is being peppered regularly with the “flying car” question. Variations on this question are “where’s my ray gun?” and “when are we going to have Star Trek-style matter transporters?”

The simple answer is “when someone invents it,” but of course the answer is more complicated than that. There are thousands of things that need to happen before the toys of the future become the tools of today. Undoubtedly, the most important is vision -- the set of ideas that will guide the development of a new technology.

Recently, as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on design entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind," the concept team at Nokia submitted their vision for how mobile communications, computing, and advances in nanotechnology would merge to create the infotech device of the future, which they dubbed "Morph." The wizards of Espoo, Finland have imagined an elegant and creative device that explores the intersection of form and function and how both of these requirements play on each other. It can be stretched, collapsed or reformed to whatever shape is needed, is self-cleaning, and runs on solar energy. Sound cool? It is. If you have five minutes, you can see a video of the Morph in action here.

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Steve Jobs’ keynote at the MacWorld convention on January 15^th sparked some online conversation between two of our futurists -- myself (Christopher) and Simeon Spearman. Here is the text of our discussion:

Christopher: I just finished reading the live blog (via Engadget) of Jobs' presentation from this a.m. I thought there were three really interesting ideas: The software upgrade for the iPhone that pinpoints the user’s location; the incorporation of the Touch interface into the MacBook Air; and the remote optical drive.

[The new MacBook Air does not have a CD/DVD ROM drive, rather, via software and wireless, MacBook Air can connect to a computer with a CD-drive and read the disc remotely.]

Simeon: I had live updates of the keynote running in the background as Jobs spoke. The announcements were pretty cool, but I felt like there should have been more to it.

Christopher: The first really pushes forward the concept of location-based services; the second puts us closer to non-physical interfaces for all computers; and the third could be the death knell for optical drives.

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The Washington Post recently ran an interesting story about the last operational telephone booth in the greater DC region. The story detailed the reasons behind the decline of the phone booth in our society, which can be neatly summed up as: the rise of the inexpensive mobile phone.

What interested me about this were the shifting cultural norms implicit in the end of the phone booth. We’ve written a lot about the Internet and its role in the erosion of both privacy and the expectation of privacy. But the rise of the mobile phone actually may be another prime mover. Looking at a picture of the phone booth, I am struck by one thing: telephone conversations were once considered private. Callers wanted to discuss their business free from eavesdroppers, and everyone else wanted to avoid the inanity we are now inundated with daily due to mobile phones. (Is there any worse sentence in the English language than, “Hello, we’ve just landed”?)

For all the talk of the Internet eroding privacy, we are more complicit than we like to believe: by embracing convenience and mobility (“Mom, you used to talk on the phone standing still?”) our mobile phone society has set privacy aside. Plus, we’ve made things more difficult for Superman.

Image: Lee McCain (Flickr)

Shanghai's skyline. Image: Aku Virtanen (Flickr)And now for some lighter news:

Those of you who joined us on our Futures Expedition to Shanghai in May will be delighted to hear that S)T's assessment of that city -- as a model for the future of China and Asia as a whole -- has been confirmed by noted futurist Paris Hiton. You can read her comments here.

This has to come as a big relief to our man in China, John Cashman, whose work in that city is now validated.

Thanks, Paris!

Image: Rachael Voorhees (Flickr)One of the big ideas to arise in recent years from the disintermediary effects of the Internet is crowdsourcing--the idea that as technology connects us, information requests and other work can be distributed to a wide range of people, all of whom can contribute to completing the task. The benefit of crowdsourcing is that it allows the user access to a wider array of knowledge and talent than he possesses...when it works.

But just like the aphorism that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, crowdsourcing is only as valuable as the resources available, and vulnerable to misdirection. And, let’s face it, few believe that mobs make the smartest decisions.

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Image: Social TechnologiesOver the weekend I had my first positive experience with an automated self-checkout at a grocery store. No starting over, no need for the self-checkout's human helper to pay a visit; the machine accepted cash and distributed change as it should. Perfect. So the use of automation for customer service was something I’d been mulling when I read this story about the proliferation of bank branches in Washington, DC. Apparently, the driver for this is customer service:

In the 1990s, a period of mergers in the financial industry, many banks promoted online services and closed branches. But industry studies showed that customers wanted personal contact when managing their money, and banks began opening more branches in a surge fueled by new players such as Commerce, which models itself as a retail store.

This was surprising for a number of reasons: bank are not known for their service, which tended toward long lines and bored tellers; ATMs have had the ability to perform most banking services since the mid-1980s; and the rise of the Internet has been transformative for the banking and finance industry, allowing customers to go beyond the convenience of ATMs to conduct almost any transaction from the convenience of their desks. Except for opening an account, closing an account, or securing a loan, there is almost no need to go into a bank (and even these services are increasingly offered online).

Many industries would love to harness the cost, convenience, and time savings that the Internet enables, but due to the vagaries of their business sector they cannot. Finance and banking have been able to exploit these savings, only to be undone by user-fueled nostalgia for customer service that, frankly, has never been that great. But the idea of the banker as a pillar of the community and someone one should know, even if he or she behaves like Mr. Potter, is apparently ingrained in the American consumer psyche, along with the “family farm.”

This raises a number of questions for retailers in the digital age: what does this mean for retail in the future? Are there other businesses that will be unable to reduce costs and increase convenience via the Internet because consumer tradition dictates face-to-face contact? To what extent does human contact trump convenience and why? And conversely, where do retailers draw the line between offering human contact and seizing the advantages the Internet provides?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to transfer funds into my checking account. Done!

Robot week on Changewaves continues with this story covering the latest in home robots for eldercare in Japan.

We've written about home robots before, and even the potential for robots in Japanese eldercare. As the story points out, eldercare is a growing concern for the rapidly aging Japanese. Having rebuilt their country on the back of technology, it is no surprise that the Japanese would turn to technology to alleviate a social problem. As my colleague Mr. Smith points out below, robots have moved past the proof-of-concept stage. The trade show this week in Tokyo ably demonstrates this, with more than 300 sales of units intended to feed people.

But what really interested me about this trade show was not the robots, but the cyborgs. Okay,not really cyborgs (i.e cybernetic organisms, part-human, part-machine) in this case, but rather wearable equipment that boosts or extends human capabilities. On display were vests that allow older people to enhance their capacities in the form of improved arm strength and more control when lifting objects. For all the sci-fi sexiness of robots, this assistive technology is more likely the future of eldercare in places like Japan. Being able to lift a spoon to feed oneself imparts far more dignity than being fed by another, even if the other is your super cool robot pal.

Assistance is one of the 12 values that we identified as shaping technology development in the next 20 years, and these strength vests are a good example of that value in action. Of course, the commercialization of this technology means that in the end, we replace our robots masters with grandpa.

Image: Luis Villa del Campo (Flickr)

In addition to the obvious inconveniences of last week's Skype outage (no IM chat, no long distance voice chat—a major headache for a company like ours, with staff scattered around the country and