Christopher Kent: March 2008 Archives

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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