ChatGPT is getting a lot of attention, and one area driving dialog is education. While the attention is warranted, another innovation is quietly making advances. Historically, education has been a bridge between eras – something that I explored in depth here. If you accept that signals point to a transition between eras, then education will be looked at to provide a bridge. But the question that must be answered is this: can education in its current form be that bridge? I maintain that the answer is no. Can that other innovation help? Virtual reality has quietly advanced. This article explores those advances.
Continue readingVirtual Reality
What The Community Said about Interacting With Lost Loved Ones
In this post from February 2nd, I once again posed the question of interacting with a lost loved one. This scenario is part of a broad digital twins discussion, whether it is a digital version of a lost loved one, or a version of ourselves that lives on forever. In a post from February 2020, I included this video that showed a women reconnecting with her lost daughter virtually (digital twin):
Continue readingTracking How Our Perspectives Change Over Time
It is interesting to watch perspectives change. In a post last week, I ran a poll exploring a possibility that is expanding: reconnecting with a lost loved one. I ran a similar poll about 1 year ago and launched it again to see if thinking changes with more exposure to possibilities. Please take this quick poll – I will report back on the before and after comparison.
The Impact Of Virtual Worlds On Travel
Continue readingThe tourism sector stands to benefit tremendously from the use of Metaverse technology. The greater availability of new and better sources of inspiration for travelers is one of the perks that stands out the most
Jai Hamid – Survey shows Metaverse will have an impact on how people travel
Virtual Society
Throughout history, the world has experienced tipping points – or a fundamental change in the nature of being human. How many have occurred throughout human history is subject to debate. From my perspective, we have experienced two and could be heading towards a third. Several forces are converging to create the possibility of a third tipping point. When we consider the advances of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, human-machine convergence, advances in brain science, and new computing paradigms – it’s not a stretch. Add to that list the evolution of virtual societies.
Continue readingThe Metaverse Handbook
The Metaverse is now one of those buzzwords we can expect to hear about for some time to come. With that in mind, I just finished reading my latest book titled The Metaverse Handbook. The book covers the following:
Continue readingOur Immersive Future
I have long believed that the way we interact as humans is on an accelerating journey towards massive change. Whether the next interaction frontier involves the brain or a broad Metaverse vision, it is almost certain that how we interact will change. There have been several waves of change to our interaction paradigm through at least three stages of transformation. However, the next transformation will alter many long-standing beliefs, and as we explore possibilities, emerging scenarios can be very illuminating.
Continue readingWeb3
The current buzz surrounding Web3 represents the convergence of multiple domains. In the past, Web 3.0 represented the semantic web, which focused on making Internet data machine-readable. Web3 has moved to a broader place, including the Metaverse and decentralization. The metaverse is described by Wikipedia as a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. The metaverse itself is a huge buzzword these days, but its origins date back to Author Neil Stephenson when he coined the term in Snow Crash, a dystopian cyberpunk novel published in 1992. In the novel, the metaverse is described as a 3D shared virtual world – a whole universe of shared virtual spaces seemingly linked together with an ability to teleport between them. Games like Minecraft and Fortnite are close to the vision that he foresaw. You can explore more on the metaverse here.
Continue readingThe Great Reduction: A Metaverse Counterpoint
I would define reductionism as the concept of depicting something – or rather mirroring or simulating something – that can pass as a useful and entertaining copy of the real thing.
Gerd Leonhard – The Great Reduction
Yesterday I posted about the Metaverse and shared a video that described how Norway envisioned a future where the Metaverse provided endless possibilities, improving the lives of generations to come. Having seen the post, Futurist Gerd Leonhard shared one of his recent posts with me.
As he and I have discussed in the past, the future is all about balancing the opposing forces of innovation. This has always been true about innovation, reflected in examples like fire positively transforming the world, but also burning down villages – and so it is with the metaverse. The quote and related post above positions the counterpoint to the Norway video. I’ve included a separate video from Gerd’s post below that underscores his message.
Continue readingThe Metaverse
Once a niche concept beloved of tech enthusiasts, the idea of a centralized virtual world, a “place” parallel to the physical world, has careened into the mainstream landscape this year, as epitomized by Facebook’s decision in October to rebrand as Meta
Peter Allen Clark – The Metaverse Has Already Arrived. Here’s What That Actually Means
That quote from a recent article speaks to the growing buzz around the metaverse. As the article states: “the promise of the metaverse is to allow a greater overlap of our digital and physical lives in wealth, socialization, productivity, shopping and entertainment. Essentially, the metaverse is an evolution of the current Internet. Although today’s version involves goggles, tomorrow it’s all about glasses. John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity describes the use of glasses this way: “You’re walking by a restaurant, you look at it, the menu pops up. What your friends have said about it pops up.”
Continue readingTalking To Ghosts
Storytelling is a powerful way to communicate in a world as fast-moving and uncertain as ours. Jason Fagone demonstrates its power in a brilliantly written piece on mental health, loneliness, grief, and isolation. It is a very long article, but incredibly impactful. He tells a story of a grief-stricken freelance writer that lost his fiancée to a rare liver disease. In telling the story, Jason shows both the power and fascination of current day innovation, and its fear and destructive potential. It effectively describes our need to balance these opposing forces of innovation. Some background: Jason Rohrer, a Bay Area programmer, launched Project December, which is powered by one of the world’s most capable artificial intelligence systems, a piece of software known as GPT-3. It knows how to manipulate human language, generating fluent English text in response to a prompt.
This text-based experiment created a new kind of chat service that lies at the heart of this story. He created various personalities and proceeded to communicate with them. During one exchange with a bot he named Samantha, he asked her what she would do if she could walk around in the world. This exchange led to a realization:
Continue readingVirtual Reality Converges With Fitness
A scenario I explored when looking into the Future of Sports was improving our fitness in virtual ways. As our bodies are immersed into games or eSports, athleticism matters. Where the view of gaming in the past was a teenager or young adult wasting away in front of a screen, virtual reality is turning that view on its head. In this recent Article, author Clint Carter describes the serious workouts he enjoyed virtually. In essence, your body is the games controller, and your fitness level plays a major role in how you do. Here is a description of one of those games from the article:
Continue readingEight Trends Amplified By COVID-19
I just finished another book and added it to my Library. Pandemic, Inc. explores eight trends that are amplified by the current pandemic. Author Patrick Schwerdtfeger believes we will see more change in the next 12 months then we saw in the last 12 years. He views the current crisis through an optimistic lens, seeing a time of incredible change, but also opportunity.
Continue readingVirtual and Augmented Reality Likely To Accelerate
In early 2019, I described the Three Focus Themes for the year. They were Acceleration, Convergence, and Possibilities. Little did I know that one of those themes would factor so prominently in 2020. In a recent Presentation, Mehlman, Castagnetti, Rosen & Thomas – a full-service, bipartisan government relations firm – describes 2020 as the year where forces already in play experience a great acceleration. One of those forces is mixed reality.
Continue readingImmigration, Innovation and the Coming Migrations
I recently added a new book to my Book Library. Authors Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler explore the acceleration of technology and the Upheaval we are likely to experience in the coming decade. Diamandis and Kotler investigate how exponentially accelerating technologies converge and impact both our lives and society as a whole. They ask key questions like: how will these convergences transform today’s legacy industries? What will happen to the way we raise our kids, govern our nations, and care for our planet?
Can you Reunite with a Lost Loved One?
In a recent book titled A World without Work, author Daniel Susskind described two fields of computing: computational creativity and affective computing. According to wikipedia, computational creativity is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and the arts. The goal of computational creativity is to model, simulate or replicate creativity using a computer. This field of computing explores whether Creativity is the Sole Domain of Humans.
Ray Kurzweil Predicts: Disease, Reality, and Brain Interaction
Ray Kurzwiel has always been very good at predicting; which will make some of his recent predictions scary for some and fascinating for others. That’s the general reaction when people are exposed to some of what Futurists see coming. Out of the 147 predictions he made in his various books, only 3 turned out to be totally wrong. With that knowledge in hand, this recent Article describes some of Ray’s recent predictions. Scary, fascinating, or some combination of the two? Here is a look at three of his recent predictions:
Trends that could change everything in the next decade
CCS Insight delivered a set of future predictions at its annual future-gazing event in London on Thursday 3 October. 
A longer than usual time frame was the focus, stretching to 2030. A total of 90 predictions were released. I include some interesting ones below.
PREDICTIONS
By 2021, algorithmic and anti-bias data auditors emerge to tackle “pale, male and stale” artificial intelligence.
Mapping the Path of Innovation
In a recent post, I asked my readers to help me identify those catalysts that force the actions required to steer our future towards advancing our human development. Feel free to respond to the Poll. The number one response was the rapid pace of innovation. That response supports my own opinion that the pace will ultimately force stakeholders across multiple domains to take action. Much like the Domain Convergence that occurred during our most Transformative Period in History, convergence is required if we are to take the correct path towards human flourishing.
The Future of Retail
The National Retail Federation (NRF) kicked off it’s annual event this week, and with it comes an opportunity to consider the future of retail and the type of changes we might expect. Colleagues at Tata Consultancy Services (Kevin Mulcahy, Bill Quinn, and April Harris) pulled together their thoughts ahead of the event. You can explore the future of Retail via this Article, and/or the short video below.
Reimagining the Future 