I’ve said many times before, being a futurist is like being a meteorologist, you are usually right, but at the wrong time. I think it’s futurist’s bane always to be right – but too early.  I feel as humans, we can look at the clues around us, and with some vision, put together a relatively reasonable scenario of where things will go.  We see things like Amazon Go or the Beta Store or Wheelys and think that yes, one day, we will all shop in stores where there are no workers. As we walk into the store, the store will detect who we are, and it will watch us pick up items in the store and put it into our cart, bag or basket, and then automatically charge us for the items as we walk out. We see this happening in a few places, and it’s not hard to predict that it will be more widespread.  Or autonomous cars – we see it happening and being tested in several areas, several states have made changes in their laws to help facilitate the use of autonomous vehicles. We go to conferences like CES and see not only autonomous vehicles, but also autonomous flying cars (which look like a large drone, sized to carry humans), and we here that companies in Dubai and Los Angeles are starting to test them.  We hear about Elon Musk's idea for Hyperloop, a train so fast that it can take us from San Fransisco to LA in an hour, something it takes six hours to drive now. We also hear about great recent strides in AI, powering virtual assistants, computer vision and machine learning, creating human facsimiles who may even be able to think like us one day. The exciting thing is that all of this is totally possible – some of it is also possible today.  It’s not the technology that is holding us back – many of these technologies exist and can be combined to build all of these innovations. So why aren’t they here today?

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