by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. After dark, on March 18th, 2018, a pedestrian was killed by an experimental, self-driving car owned by Uber as the pedestrian crossed a street in Tempe, Arizona. The month before, a driver was killed in a crash in a Tesla on its Autopilot setting in Mountain View, California. And […] Read more

Big Tech is going to invade health care, health insurance, and much more besides. Here’s one way it might play out.

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. Bitcoin was the first crypto-currency, and still the most widely known. It has been making headlines in large part because some of the people who have bought it have made fortunes, at least in theory. In turn, this has seduced other people to pile in, which has pushed up […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. At this stage in an economic cycle, inflation has usually reared its head, and the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) is typically thinking about taking the punchbowl away from the (stock market) party by jacking up interest rates. In turn, this usually kills the economic recovery, tipping us over […] Read more

by futurists Richard Worzel & Kit Worzel 2018 is going to be remarkable in many different ways. Indeed, when we put together our lists for the most important changes ahead in 2018, we wound up with so many we decided we couldn’t discuss them all, and settled on 18 things for 2018 (catchy, right?) that […] Read more

by futurist Kit Worzel Artificial intelligence and robots are making incredible progress. Recently, Boston Dynamics released footage of one of their latest robots that can do backflips, and land them handily. It’s been over a decade since a human beat a top-class chess AI. We have self-driving car prototypes being tested, and getting ready for […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. The growing number of men being outed for sexual harassment and assault will lead to one of the most profound changes in society in decades, perhaps centuries. Women, who compose the majority of the population in virtually all developed countries, will, I believe, conclude that the only way that they […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”                – John Maynard Keynes * The U.S. stock market has been on one of the great bull market runs in history, more than tripling since the market bottom on March 9th, 2009. And it […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. Hurricane Harvey was not a surprise. At least, it shouldn’t have been. Hurricane Ike, which ran just slightly to the east of Houston in 2008, caused an 8 ½ foot flood along the Galveston Strand (i.e., sandbar) to the southeast of Houston. NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) […] Read more

by Senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. Pay attention. Your life is about to be significantly changed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), whether you want it to be or not. Every once in while, something happens that tosses a huge rock into the pond of human affairs. Such rocks include things like the discovery of fire, the […] Read more

by Senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. What follows is an edited version of a presentation I gave to an audience at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario on the occasion of their 50th anniversary. They asked me to speak about the next 50 years in post-secondary education. I was delighted and honored to be asked to […] Read more

by Senior Futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. Reality is messy. You know how, when the office photocopier gets jammed, you always call that guy in your office who seems to be the only one who knows how to unjam it? That’s the kind of reality that robots and automation can’t cope with. Reality is unexpected. Physicists […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. Virtually everyone knows people who are unemployed or underemployed. This is especially true of young adults, although there are also lots of older people, even in their 50s and 60s, who are in similar situations. This wasn’t true in earlier eras, specifically the periods from about 1950 until the […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. The victory of Donald Trump as president of the United States is without precedent, and creates enormous uncertainty. Will his qualifications as a businessman transfer to management of the world’s largest economy? Will his policies work as advertised? Will his advisors be up to the task? We don’t know, […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done… Nothing you can make that can’t be made” – “All You Need Is Love”, Lennon & McCartney Our own brilliance and ingenuity is putting us out of work. In some ways, one of the most insidious problems we are facing is […] Read more

by futurist Kit Worzel One of humanity’s final frontiers of research is the human brain. Dimitry Itskov, a Russian billionaire, is keeping abreast of research as part of his Immortality 2045 project, which has the end goal of uploading his human consciousness to a computerized brain, and living forever in an artificial body. I wish […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. The emergence of computer genies, such as Siri on the Apple iPhone, Cortana from Microsoft, or IBM’s Watson, will lead to many changes in the way we live our lives and interact with our surroundings, both in the real world and in cyberspace. But one seemingly minor advantage of […] Read more

by Kit Worzel, futurist Last year, I wrote a blog about the future of food, and how we would need to use a number of alternative methods to farming in order to feed everyone. I didn’t manage to fit the rest of the information in that blog, about how we would still need to farm […] Read more

by senior futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A. To read their Wikipedia entry, you would have to say Apple, Inc. is an amazing success: “Apple is the world’s largest information technology company by revenue, the world’s largest technology company by total assets, and the world’s second-largest mobile phone manufacturer. On November 25, 2014, in addition to being […] Read more