Futurist Speaker

By Futurist Thomas Frey

For most of human history, when we imagined a robot, we imagined something that looked like us. Two legs. Two arms. A head. Eyes at the top. The humanoid form — familiar, symmetrical, vaguely reassuring — dominated science fiction for a century and shaped the popular imagination so thoroughly that many people still assume it is the inev...

By Futurist Thomas Frey and Futurist Teresa Grobecker

Something important happened recently that the technology industry would be wise not to dismiss.

Eric Schmidt, one of the most credentialed voices in the history of modern technology, stood before an audience and began talking about the coming AI economy. He was booed. Around the same time, community...

There is a photograph circulating the internet that should stop every one of us cold. It shows a robotic dog — sleek, mechanical, four-legged — with a rifle mounted on its back, trotting across a dusty field on autonomous legs, scanning for targets. No human hand on the trigger. No human eye behind the scope. Just a machine, doing what machines are being trained to do: find, ...

By Futurist Teresa Grobecker and Futurist Thomas Frey

Here is a headline that seems impossible until you look at the numbers beneath it: two of the largest banks on earth are simultaneously closing branches at an accelerating rate and announcing massive branch expansion campaigns. Bank of America is closing two locations for every new one it opens — and yet i...

By Futurist Teresa Grobecker and Futurist Thomas Frey

There is something deeply strange happening inside the global banking system right now, and almost nobody is talking about it clearly.

In 2024, banks around the world generated more profit than any industry in recorded history — $1.2 trillion in a single year. Record balance sheets. Record earnings....