Category Archives: Futurist

In a new five-part podcast, in partnership with Smartsheet, OZY paints a picture of the workplace to come, from productivity and privacy to social enterprise and the rise of gamification. Listen up on OZY.com, Spotify, Apple or wherever you prefer to stream your audio.

Collaboration. Teamwork. In the superconnected, crazily networked jobs of the future, how we work together will be critical. And so will the teams we work in. This season on The Future of X, OZY is exploring future of the workplace. In the latest episode, we asked some leading futurists and business executives about what the future of work means for one of the most important elements of any business: working with other people.

You should think of it like a rock band.

Liselotte Lyngs, founding partner, Future Navigator

Workplaces have been organized around hierarchical divisions of labor for centuries. And that was a perfectly sensible way of doing things, say, 150 years ago, says Mark Stevenson, a futurist and author of An Optimists Tour of the Future. Now its looking like there are better ways of organizing ourselves, which are more like diverse, bottom-up collaborative systems.

A more collaborative workforce means that finding the right team members, and the best groupings, becomes paramount.You should think of it like a rock band, says Liselotte Lyngs, a founding partner of Future Navigator, a think tank based in Copenhagen. They take a lot of practice working together and you need the same kind of patience in order to get a team that is really working well together.

In the future, companies will move from headhunting to team hunting. Specialized teams will move from company to company and project to project.And the resulting interpersonal relationships that will build up as you and your teammates move across companies and projects as one will be key to not just job performance but also your overall health and well-being.

Were gonna have more diverse teams that are going to add a lot more value to companies in ways they didnt expect, says Lisa Bodell, a futurist and CEO of FutureThink. Innovation is going to really take off in the next 15, 20 years.

This episodes Future Tip? If you want to get ahead in your career, go pick up a book on parenting. Tomorrows workplace values can be found in todays developments in the study of family dynamics. The new rules in childhood development are based on decades of research and moving away from awards systems and tough love and toward empowerment, communication and empathy. Plus, it may help when your boss is acting like a 3-year-old. There are endless parenting books and podcasts, of course, but weve put a few of our favorites here:

Check out the latest episode of The Future of X: The Workplace to learn more about the future of collaboration at work. Now available on OZY and all podcast platforms.

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'The Future of X' Turns to Collaboration in the Workplace. Tune In - OZY

The worlds most watched surgeon broadcasts ops for students and advises governments and business on tech. Here are his inspirations

Listen with the earsof an owl is advice that I live by. Experience has taughtme that good leadership is about listening intently to the people around you and all your stakeholders. Itsabout being able towork with humility.

A book that has inspired me is Muhammad Ali: His life and times by Thomas Hauser. It has views from Alis family, friends and opponents. Its fascinating how hechanged over time. Italso makes you think about legacy: what will you leave behind and be remembered for?

My favourite quote: The future is already here. Its just not evenly distributed William Gibson.

I believe that artificial intelligence is thefuture. Machine learning will power healthcare. Itwill augment and assist doctors, rather than replacing them. Peoplewill access care wherever they are, whenever they need it, without waiting or taking time off work which will also be good for employers.

A leader I admire is Jacinda Ardern, PM of New Zealand. Leadership is about how you act under pressure. Herresponse to the Christchurch terror attack comforting people and facing theissue head on to bring about rapid change was exemplary.

Its important to get away for a day to relieve the pressure. For me, its about spending time with myfamily. My son and I go to watch West Ham United football is a shared passion.

Tech empowers us to teach. The Lancet Commission reported that we need to train2.2million more surgeons to perform 143 million more procedures a year by 2030. That got me thinking: how can we disrupt the training of surgeons? Using VR, social media and TV, Ishared my surgical skills with millions ofpeople in real time. Ihope its pushed a boundary of what we imagine learning couldbe in the future.

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The inspirations of Shafi Ahmed surgeon, teacher and futurist - Director magazine

Cyber Police

The Dubai Police department is officially planning on adding Tesla Cybertrucks to its fleet, Arabian Business reports.

The official account of the Dubai Police department tweeted an image of a Cybertruck with its logos on it with the caption 2020 on Tuesday.

The news comes after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday that the oddball electric pickup has already received 250,000 pre-orders.

Commander-in-Chief of Dubai Police Abdullah Khalifa Al Marri told Arabian Business that the new cars will help enhance security presence in tourist destinations.

The Dubai Police department already has a pretty astonishing fleet of luxury sportscars, including some of the fastest cars in the world, from the Bugatti Veyron to the Lamborghini Aventador.

The Cybertruck will be a worthy addition to the fleet. Its clad in a thick exoskeleton of cold-pressed stainless steel and features bulletproof windows although the jury is still out on that last bit.

The unusual truck also has impressive specs when it comes to acceleration and range. A top of the range tri-motor variant with a price tag of just $69,900 can go from 0 to 60 in under three seconds and features an advertised range of over 500 miles.

As for how the Dubai Police is expecting to get their hands on Cybertrucks next year when production is expected to start in late 2021 is still unclear.

READ MORE: Tesla Cybertruck will serve and protect with Dubai police force [CNET]

More on the cybertruck: Elon Musk: 250K People Have Pre-Ordered Cybertrucks

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Dubai is Adding Tesla Cybertrucks to its Police Car Fleet - Futurism

Ahead of World Aids Day, three charities have launched the worlds first sperm bank for HIV-positive donors in New Zealand, the BBC reports. The facility, called Sperm Positive, could help fight the stigma that still surrounds the illness.

Three HIV-positive men have already signed up. The men have such a low level of the virus in their blood that the illness cannot be transmitted through either sex or reproduction, according to the BBC.

According to UNAIDS, theres 20 years of evidence demonstrating that HIV treatment is highly effective in reducing the transmission of HIV, meaning that people living with HIV with an undetectable viral load cannot transmit HIV sexually.

The sperm bank will provide clients in touch with local fertility clinics once they find a match.

I know what joy children can bring, I love having them around, Damien Rule-Neal, a New Zealander who was diagnosed just under 20 years ago who donated to Sperm Positive, told Radio New Zealand. I feel like now weve got the science behind it to say that medication makes you untransmittable and that people can go on to have children, as Ive seen a lot of my female friends that have HIV go on to have children, it shows that science and medication have given us that ability back.

HIV is still a major global health problem. While there are effective treatments, theyre expensive and there still is no cure.

According to UNAIDS, there were about 38 million people worldwide with HIV/AIDS in 2018. Only about 62 percent were able to access antiretroviral therapy globally.

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New Zealand Opens World's First HIV-Positive Sperm Bank - Futurism

Its a Trap!

Somewhere out there, there may be massive exoplanets that orbit giant black holes instead of stars.

Research recently published in The Astrophysical Journal proposes that supermassive black holes like the one at the center of our galaxy could have tens of thousands of planets born from rings of dust and debris that condensed while trapped in the black holes orbit. If the idea holds up, it could make scientists revisit a fundamental assumption about the structure of the cosmos.

The Japanese astronomers behind the study calculate that any exoplanets orbiting a supermassive black hole would need to do so from extremely far away, lest they get drawn in and gobbled up by their voracious hosts.

Our calculations show that tens of thousands of planets with ten times the mass of the Earth could be formed around ten light-years from a black hole, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan researcher and paper author Eiichiro Kokubo said in a press release. Around black holes, there might exist planetary systems of astonishing scale.

The new study is purely theoretical. The math supports the idea that these exoplanet-black hole systems could be out there.

But as of yet, scientists dont know how to or even if they can hunt them down. Finding a way to actually test the new idea, in other words, comes next.

READ MORE: Planets around a black hole? Calculations show possibility of bizarre worlds [National Astronomical Observatory of Japan]

More on space: A Supermassive Black Hole Yeeted This Star at 3.7 Million MPH

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New Calculations: Black Holes Could Have Thousands of Planets - Futurism

Digital Dystopia

In 1989, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Now, hes trying to save it through the Contract for the Web, a global plan of action designed to stop the kind of internet misuse were already seeing today.

If we leave the web as it is, theres a very large number of things that will go wrong, Berners-Lee told The Guardian. We could end up with a digital dystopia if we dont turn things around. Its not that we need a 10-year plan for the web, we need to turn the web around now.

Berners-Lees contract, which his Web Foundation developed with input from more than 80 organizations, includes nine central principles three for governments, three for companies, and three for citizens.

They include making sure everyone can access the internet at all times, respecting the privacy of internet users, and the slightly vague goal of developing tech that brings out the best in humanity.

So far, more than 150 organizations have endorsed the contract, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. It also has the backing of several governments, including those of France and Germany but the goal is to get everyone on board.

Ultimately, we need a global movement for the web like we now have for the environment, so that governments and companies are far more responsive to citizens than they are today, Emily Sharpe, the director of policy at the Web Foundation, told The Guardian. The contract lays the foundations for that movement.

READ MORE: I Invented the World Wide Web. Heres How We Can Fix It. [The New York Times]

More on Berners-Lee: The Inventor of the Web Says Its Broken and Net Neutrality Can Fix It

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Web Inventor Unveils Plan to Save the Web - Futurism

Humans make a lot of great decisions based on hunches, like detectives who solve cold cases by tracking down unlikely suspects and baseball scouts who pluck future all-star pitchers from minor league obscurity.

Falon Fatemi, founder of the augmented intelligence platform Node, built a company based on the idea that instinct can also be analyzed and adapted into code.

During her formative years in the tech industry, she facilitated meetings between people shed met based on her intuition. A tally of the meetings results shocked her. Shed cultivated partnerships that led to millions in investments, successful hires, marriages, and a merger. These days, Fatemi wants to scale up that successful process using Nodes AI to help other professionals hire better, drive sales, and foster partnerships.

Nodes machine learning is powered by artificial intelligence, but relies on an evolved version of AIartificial intuitionto help businesses make smarter decisions.

Whats different about intuitive algorithms? As futurist Maurice Conti says in his TED talk The incredible inventions of intuitive AI, new computer programs are becoming less like Star Treks Spockfocused on logical thought and more willing to rely on gut instinct like Captain Kirk.

But most companies arent worried about navigating the frontiers of the universe. In a more down-to-earth example, a business can use a platform like Node to help find more prospective clients like your best customers, without ever having to define what best means, said Fatemi.

Consider this case study. Within minutes of meeting a potential customer, a car salesperson has a hunch theyll become a buyer. When that hunch turns out to be true, the dealership may ask the salesperson for tips on putting together an ideal customer profile. But what if the salesperson is unable to offer specifics that can be plugged into an algorithm?

Using Node, a business can enter general information about their best customers, hires, or markets and the artificial intuition will connect the dots, working out the characteristics that create the best fit for the company. The system may even sense when a disengaged employee might be ready to look for a new job, which can in turn help leaders understand the needs of their workforce better and focus on retaining talent.

The system, modeled on human intuition, learns and evolves as it receives new data.

The technology begins to teach you. Weve seen a variety of use cases where the system was able to use that data to uncover new markets of opportunity, seeing into the future to identify and intuit which products would work better in which markets, Fatemi said.

Computer intuition can even make some of the most tedious chores, like scheduling and trip planning, easier. In response to a competition organized by the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, researchers from MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory adapted the problem-solving strategies of MIT students into an algorithm to tackle scheduling challenges. The result is perceptive software that improves on previous attempts by 10 to 16 percent.

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Can a computer have intuition? - Verizon Communications

In her early days at Gombe, Jane Goodall spent many hours sitting on a high peak with binoculars or a telescope, searching the forest below for chimpanzees. Learn more about Goodalls groundbreaking behavioral research at Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall, an exhibition organized by National Geographic and the Jane Goodall Institute. The exhibition is open at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C. from Nov. 22, 2019 through summer 2020. Photograph by Jane Goodall, Jane Goodall Institute.

THEATER Playwright Ken Ludwig found inspiration from his parents story for his newest play, Dear Jack, Dear Louise, which has its world premiere at Arena Stage. Two faraway strangersa U.S. Army Captain physician stationed in Oregon and an aspiring dancer and actress in New York Cityexchange love letters during World War II. Through December 29. $41-$95.

MUSICThough Blues-rock singer/songwriter Stephen Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash in 1990, you can still hear his tunes live. Blues band Moonshine Society will perform his 1984Couldnt Stand the Weather in its entirety at Pearl Street Warehouse; the album mixes Vaughans originals with covers such as Jimi Hendrixs Voodoo Child. Free, 8 PM.

MUSEUMS Learn more about Jane Goodalls work with chimpanzees at the National Geographic Museums hands-on exhibit Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall. See images from Goodalls work and venture into a replica of her research tent. The exhibit also includes aa life-size hologram of Dr. Goodall and a 3D exploration of the park in Tanzania where she did her research. Through Summer 2020. $15.

SHOPPING Now in its 15th year, Downtown Holiday Market has been a staple of Chinatown with a rotating group of exhibitors. Find a unique handmade giftfrom paintings and photography to jewelry, ceramics, and candlesor just enjoy the mini-donuts and other foods as you browse. Through December 23. Free to attend, 12 PM to 8 PM.

EXPERIENCE Walk through a Christmas light maze at Nationals Parkin search of a missing reindeer. The maze is90,000 square feet with a 100 foot tall lighted pine tree as the centerpiece. The event also includes a Christmas market and ice skating trail. Through December 29. $19.99-$33.99.

MUSEUMS Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai is best known for his renown painting Great Wave Off the Coast of Kanagawa, but he was extremely prolific beyond just that piece. Charles Lang Freer gathered the worlds largest collection of Hokusais works, which will be on display at the Freer|Sackler Galleries for close to a year. In addition to Hokusais paintings, see the artists drawings for woodblock prints (hanshita-e), folding screens, and hanging scrolls in the exhibit Hokusai: Mad About Painting. Through November 8, 2020.

DANCE The Nutcracker is a holiday staple; The Washington Ballet takes the Tchaikovsky score and re-sets the story in 1882 Georgetown with George Washington as the nutcracker and houseguests such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. November 23-24 at THEARC, $30-$55. November 30 December 29 at the Warner Theatre, $31-$200.

LECTURE The National Gallery of Arts current exhibit The Eye of the Sun: Nineteenth-Century Photographs from the National Gallery of Art shows the development of photography in its first 50 years. The gallery is hosting a lecture on Sunday that specifically explores the roles that women played in those early years; hear about the types of jobs women had in the field and how photography changed throughout the 1800s up to the advent of the Kodak Girl as a marketing campaign in the 1890s. Free, 2 PM.

SHOPPING Get a jump start on your holiday shopping while sipping beer at Port City Brewings first Alexandria Makers Market. In addition to goods from Alexandria-based crafters and designers, there will be a few DIY workshops where visitors can get hands-on and crafty themselves. Learn how to brew bath bombs and makehand-letter ornaments. Free to attend (workshops require tickets, $25-$48), noon to 6 PM.

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Things to Do in DC This Weekend: A Jane Goodall Exhibit, Holiday Markets, and a Massive Maze at Nats Park - Washingtonian

Over the next five to ten years, the technology industry will shift from Cloud 1.0 to Cloud 2.0, and managed services providers that can smooth enterprise adoption of disaggregated cloud services will prosper greatly.

But the trick to seizing that opportunity isn't understanding the progression of technology, which is fairly predictable, but the use cases that it will enable, Tom Koulopoulos, chairman of the Delphi Group think tank, told attendees of NexGen Cloud 2019 conference in Anaheim, Calif. on Tuesday.

In a keynote titled "How Next-Gen Cloud Will Transform Business," Koulopoulos told the NexGen audience: "the value that people in this room bring is going to increase by orders of magnitude."

[Related: NexGen Conference & Expo 2019]

The pace at which computing power and storage capacity increases mostly follows a trend line. But business advantage comes in understanding how people, and organizations, use those resources.

To illustrate that point, Koulopoulos, a highly-regarded futurist and author, traced the evolution of computing technology, from the IBM ENIAC mainframe of the 1950s to the smartphones we all carry arounda large percentage of the 10 billion computing devices in existence.

Back in the 1950s, no one could comprehend the use case for what is essentially 10 billion ENIACs. Similarly, we can't comprehend what will come in the next 60 yearsbut the next 5 to 10 years are in clearer focus.

An "insatiable appetite for data," will characterize emerging business models that revolutionize every industry, he said.

Currently, from transportation to health care, the stumbling block is storing and accessing the right data, as we're generating more of it than human beings know how to understand and decipher.

What's worse, it's all too expensive, Koulopoulos said. There's still a long way to go to achieving Cloud 2.0, where data is bottomless, and storing any that might be of value is economically viable.

"The economics of data ultimately define the parameters of your business model," he said.

Those challenging economics have slowed cloud adoption. Currently, only 10 percent of companies have moved their data into the cloud.

"We've barely seen the economic impact of this movement. But it's going to happen," Koulopoulos said.

Companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google deserve to be commended for building the first-gen cloud. But what has held up universal adoption is that those providers still present a bundled economic model.

Cloud 2.0 will be the unbundled cloud, deconstructing servicescompute, storage, networkinginto components offered by vendors that can optimize each of them independently. Look to what Wasabi is doing for storage, or Packet for compute, as examples, Koulopoulos said.

"Your role is to be the aggregator of these various services," he told solution providers gathered in Anaheim.

Slowing that progress is lock-in to Cloud 1.0. "Once you're locked in, it's really hard to get out of it," he said.

The channel will play a key role in unlocking the next phase of cloud, which further frees companies to focus on their core competencies and shed all othersan essential pursuit for businesses that want to remain relevant as the world rapidly changes.

And for most businesses, technology is essential to the products and services they deliver customersbut it's not their core. Cloud partners must figure out how to eliminate the friction that makes it harder for their enterprise customer to focus on their core value propositions, Koulopoulos said.

"What you deliver as an industry is the elimination of technological friction," Koulopoulos said. "You take friction out of the equation, you increase the velocity of the transactions, and increase the pleasure of the user experience."

That sentiment resonated with Ben Schmerler, director of strategic operations at DP Solutions, a managed services provider based in Columbia, MD.

Schmerler works on guiding direction of the business, and sees the paradigm shift currently under way as one that will drastically impact MSP practices.

"We have to be bleeding-edge within our core, willing to embrace this new stuff, embrace change, but remember fundamentally who we are," Schmerler said. "That sounds like it's conflicting, but I dont think it is. "

MSPs have to constantly assess how the deliverables they excel at can be provided to suit the modern and rapidly evolving market, Schmerler said.

"A lot of MSPs become very stale," he said.

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Futurist: Channel Has To Remove Friction To Cloud 2.0 Adoption - CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

While Michael Rogers says he wasn't a fan of the title "futurist" at first, he's come to embrace the title for himself. And he recommends that MSPs start thinking of themselves as futurists, too.

"Part of your practice going forward is going to be being a futurist," Rogers said Thursday at the NexGen 2019 Conference and Expo in Anaheim, Calif., an event hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

[Related: Blockchain: 5 Things The Channel Needs To Know]

"Futurist" is a useful title because it gives permission to "think out a little bit further" than usual, he said--which is something MSPs ought to get into the habit of doing, if they aren't already.

"I think there is an interesting role for futurists and R&D in your industry," Rogers said. "Because you are building the infrastructure for the next decade. I often call it the 'virtualization of America and the world'--the fact that more and more of what we do, how we learn, how we shop, how we need our mates, is going into the cyber sphere."

While many would contend that's already happened, "my argument is that it's actually just started, he said.

"We will be stunned 10 years from now by how much goes on in the virtual world and has been moved to the virtual world," Rogers said. "The winners toward the end of the next decade will be the ones who best figure out what belongs in the virtual world, what should remain in the physical world, and how you connect between them."

Rogers outlined several specific technologies he believes will be "very important in the virtualization of the world" down the road--even if they "may not play a big part now in the MSP world.

One technology is smart glasses, including devices that are starting to emerge that can project a virtual screen that can be controlled by voice (or even by hand in the air). Potential uses for the glasses include aiding with repair work in the field, Rogers noted.

Another use for new display technologies is to better enable distributed workforces--with Rogers giving the example of new systems that could be described as "videoconferencing on steroids." The systems could offer a high-res, wall-sized screen that is connected to another office within an organization.

"In the demo I saw, you walked into a coffee lounge in Palo Alto and it looked like an ordinary coffee lounge with a table, chairs, coffee maker. And then there's a full-size video screen, completely covering the back wall, on which you saw identically the same coffee lounge," Rogers said. "It literally looked like one room. And that was up in Portland, Oregon. So you'd walk into Palo Alto, a bell would ring in Portland, Oregon, to indicate someone was in the coffee lounge, and your co-worker from Oregon would come out."

Research on those offices suggested that a piece of work divided between the two sites was equivalent to work occurring in the same space, Rogers said.

Allen Falcon, CEO of Westborough, Mass.-based Cumulus Global, said this example of visually connected offices resonates, because it recognizes that the human connection is really important in work.

So if you're not going to go physically into the office, your work relationships still have to be there. And the visual component of communications, which is more than half of communication, has to be there as well," Falcon said. "And so really focusing on the technologies that let people use the network to work and live in the way they want, as a convenience, and as a way of maintaining the human connection--I think that's an opportunity for our industry."

Other examples of technologies that Rogers expects to be increasingly important going forward include blockchain, IoT and artificial intelligence.

AI, he noted, is already automating a wide range of white-collar jobs, including in sectors such as law. For instance, in just a few hours, eDiscovery applications are capable of going through evidence that previously would have taken months, he said.

"It is clearly the way forward for a lot of these white-collar organizations where work is being automated by AI," Rogers said.

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MSPs Will Help Enable The 'Virtualization Of The World,' Says Futurist - CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel