Category Archives: NEXT

The Me.Ring is just a concept design at the moment. But if it were to be actually built and widely marketed, its impact would be dramatic. The ring consists of a switch: when you are open to having your data shared, you flip the switch to the “on” position. To remain anonymous, a user wouldContinue reading “NEXT: The Future of Data Privacy”

Demographers have observed that, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent downturn in economic activity, birth rates in the U.S. have declined. Research from Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine observes that “that the Covid pandemic would lead to a decline in U.S. births of about 8%, as compared with the number ofContinue reading “NEXT: Baby Bust…or Baby Boom?”

For the last two weeks, I’ve been an avid participant at the (virtual) Polymath Festival, organized by the Da Vinci Network, and specifically by Waqas Ahmed, author of The Polymath. It has been a pleasure meeting like-minded practitioners because, I fear, there are very few such venues or opportunities to do so. A polymath isContinue reading “NEXT: Jack-of-All-Trades, Bachelor of Polymathy”

We wait with impatience for the widespread vaccination of the population. The news about COVID-19 has lately been focused on the relatively rapid speed with which the vaccines were produced. In what is usually a years-long process, the Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are now being injected—albeit slowly—in American arms. What has been notable aboutContinue reading “NEXT: The Future of (Bio)Coding”

I anticipate that one of the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will be the emergence of a new philosophical movement. Like existentialism in the 1950s or transcendentalism in the early nineteenth century, this movement will be sparked by the thoughts of philosophers and intellectuals, but the ideas will soon extend out into broader publicContinue reading “NEXT: Neo-Essentialism and Post-COVID Philosophy”

I caught myself before I “got it wrong.” I have written before that, because futurists think in terms of scenarios and probabilities rather than predictions and certainties, we really do not consider being right or wrong the true metric of our value. Getting the future “right” means only that a scenario we posited—one, perhaps, withContinue reading “NEXT: The Future of American Global Scientific Leadership”

I have a friend who recently confided in me—somewhat sheepishly—that she had spent $50 on a virtual concert ticket for her favorite band, Blackberry Smoke. She worried that others might judge her for such a seemingly extravagant purchase for what amounted to a live stream of a concert. (I should note that the $50 alsoContinue reading “NEXT: Virtual Reality and the Future of the Arts”

A curious phenomenon has been happening at our CreativeMornings Columbus event series. Ever since we moved into Zoom, a number of people from outside Columbus have been attending our events. We’ve had participants from Detroit and New York, but also from Mexico City and Stockholm as well. In May, I hosted a design event overContinue reading “NEXT: Zoom Globalization”

Why are some future effects of technology “unforeseen,” and is there anything that can be done to prevent this? A recent white paper from the consulting firm McKinsey explored the future of the “Bio Revolution.” Their analysis anticipated that the leading sectors in biotech over the next decade would include biomolecules, meaning the engineering ofContinue reading “NEXT: Seeing the Unforeseen Effects of Technology”

What follows is not a prediction. It is a plausible scenario written in the form of a “history from the future.” The scenario is written as if the year were 2030… On July 1, 2026, City Council announced a change to the city charter, renaming the city of Columbus as “Scioto.” While there had beenContinue reading “NEXT: Scioto, Ohio – A Story”