Lifeboat Foundation

So much can happen between now and 2040. Here are our 20 predictions of how technology, society, regulation and markets could evolve.

“Aqua” pushes the envelope in every possible way.

Circa 2015

Since the first laser was invented in 1960, they’ve almost always given off heat — either as a useful tool, a byproduct or a fictional way to vanquish intergalactic enemies.

But those concentrated beams of light have never been able to cool liquids. University of Washington researchers are the first to solve a decades-old puzzle — figuring out how to make a laser refrigerate water and other liquids under real-world conditions.

Continue reading “UW team refrigerates liquids with a laser for the first time” »

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This is the boat of the future and we are sailing.

Thanks to Eric Klien Brent Ellman and others.

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We all subconsciously learn complex behaviors in response to positive and negative feedback, but how that works in the brain remains a century-long mystery. By examining a powerful variant of reinforcement learning, dubbed distributional reinforcement learning, that outperforms original methods, the team suggests that the brain may simultaneously represent multiple predicted futures in parallel. Each future is assigned a different probability, or chance of actually occurring, based on reward.

Here’s the kicker: the team didn’t leave it as an AI-inspired hypothesis. In a collaboration with a lab at Harvard University, they recording straight from a mouse’s brain, and found signs of their idea encoded in its reward-processing neurons.

Polynomials aren’t just exercises in abstraction. They’re good at illuminating structure in surprising places.

Does objective, perfect randomness exist, or is randomness merely a product of our ignorance?

Are Administrative/Executive Assistants (EA)/Personal Assistants (PA) already living in the future as new technology hits the workplace?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most disruptive technologies affecting today’s business environment. Explosive developments, funding and support for increasing the role of AI in all sectors, and across all job roles seem to be a key driver of the future of business. The impact of AI over the next decade is expected to completely transform the landscape, and no industry, or job, will be left untouched.

Jobs are among the chief concerns whenever the topic of AI is mentioned. Most people have by now heard that “robots are coming” for jobs, and that mass unemployment is “inevitable” in our collective future. But, some jobs could be transformed for the better with the rise of smart technologies making routine work easier, allowing people to focus on the job elements that they can really add value to. For that reason, we suggest that the Administrative/Executive Assistant (EA)/Personal Assistant (PA) of 2025 will not be replaced by technology, but rather, enhanced by it.

In many ways, the future is already here. Though the Admins/EAs/PAs are indeed job roles which are already being affected by AI, there is ample evidence to show that the future outlook is actually quite good as a benefit of smart technology.

Continue reading “The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same: The Administrative Assistant of 2025” »

The upcoming volume, After Shock, features 50 of the world’s most renowned futurists reflecting on the 50-year legacy of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, and looking ahead to the next 50 years. Seven of the contributors have been guests on Seeking Delphi ™ This is the second in a series of repeats of these podcasts, which will lead up to panel discussion with some of the authors, on the book and the Toffler legacy.

Dr. Cindy Frewen is a futurist and architect living in the Kansas City, MO area. She was formerly board chair of the Association of Professional Futurists, and was one of my instructors and mentors in the University of Houston’s graduate foresight program. Here essay in After Shock is titled Cities in Crisis: What Toffler Got Right and Wrong.