If the 21st Century is going to be the bioscience century, as I believe it will, then every year will feature significant developments. However, I suspect that 2008 will, in particular, see the dawning comprehension that the tiny genetic differences between one person and another are more important than previously suspected, and are part of […] Read more

Last year, I thought that George W. Bush’s weakness would lead to three strong Democratic candidates, Hillary, Obama, and Edwards, plus a designated loser for the Republicans, likely McCain, and it seems it may be turning out that way. I, like everyone else, thought that Hillary was the most likely winner because of her money, […] Read more

I’ve written and talked about “wearable computers” for more than a decade now, and they are continuing to emerge, although not quite the way I expected. What is happening is that while the original “grey brick” cellphone has morphed into the miniscule smartphone, it is, in fact, a computer that you carry on your person […] Read more

I spoke at a transportation conference in Vancouver, Canada, not long ago, and one of the things I said was that some people were still skeptical that climate change was happening. Afterwards, the conference organizer came up to me and told me that the only skeptics were in the south, the temperate zones. Everyone in […] Read more

The top story of 2008 is likely to be the American economy, plus the potential for a financial market panic that could be enormously destructive, arising out of the credit market crisis. We could be facing a full-blown panic, a run on commercial banks, and even a global recession of significant magnitude. Since no one […] Read more

November 2007 The following is a summation of a presentation I gave to the Calgary CFA Society in Canada last April. The concept of ‘the future’ is a dangerous fantasy because it implies simplicity, and this is particularly true of the future of energy. Energy is at the very center of our society, and is […] Read more

May 2007 The following article was written at the request of a Canadian education magazine. All of the details apply to the United States, except for the population projections. In 10 years’ time, U.S. schools will have roughly 2 million more students than they do today. Other than that, though, the attitudes and situations will […] Read more

June 2006 What follows is a summary of a presentation I recently made for the ‘2006 Life Sciences Industry Summit,’ co-hosted by the Long Island Life Sciences Initiative, and the Center for Biotechnology. The Life Sciences Century When we look back, later this century, we’ll identify the completion of the Human Genome Project as the […] Read more

April 2006 What follows is adapted from a presentation I gave to a joint conference on the futures of farming and alternative fuels. There is no future in traditional agriculture, and those who persist in hoping that there is will go down to defeat and bankruptcy. But there is a remarkably prosperous future for new […] Read more

September 2005 Have you ever gotten really lousy service, then wondered how the restaurant, phone company, Internet service provider, or store that gave it to you managed to stay in business? The answer, unfortunately, lies in Darwin’s poorly understood theory of natural selection, driven by the rising tide of competition produced by globalization and technology. […] Read more

May 2005 Consider the following premise for a science fiction story: As humans moved beyond the stone age, they gradually started developing and using tools. Fire was discovered, and added considerably to their ability to defend themselves, and make life comfortable. Over time, people added more and more sophisticated tools to their toolboxes, and started […] Read more

February 2005 Only perverted parents would feed their children food that they knew was poisoned. Yet, many parents poison their children physically, emotionally, and spiritually through inaction and indifference, and are sometimes even aware that they are doing so. Nor should we blame parents alone, for we are all responsible for permitting the emergence of […] Read more

August 2004 Innovation is the hot topic of the 2000s, and with good reason. An organization’s success at innovation will determine whether they pick up market share and thrive, or shed customers and go bust. It is the key to both survival and success. But much as ‘total quality management’ became the management buzz word […] Read more

October 2003 I’ve often found that telling people what tomorrow may be like is not as clear or as effective as illustrating what I mean with a vignette or story set in the future. What follows is one of the vignettes that I originally wrote for my newly published book, Who Owns Tomorrow? 7 Secrets […] Read more

July 2000 Just for some summer fun, I thought I’d answer some of the questions I get along the lines of: ‘What happened to the glorious future we were promised 25 years ago?’ Why don’t we have a 25 hour work week and 8 weeks of vacation? George Jetson worked at Spacely Sprockets. He arrived […] Read more

May 2000 ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ – ‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats Shortly before Christmas, 1999, I was contacted by a reporter for a Dallas newspaper. His ‘beat’ was religion and spirituality, and he was doing an article on the future of morality. He’d seen some of the articles on […] Read more

April 2000 The anti-gravity economy: Are recessions a thing of the past? There are three major structural changes in the U.S. and global economies that will change the patterns of recession and recovery, and that have significant implications for you and your business. The first is that the mechanism that used to trigger a recession […] Read more