‘101 Things We Know About Our Future’ – An Esoteric List of Things That are Happening Now and Next!

My mind all too often races with ideas; I think too much. The busy activities in my head lead me to regularly scribble down lots of thoughts about the world around me. Overall, as a futurist, it’s a remarkable time to be alive – and with that in mind, here’s a list that I’ve accumulated as to ‘101 things we know about our future.’

Some are obvious, some are not so obvious. Let me know what other ones you think about. Contact me.

1. 1. We’re obviously shifting from driving cars based on gas and internal combustion engines to those based on batteries and electric – and it will happen faster than you think
   2. Energy grids are shifting from mostly one way distribution to massively two way interconnected systems
   3. We’re entering the era of connected agriculture, in which a kid who grew up playing Farmville will define the future virtual farm
   4. Oil is over. It’s a sunset industry in decline as renewables come to dominate all future spending
   5. Solar power generation is growing faster than any other form of energy
   6. Constant bio-connectivity body monitoring, such as done through your mobile device, will forever transform healthcare
   7. Connected pharmaceuticals will one day soon report on how well they are working inside your body
   8. Africa is the next big economic powerhouse
   9. We’ll never go back to the world of in-person retail shopping like it was before Covid
   10. You are surrounded by modern things right now that will become ‘things from the olden days’ during your lifetime
   11. Most major companies will be at risk of failure through computer security hacking issues – until security becomes a Board of Directors responsibility
   12. The fact that there are ‘fitbits for cows’ is a trend that is helping to accelerate battery storage technology
   13. The next generation has no attention span whatsoever: and this has big implications for everything!
   14. We’re moving from a world in which we fix people after they’re sick – to one in which we know what they are going to become sick with and act accordingly
   15. There will soon be a lot of weed-zapping robots on farms, along with tiny robotic pollinating insects
   16. Change-resistant baby boomers are starting to leave the economy, making things even faster than they are
   17. Machines are starting to think on their own a bit more. We don’t yet know what this means.
   18. Most successful companies today will eventually go the way of Sears, Blockbuster, and Kodak – because of leadership complacency and hubris
   19. Right now, someone has the perfect idea in mind to put your business model into a death spiral – and you might not notice till it is too late
   20. The concept of data-transmitting crops is a marvelous thing – and we’ll see it in our lifetime
   21. We will soon have windows most everywhere that generate solar electricity, simply by being windows
   22. Car companies don’t know how to innovate at the speed of Silicon Valley. This is a BIG problem – for them
   23. Insurance is moving from looking at the past performance of something to looking at real-time indicators from that thing
   24. Baseball bats, golf clubs, and footballs will have spatial connectivity technology as a built-in feature – providing for a new era of sports and exercise feedback
   25. We’re quickly moving from ‘learning how to drive to ‘learning how to supervise a car’
   26. Batteries are at the heart of most significant future trends
   27. Manufacturing is no longer about mass production, it’s about mass customization
   28. We’re moving to a world of 24-hour farming – autonomy means that we no longer have to farm only when the sun is up
   29. In the near future, you’re going to eat “who you are”, with daily food plans based on your personal DNA profile
   30. There are a lot of things you will use in 10 years that have not yet been invented.
   31. Just-in-time insurance will dominate the industry within a decade
   32. You might one day golf with a personalized drone flying overhead, filming your round
   33. Most kids today will work in a job or career that does not yet exist
   34. Your business model won’t last next 10 years
   35. Bionic, artificial eye implants will soon bring eyesight to the blind
   36. One of the biggest energy opportunities in the next decade is to be found in an integrated home-energy wind/solar/battery/thermostat/iOT integrated system.
   37. Your car dashboard of today will be obsolete in but 18 months, just like your smartphone
   38. There is someone in a garage at this very moment with a really great idea that will become a billion-dollar company
   39. Half of the knowledge we get in the first year of university or college is obsolete, or out of date, by the time we graduate
   40. Urban farming within the 35 megacities of the future 20+ million people will change our entire concept of agriculture
   41. Norway will hit 100% electric vehicles by 2025, and other nations will soon follow
   42. It’s pretty likely that the US will follow the trajectory of the Roman Empire as its democracy goes into its death spiral
   43. One day, the road on which you drive will automatically charge your electric car
   44. In the future, you’ll be able to buy a DNA sequencing machine at Dollar General
   45. Most regulatory bodies will continue to act slowly in a fast-paced world – and the disconnect of today will have bigger implications tomorrow
   46. We’ll probably soon have little robotic micro-drones regularly tending crops in agriculture
   47. The acceleration gap between the speed of change and our ability to deal with it is big — and getting bigger
   48. Technology oriented seniors community care is a ‘next big thing’ – and will come just in time to deal with a massive flood of Alzheimer’s’ patients
   49. Much of what you know today is already obsolete – you just don’t know it yet
   50. Most of the cost of equipment in every industry will be within the software and the chips – and not within the other hardware
   51. Most new homes will have driveway drone pads with an automatic storage locker as a standard feature
   52. Real-time analytical predictive insurance underwriting will be the only actuarial insurance model in the not-too-distant future
   53. We’ll one day use 3D skin printing technology to deal with medical burns and other complex issues
   54. Rather than megabits and terabits, you’ll be talking about yottabits. Hint: look it up
   55. The volume of known medical knowledge is increasing 48% annually, going from 153 exabytes in 2013 to 2,514 exabytes in 2020
   56. Smart, connected contact lenses will soon be able to monitor your health, such as with diabetes
   57. We’re quickly moving from a world of computer code written by humans – to code-written-by-code-and-data
   58. One day, Apple will be delisted – every company eventually becomes irrelevant
   59. 40% of the big car makers of today won’t exist by 2030, because they weren’t able to make the shift to technology-focused electric vehicle technology
   60. Some kids born at this very moment might very well live beyond the age of 125 years
   61. Human brain augmentation technology will become a mainstream industry within the decade
   62. A ‘next billion-dollar industry’ will be fully integrated home microgrids – with renewable energy (solar/wind), batteries for storage, tech to direct it directly into your car, all managed through a thermostat like a device
   63. The cost and complexity of car maintenance will have collapsed with the arrival of electric vehicles because there is really nothing to maintain
   64. The arrival of a faster future means the arrival of new insurance risk – and insurance companies will have to ensure for forms of risk that don’t even yet exist, not even knowing what they are insuring for!
   65. Your car will have credit card capability embedded into the dashboard, in order to streamline drive-through and curbside pickup interactions
   66. The 40 mega-cities that will account for the majority of the earth’s population 20 years out will grow most of their food within the city, including within 100 story high ‘vertical farms’
   67. Most of your clothing will be smart, connected, aware – helping you with fitness, health, and safety
   68. Your self-driving car will ‘talk’ to a lot of the other self-driving cars around it in order to figure out where it is going and how to safely get there
   69. Much like you might have a domain name or email address today, tomorrow you’ll have your very own light spectrum on the infinite fiber-optic Internet, which will be reserved solely for your encrypted use on global optical networks
   70. By 2030, most actors have mostly become irrelevant – instead, avatars and deep-fake personalities will be purchased off the shelf, ready to be turned into the next great performance.
   71. The newest trillion-dollar company that will be common in 2035 came from a product that didn’t exist at the moment you read this
   72. Likewise, one of the most important technologies in your life in ten years does not yet exist
   73. Personal health concierges will be one of the fastest-growing career professions
   74. We won’t find it unusual at all to know that a child in the future might actually meet their great-great-great-greet-great-great-great-grandparent.
   75. The volume of medical knowledge will have doubled by the time you re-read this post 78 days from now
   76. There is a child alive today who will receive the first cranial brain implant
   77. Vision care will transition from the prescribing of eyeglasses to the basic procedure of preparing an implant of bionic eyes
   78. Many crypto-currencies will become viewed much like tobacco, due to their destructive environmental impact
   79. Knee replacements will be grown at a bio-tissue farm, with customization based upon your specific DNA.
   80. The TV show the Jetsons will soon seem like it too is from the olden days
   81. Most major shopping malls of today won’t fulfill that function tomorrow – they’ll be something else altogether. We don’t yet know what.
   82. Some of the most respected democracies in the world will go full-fascist, leading to really challenging political realities
   83. You’ll have a custom 3D food printer in your home as you become a part of the world of real-time, customizable food programming
   84. Human longevity in industrialized nations will undergo the first significant decline, dropping an average of 10 years, mostly with those who think science is not a thing
   85. We’ll find that the hyped ‘metaverse’ didn’t happen with avatars, but did with heads-up displays and similar technologies
   86. The concept of ‘just-in-time learning’ will come to dominate most of our education system in the years to come
   87. We will soon be growing human body parts in labs for use in many major surgical procedures
   88. Someone will figure out how you can spend an actual hour inside the very mind of your pet, thinking and seeing the world exactly as they do
   89. 50% to 80% of the revenue that a company will generate by 2030 will come from a product or service that does not yet exist today
   90. Many of the trucks in the industrialized world today will be driven by virtual drivers on the other side of the world tomorrow
   91. What we did for heart health in the 20th century, we did for brain health in the future
   92. Every single device that you use day today will be a featured piece in a museum in less than 25 years
   93. Most car dealers don’t yet accept the inevitability of the demise of their business model
   94. In the future, the idea of a ‘lighter than air’ plane will not seem ridiculous.
   95. The world of science will have taken us from 19 million known chemical substances today to 5 billion by 2100 – and this will lead to the birth of countless new billion-dollar industries
   96. One day, you’ll wonder whatever happened to the idea of ‘change management workshops
   97. We will have figured out how to stop light in its tracks, which will have big implications for the future of all computer and chip technology
   98. 50% of Wikipedia will be useless within 10 years because of ‘link-rot’
   99. Right not, there is a company that does not yet exist that will build a product not yet conceived, using material snot yet invented, with a methodology yet to be discovered.
   100. We will still be talking about how committees are evil well into the future – because stupid companies will still form committees
   101. Fifty years out, people will still write lists of ‘101 things’ because it provides a nice structure for creative thinking