thinkfuture: technology, philosophy and the future

If you are looking to build and launch breakthrough products, then you don’t need to be reasonable, you need to be unreasonable. Being reasonable keeps you in the realm of incremental innovation, adding small new features and functions to a product until it gets so complicated and unwieldy that a whole industry has to be built around it (Microsoft Windows and Office anyone?) No, to make breakthrou...

Our smartphones have already turned us into cyborgs. We should just admit it and understand that we have evolved into a new kind of human - one that cannot survive without augmentation.

Look around you. Unless you are in nature somewhere - almost everything around you is a human invention.

Just like Frank Lloyd Wright, current architecture is saddled by zoning, rules and regulations. Do you have similar rules when it comes to developing innovative products and services?

Apple can now detect if you are having a heart attack before you even are aware of it and dispatch first responders: this is a) good, because people do not want to die b) not good, because Apple has your health data and c) OK because the positives far outweigh the negatives. This is the kind of help we need. 

Who would want smart bots to do all of this stuff for them – how can they be trusted? So I questioned myself, and I’d like to throw this question out to you, dear readers, what do you think? Do you feel that we should be giving up more of our agency to technology – that we can trust it to do what we want – or do you think that we have already given up too much agency and we should wrest it back?

How often do you hear "let's go for the low hanging fruit"? Why do we always go after the easy stuff - when the sweeter fruit is typically higher up in the tree.

Customers want things to magically happen today - not in some future universe.

The modern world has filled us with stress since we really haven’t evolved far from tribes wandering the savannah. Think about that for a moment – think about the time before smartphones, before the internet, before computers, before human flight, before cars, before locomotives, before the Renaissance, before the dark ages, before the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians. Go way back, even...

It’s true innovation. Like the Segway , which pushed the boundaries of personal transportation and Google Glass , which pushed the boundaries of wearable devices , Libra is pushing the boundaries of cryptocurrency.

When you think about it, we are all living in a multiverse of realities. What we each experience is our own reality. Even when more than one of us is in the same time and space, we don’t see an objective reality that we can all agree on – we still see our own realities, they just happen to be overlapping in time and space.

Many jobs are just "wall washing", serving no real purpose. Are you in one of those jobs? Do you know someone in one of those jobs?

Your employees are professional adults - give them a goal to shoot for and just let your folks go.

Is having no personal space at work really the best way to get the most from your people? Maybe it's an underhanded way to get more people to work from home? We've already seen an explosion of purchasing noise-canceling headphones.

We are already cyborgs - we are already augmented humans - is our life more complex due to our technology or is our technology making our lives more complex. Personally, I feel that we are not using technology properly - it should serve us, not the other way around.

A wide-ranging discussion on education and why not everyone needs a college degree to get a good job. The founder of AlternativesToCollege.com talks about creating a resource for those who want to skip the college debt cycle. 

All you need to know about IP for your startup or great new idea - detailed interview with George Likourezos of Carter DeLuca

A masterful show with the master of productivity, Dr. Todd Snyder, a psychologist, productivity coach, and decision consultant. We deconstruct what you need to do to be successfully productive.  Books mentioned on the show: The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months   Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life  Integration Marketi...

I’ve said many times before, being a futurist is like being a meteorologist, you are usually right, but at the wrong time. I think it’s futurist’s bane always to be right – but too early.  I feel as humans, we can look at the clues around us, and with some vision, put together a relatively reasonable scenario of where things will go.  We see things like Amazon Go or the Beta Store or Whe...

If you see a need, try to fill that specific need as simply, as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Don’t be afraid to put out something half-assed in your own mind; it might be the exact thing your customers want. Sometimes your best is too much, sometimes spending too much time refining, rewriting and tweaking to make something your best, might be the exact thing which kills it as a product. Nex...

Does persistence always win over talent? Yes, for many reasons, but here are two: 1) if you keep going on anything - writing, dieting, working on your startup, eventually the moment will come when you will luck out and win and 2) persistence is additive - the more you do it, the more you have and the more you want to keep doing it.

William Shatner's philosophy is something that he developed from the days when he was a starving actor, desperate for roles. It was, simply put, “Say Yes To Everything.”

A wide-ranging discussion on ageism, marketing, the future. Plus some great start-up ideas and activism thrown in for fun. Links discussed on the show: The Unstoppable Rise of the Zaddys -- in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/t-magazine/zaddy.html Getty Images and AARP Launch the Disrupt Aging Collection http://press.gettyimages.com/aarp-and-getty-images-launch-the-disrupt-agi...

Innovation IS risk, it requires risk, and without risk, how can you innovate? This company has just given the death knell to internal innovation. If the most critical metric in your employee’s objectives for the year is managing risk, how innovative do you think this company will be?

Can you innovate by copying?