Posted by Dr. James Canton on January 21, 2011 under Uncategorized | 
This year we are going to have to redefine the economy. Too many innovations are emerging that are blowing up business models but I do know this: The Mashup Economy is coming.
The Mashup Economy is all about the convergence of new media, social networks, influence management, predictive analytics, mobility and Web 2.0. This is not your father’s economy (or mothers!) The point is that a collision of new innovative even disruptive tech will be offering new business models-watch or serious games, social selling, virtual world markets and person to person marketing.
The currency of new ideas will rule. Learn the new language of the Mashup, the Mashup Economy.
Stay tuned
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
Facebook is transforming consumers and business by offering a new dynamic marketing model where Attention and Community Rules. Not that Google and even newcomer GroupOn do not challenge the establishment of marketing, but Facebook’s fast adoption by consumers is leading the way.
Every organization should stand up and realize the Death of Marketing is here, that is traditional marketing. If you want to touch consumers, Facebook’s lessons about collaboration, birds of a feather, consumer to consumer advice and the de-personalization of technology–the digital community of virtual friends (even those you never met!) is forging a new marketing narrative.
GroupOn, Google, Facebook offer a glimpse of a future marketplace of the Mashup Economy that’s coming.
Stay tuned
Posted by Dr. James Canton on December 29, 2010 under Uncategorized |
Each year since 1990 I have offered an overview of the top trends for the next year. Here is this years GFF. Enjoy.
Global Futures Forecast 2011 (PDF)
Posted by Dr. James Canton on November 24, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Over 50% of the planet lives in MegCities today. We are forecasting over 65% by 2025. Part of the mobile migration is about jobs. 1,000 years ago it was security, safety even culture. We will need to get much better at feeding and providing basic services for the next 200 megaCities that will emerge. From energy to health care, the next M
egaCities, that is 10 million or more people will need care and nurturing well beyond the planetary logistics we know of today.
At the Institute for Global Futures we have been working with corporations and governments to better understand the needs of the future and how tomorrow’s MegaCities will demand an entirely new narrative about culture, business, communications and interaction.
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
So for those that have not heard about Singularity University, http://singularityu.org/sponsored by NASA and Google it is a university by futurists, inspired by Ray Kurzweil futurist, author and Peter Diamandes the X Prize founder.
Out of these concerns, and grounded in the belief that advanced tech innovations might save the planet and our way of life, Singularity University was born. A place to educate and share big ideas about how to develop human and tech potential to meet the challenges of the future.
The objective of the school is to actually blow up schools, at least the model of education. The big idea is to prepare the next generation of leaders to deal with exponential tech and innovations that could transform the planet for the better.
As lead chair for Futures and Forecasting track, I am concerned that we are not preparing leaders fast enough and deep enough to meet the grand challenges that confront humanity now and in the future. Grand challenges like accelerating climate change, the next 500 megacities, feeding 9 billion people, peace and security for the future planetary needs of our children. We need a new type of leadership model that is ready for the future.
Check it out. We just graduated the first executive group and the first university student group this past summer.
Singularity U is an experiment in transforming not just education but in thinking and doing for creating a better world.
What is next for nano, bio, neuro, quantum and IT? Come and find out, many lectures are online. We are building a community, join.
Check out the Synthetic Biology talk on the front page at www.Singularityu.org
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
Just got back from India. Crazy mashup of nextgen innovation and spiritual capitalism. Drove the new Nano from Tata Motors, revolutionary. Why? For about $2,000 US it enables millions to get a car and will transform the logistics and transformation of the developing world.
Also, spent some time at CRL, a supercomputer putting out 200 pentabytes of thinking, glowing, aware power. In the CPU room was a image in honor of Genesh, the Hindu Elephant God, very auspicious, good vibes, such a fantastic fusion of spirit and computing, the AI inside or out. Ghost in the machine or human in the machine?
Posted by Dr. James Canton on May 10, 2009 under Uncategorized |
A new film project, The Surrogates movie, is Terminator meets Blade Runner demonstrates the rapid acceleration of technology and its impact on society—in radical new ways. Its is based on a graphic novel of the same name. It is a bold even dark future that could happen. As with every technology there are good, bad and ugly scenarios that share an equal possibility of emerging as reality. This film captures this chaos.
We just finished on Friday the prequel to Surrogates. This is the yet to be released film starring Bruce Willis and directed and produced by the Terminator movie team. The film is about a future time when everyone has a surrogate, a robot avatar of sorts, that operates in society. The prequel is the mini film documentary about how robots will change human society, in dangerous ways. More complicated then robo cleaners, in this future, humans experience life via being connected to Sim Chairs that wirelessly connect with their Surrogates, their robo-selves.
In this future, robo-surrogates take risks, engage in adventures and operate in society often because their human owners don’t go out. Surrogates offer a parallel society of interactive robots and humans who experience their robots every sensation. There is a murder, the first in 15 years of a surrogate and their human. Willis is assigned the investigation to unravel the murder.
What the prequel, a short film I am being interviewed for, explores the future of robots and society. What kind of a dangerous Extreme Future, world are we creating where both robots and humans will interact in intimate and collaborative ways that may fundamentally change the nature of human culture. In the film, as today, we are not ready for accelerating innovations–from synthetic biology to AI–that creeping into every aspect of our world. Yes we move forward towards a number of Singularities–computing, nanotech, biotech, neurotech, quantum.
In a world where everything is connected, aware, interacting and even alive, new synthetic life forms, systems and smart processes are emerging, even here, few are watching. Some are not human. There may be other non-human agendas emerging that are directing the evolution of planetary culture, parallel to human evolution. Are you watching?
My last book, the Extreme Future explored some of this landscape, read it for more future forecasts. Look for Bruce Willis’s new movie, the Surrogates in Nov. 2009.
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
The Ghost Hack that is now embedded in about 100 million computers, perpetrated by an rogue Asian secret organization is waiting for instructions. It is an experiment in how powerful hackers can comprise our IT infrastructure. Just an experiment in staging a penetration on a scale we cannot properly even measure. Showcase for future intrusions?
Now take the Swine Flu. There are few life forms on the planet that are older or more agile then a virus. They make perfect platforms for carrying engineered pathogens or bio-agents. Given this relative benign nature of the current Swine flu, we cannot forget that the global pandemic speed that this flu traveled, covering in less then two weeks 40 countries should be noted.
The connection between two random but global agents, to reach the penetration, from a systems acceleration perspective is not random. In a larger context, both of these events, one seemingly random, the Swin flu and the other a purposeful malicious hack, have the same global system dynamics–fast trajectory of penetration, borderless mobility, digital and human infection, infection velocity and transglobal impact.
At the Institute for Global futures, we track these seemingly wild card events to establish patterns of connection so we are able to make forecasts, trends and provide advice to our clients. This is an example of a speculative but plausible scenario we are watching.
Posted by Dr. James Canton on April 1, 2009 under Uncategorized |
This article comes from MIT’s Tech Review and is startling in its implications for what is next in not just computing, but in driving the Singularity Forecast. Will we witness an era where AI rivals human intelligence or even surpasses it?
Perhaps a different form of AI, different form of consciousness from human beings, a synthetic form of intelligence I would maintain, has already emerged.
I wrote about this in my article When the Network Wakes Up. In it, I posed the notion that perhaps the Singularity has already started and we did not notice because we are so human-centric in looking for consciousness and intelligence that is biological, or computational in form, when there is a new A-Life model that is emerging, a mash-up of silicon and biology. Read on.
Artificial intelligence investigators have built a fully silicon scale simulation of the human brain. The artificial neurons operate faster than the organic model, are built to learn and adapt.
The Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project takes a different approach to other electronic intellect endeavors. Research like the Blue Brain project, run vast software simulations of virtual brains, which allows them to tinker with the conditions and wiring of the brain with the tap of a keyboard. On the downside, you’re running a layer of simulation of a parallel system on top of an utterly sequential computer system, which slows things down.
The FACETS hardware instead builds direct silicon similes of synapses and neural circuits, creating a real hardware brain which can operate in parallel just like the human mind. Sure, it’s more of an American Idol mind at the moment, with only two hundred thousand neurons compared to a hundred billion in your head (a factor of five hundred thousand).
But the FACETS architecture is scalable, and the team already has plans for a billion-synapse super chip – for those of you updating your “end of the human race” calendars, that’s a fifty-thousand-fold increase in one generation. And we all know that computers don’t have new generations more than once or twice a year.
FACETS Artificial Brain
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
The use of geospatial information is transforming every industry, from health care to climate change. For an example, check out the Tornado Map. This map shows the spatial distribution of 43,433 tornadoes in the United States recorded between 1950 and 1995.
