GlobalFuturist

Futurist, author, keynote presenter Dr. James Canton, CEO Institute for Global Futures, author of the Extreme Future. Blogs about future global trends in tech, innovation, medicine, security, IT, science, population, culture, economics. http://globalfuturist.com/

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By Steve Keating SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - In 2066 when the Super Bowl celebrates its 100th anniversary fans will not just watch the National Football League's championship game - they will live it in all its bone-jarring virtual reality glory. Football fans will look back on Super Bowl 50 in much the same, quaint way people today reflect on Super Bowl I, a simple sporting event with halftime marching bands that did not sell out.

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Its 2016 and do you know what innovations will change your world? Here is your executive summary. This is a quick take from my annual forecast from the Institute for Global Futures that focuses on wha

Innovation is the only competitive advantage--in your company, your career and your life. If you want to find out what's on mind, what are the cutting edge innovations that will change the game coming soon, check this out. Your either shaping your future or your competition is.

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James Canton | HP Futurist James Canton speaks with HP Matter on emerging developments in healthcare and artificial intelligence, and on the continuing obsession with disruption.

Here’s what’s coming in tech--Be the disruption or disrupt. Fair warning.

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Is Google now working on artificial intelligence and deep learning to turn the web into just a more efficient search engine, or are they creating a new a type of synthetic intelligence that can predict and help our civilization?

In an era of massive business disruptions it is not just about the outcome--about the tech or new shiny thing. It’s about the mindset, the ideas that led to the innovation. 

If you consider the new digital business models, new knowledge supply chains and dynamic virtual markets, it is clear we are in a new era, the Connected Planet. The intimate networking of networks, mobility, social media and machine learning are creating entirely new businesses just emerging now.

 In this post I explore current disruptions that are driving new business models and strategies. I suggest that we are in a dynamic new era where fundamental business models are being invented that will shape the future. 

This post is from a recent keynote presentation at Ameriprise corporate event based on a body of analysis based on my new book Future Smart: Managing the Game Changing Trends that will Transform Your World. 

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7 Futurists On What To Expect In The Next Decade

From smartphone apps that can do seemingly everything to driverless cars and eerily humanlike robots, the past decade has seen dramatic advances in science and technology. What amazing advances ar

An interesting look at what coming next and whose saying it--including myself.

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The Future Impact of Ai on Business, Lifestyle and Society

This is the first of a new series of explorations, investigations and emerging forecasts that come out of both my organization’s Institute for Global Futures and my recent book Future Smart: Managing the Game Changing Trends that will Shape Your World. It is an inquiry and forecast into the future of Ai, artificial intelligence.

We are all surrounded by Ai, artificial intelligence that even by mentioning the uses, my observation is that unless you are an Ai scientist you probably don’t realize how ubiquitous Ai has become in our world. The trajectory of Ai penetration into our media, security, security, social media, health care, entertainment, financial services--our lifestyles, business and society is increasing. As my friend Ray Kurzweil would remind us, exponential technology is increasing exponentially. Ai is everywhere and it is evolving, learning and emerging more prominent every day, though still invisible to most of us.

This replaces the slow and predictable Moore’s Law but Ai is deeply embedded in our world. From Ai’s that trade stocks, make those pics better w fuzzy logic to Siri’s intimate questions on our iPhones to Google’s app’s that show you what your interested in or Facebook and LinkedIn auto-analyzing our interests, topics as well as our shopping preferences, emails and GPS location intelligence--Ai is behind it, watching, cognizing, correlating, “thinking” about  data, people, products and connectivity.

 Ai is watching and learning what we desire and in the future Ai will help us find it. Are you ready for this New Future? Now it seems like a Spooky Future if your being spied on. But if your kid’s Cancer was just diagnosed by a Class Three Asimov Ai which saved her life from early detection, well then that Ai is your hero. 

Back to now. You just used Apple Pay on Uber in San Francisco. Well then maybe your interested in a guide book for that next trip to Paris, thinks the Ai at Amazon. Do Ai’s talk to one another yet through metatext or HTML? This is present day Ai technology at work--trading stocks, designing asset portfolios, managing supply chain optimization--heck the entire Internet, telecom and global communications infrastructure is run by Ai’s used by humans. 

Now you maybe thinking that these form of Ai, or Machine Ai, M2M or what will be called IoT, Internet of things is not very smart yet. But it doesn't have to be to get a specialized job done that is important: find the best packet network to transmit data, or find a airline seat or even locate a particular search item to buy. 

If you just consider that the largest technology companies who are all focused on transforming business, lifestyle and society are investing the heaviest in Ai technology well you begin to grasp what’s going on. These companies will compete to design much smarter Ai that will be smarter for specialized jobs then even most humans, maybe in place of any humans in the future. 

Facebook IBM, Apple, Google and Microsoft, are some of the billion dollar club of companies that rightly see the future of Ai as dominating the future of business, lifestyle and society. From security to healthcare, to manufacturing to financial services and entertainment, Ai will dominate the future innovations in every industry, affecting every job and every nation. Vast online trading platforms and innovation ecosystems for learning, health care and manufacturing will be managed by Ai. 

The emergence of a new competitive advantage from smarter tech, which breeds smarter people, smarter companies and even smarter societies, or so I forecast will completely change the competitive landscape of jobs, nations and industries. Of course the  promise--of the use of Ai’s to augment humans, or replace humans, to increase the capacity to be more and differently productive is the bet. 

Already cloaked in new terms such as Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing and Deep Learning you will find Ai at the core of each of these developments. While there is important work being done in neuroscience, machine Ai and computer science that lays the foundation of the New Ai Revolution, its the demand for Ai shaped by our lifestyles, business competition and society that is shaping the future. 

The demands come for greater productivity and efficiencies that only Ai may be able to produce.  Ai can process data faster, find and correlate patterns humans cannot see or even understand in the future. Maybe Ai will even teach us to understand how to manage business, risks and the planet’s resources. 

As Ai’s get smarter, more connected and start delivering Big Value such as IBM’s Watson for health care, which is developing a Oncology Advisor to better diagnose and maybe prevent Cancer someday, we will be amazed at these new super tools, the Ai’s among us. 

The likely risks, as with any new technology, will be large. But as Rodney Brooks and others have pointed out, we should not fear Ai. We should seek to enable Ai’s to understand humans. In the chapter on our Neuro-Future in my new book I call for moral machines that can meaningfully understand human morals and values. 

You may think this is rash or bizarre to consider but Ai’s will become even more intimately engaged with humans. Look for the A2H, Ai to human interfaces, in cars, elevators, medical devices even in people, coming sooner then you think. 

Stay tuned. 

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Connectivity is the New Asset Class: Are You Connected?

if you have not noticed business is going through another transformation driven by global connectivity. Connected markets, supply chains, ecosystems even connected customers are redefining business. Connectivity also is being driven by technologies such as the Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, sensors, cognitive computers, algo's that are connecting homes, to autos to people to the cloud. Connectivity is driving innovations and redefining the real time access to information. 

From Fit Bit to Uber, connectivity and the speed of connectivity will redefine business and markets fast. Assets, that are based on connectivity such as cloud, analytics and mobile are the conduits for the new Innovation Economy that is coming. Every industry from pharma, manufacturing, consumer products to tech should be asking how can we increase our connectivity with everyone in our market?

Companies are building entire business models, like Uber on Connectivity as a New Asset Class. It is the connectivity of things, people, platforms, apps and services and the value of the connectivity that business needs to embrace faster. We are getting beyond the tsunami of data into the leveraging and prediction of knowledge to grow our business--connectivity as the new asset class is emerging. Best to understand how connectivity will alter the marketplace. 

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Disruption and Business Strategy: Becoming a Game-Changer

Looking out over the fast changing landscape of business, markets and society it too convenient to characterize the objective of business strategy as being disruptive, without defining what that means. Every bushiness wants to be disruptive but struggles with authentic results. 

In my new book Future Smart I bring the readers with me into a conversation about how to be a game-changer but also what this means for business strategy. Changing the game is about being the disruptor in your industry: creating a more efficient solution, a cost-effective service, providing a new insight into a radical opportunity, enabling customers to do things they cannot do now. Understanding and predicting desire, embracing innovation, paying attention to edge cultures, redefining agile business models, willing to reinvent the new, rethinking mobile digital business processes are all a good start. 

The most viable business strategy maybe to disrupt yourself before a competitor disrupts you. You have to be willing to break the rules, throw out those sacred cows and boldly go where few or none have gone. It not enough to declare your just going to get better at managing change. You invent your future. And your either inventing your future or someone else is. Make sure that's you. 

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My New Book Future Smart describes the key trends that will shape your future. Get a taste of my book in this info graphic on what's coming next>

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The Top Ten Game Changing Business Strategies for 2015

The New Year is great time to refresh your personal and business strategies. Shoot for the Game Changers, those that create bold competitive advantages. This will be a highly competitive year and you want to move with speed, agility and innovation. Here are my Top Ten Strategies to make this happen from my new book Future Smart.

1. Leverage global real-time connectivity between supply chains, customers, partners and employees for building an agile organization now. 2. Redesign every business process to embrace digital transformation. 3. Rethink cyber security by getting an external vendor to do a security audit. 4. Hire a data scientist to figure out Big Data strategies that will create meaningful opportunity and change. 5. Create a innovation culture that rewards invention, discovery and experimentation. 6. Brands that care about what their customers care about will be the winners. What do your customers care about? 7. Embrace how the talent marketplace is changing before your competition does. How can you retain and recruit smarter? 8. Commit to a mobile commerce platform that can empower customers. 9. Get bold about social accountability with actions that distinguish your social leadership. 10. Leaders envision the future with a plan and actions that spark innovation in everyone. What's your Envision the Future Plan?

Excerpted from my new book Future Smart: Managing the Game Changing Trends that will Transform Your World, DeCapo Perseus Press 2015

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The Time Travelers is an award winning film series we produced to show case advanced ideas about the future of technology like nano, neuro, quantum physics. Three teens travel through time on their quest to Save the Future. We used a form of animation called machinima and then shot in Second Life. Check out the website for more info www.ourtimetravelers.com

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How much more effective, productive and successful could your organization be if prediction was a strategic capability?

We are encountering a sea change in the future of business, in the future of one minute from now, of all types of organizations: the power of predictive systems, services and...

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My keynote on the Future of business and innovation. What are the top trends that will shape your market, industry and economy. Find out what's next and how you can become more Future Ready about the future.

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Wearable Computing will create a dynamic new marketplace where augmented reality will meet the always on web. Dynamic new business models will emerge that leverage the Wearables Big Data and Wearable Analytics capabilities every business will want to know about. Get ready for the Wearable Market.

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As I was giving a keynote presentation last week. I recalled my work as a consulting futurist on the the Movie with Bruce Willis, Surrogates and realized how close to reality this future scenario is. The technology of cloud computing as a tele-robotic platform for drones, robots and smart tech is coming faster, especially with the Internet of Things, IoT showing up now in 2014. Are you Future Ready?

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The Extreme Future of Health Care: 2020 Horizon

This graphic comes from my keynote on the future of health care where I map the key drivers of change that are coming: Cell therapy, cognitive enhancement, Genetic Mapping, Regeneration and Predicitive Pharma.

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The Extreme Future of Health Care 2014

Radical trends in health care and medicine will change business and society. This presentation fresh from Dr. James Canton's New Keynote Presentation and from h