As readers of this blog know, I believe that, in many large and significant ways, disintermediation is a fundamental force of reorganization in the world today. We live in one of those eras of disintermediation. If you are new to this blog, check out the archive on this subject. We all have our guilty pleasures […]
In one of my posts on disintermediation, I stated that the residential real estate industry is and will be undergoing restructuring due to this force. In that post and in another, when I defined disintermediation, I warned the real estate brokers that this was historically inevitable and that they needed to develop ways to be […]
The first post I made here was about the significance of the MIT Media Lab and the fact that its founder, Nicholas Negroponte was taking a leave of absence to launch the noble effort of supplying $100 laptops to children in the Third World. In the six months since that post, the $100 laptop has […]
As a futurist I spend a lot of time looking for patterns — pattern recognition — and forces that may develop into trends. This is just the way I look at the world, trying to connect the dots into patterns and directions that suggest the future. However, in some cases it doesn’t take a futurist […]
It was twenty-five years ago this month that the PC was born. In August of 1981 IBM launched the Personal Computer. This of course was five years after Jobs and Wozniak came out with the Apple 1, but it was the PC, and it’s rapid acceptance first in the corporate world and then in homes […]
On a recent trip to Europe I was reminded of the fact that Europeans are so much more conservation oriented and energy efficient than Americans. The lights in hotel hallways are off until you walk by the sensor or push a button; they go on for two minutes and then go off again. Motion sensors […]
In this space I have been clear about where the price of gasoline is going and, more importantly, what Americans and all global citizens need to do regarding energy. The next twenty years are a critical time, a time of potentially great peril unless we have visionary leadership and full scientific and entrepreneurial mobilization toward […]
Modern man has moved through three different ages in the last 10,000 years. The Agricultural Age was from around 8,000 BC until the 1700s. The Industrial Age was from the 1700s to the last two decades of the 20th century, when the Information Age began. The great Alvin Toffler referred to these ages as the […]
Yes, Dachau, the first major concentration camp opened by the Nazis. As a futurist visiting Dachau, I had a similar viewpoint that I touched upon in the recent post on Berlin: how looking back at awful events can help us today and that the awful events of today, when taken in a historical perspective, are […]
It is easy for us all to get caught up in our lives. It is also very easy to think that times have never been worse in the world, that the world problems of ‘our time’ are more serious than in the past. As a futurist, I try to look closely at the present, but […]