As a futurist I often feel as though I live in a déjà- vu world. I write about something and then months or years later it occurs or becomes something that is on the minds of a lot of people.

This is the first of what may be occasional columns from years past written here that, for one reason or another, are relevant to what is currently going on in the world.  As a futurist I try to write “ahead of the curve” or to take a “future look at today”. Sometimes old columns resonate today.  This is one of them.

The recent – and ongoing – flap about privacy settings on Facebook is just the latest incident that makes us think about our privacy in this age of connectivity and social media.  When we are confronted with this issue, predictably we seem to recoil and speak about invasion of privacy.  We get upset that our personal data is or could be shared with people we don’t know.

Facebook, with  almost too numerous to count privacy settings, is clearly a conflicted company when it comes to privacy.  It has a culture, purpose and business model that is completely about sharing, or sharing completely.  A complete surrender of privacy is the ideal.

To focus on Facebook and other social media as a place of concern for privacy is myopic.  We all long ago gave up privacy for the sake of convenience.  In the larger scheme of things we have willingly, if not fully consciously, …

In the past year I have found that framing conversations about certain topics with the context of being of the 20^th century or of the 21^st century to be clarifying for most people.

I have written extensively about humanity being in transition between the Information Age and the Shift Age.  Those who have heard me speak or read my writings come to understand and accept this.  That said, this is a higher concept than the simple reality of the calendar.  No one can dispute the numerical fact that we are 10% into the 21^st Century, unless you want to debate whether the scientific concept of linear time verses the older concepts of cyclical time or chaotic time.

Once you start to look at the world, its’ institutions and both business categories and specific companies, through this 20^th versus 21^st century filter, things become clearer.

Here are some examples:

I could go on for pages, but the lists above should both provide clarity and food for thought.

A very simple way to look at the world is through this filter as it will bring clarity as to what will last and what won’t, to what will be significant and what will not be.  It is clear that companies created in the 20^th century that …

In the last column we looked at the general dynamics underlying the reality and need to create an automotive industry in the U.S for the 21^st century. We now take a look at what this industry might look like. An analysis of trends, developing technologies and the role that the federal government can and should play, makes it is clear that this industry will be substantially different than that of the 20^th century.

At the beginning of the 20^th century there were dozens of car companies.  The story of the last century is one of consolidation so that by the 1990s there were only the Big Three and a few foreign companies producing vehicles in the U.S.  These companies from the last century will continue as the scale part of the business for the next 5-10 years.  They will be joined by smaller, more nimble companies that will bring innovation to the marketplace.  Tesla and Aptera, mentioned in the last column are just two examples.  There is a real possibility that there will be dozens of companies by 2015.  The new companies will not provide scale, at least initially, but they will lead the market with innovation.  Some companies may produce hundreds of vehicles, others thousands, others tens of thousands.  These companies will successfully compete with the big companies on the playing field of innovation.

Clearly the cars produced in the next 10-15 years will be generally smaller, much more fuel efficient and will use less and less gasoline.  The first stage …

The mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is a magnificent and historically important event.  The images coming to us from space as the astronauts work on repairing the telescope are beautiful, up close and personal and once again instill awe in those of us that watch.

For most of my life the increasingly incredible pictures and videos that have come back from space have taken we humans out of our planetary realm and realities and lifted up into the cosmos.  The world literally stopped and listened on transistor radios when John Glenn orbited earth in the early 1960s.  The whole world watched as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969.  The first space walks allowed us to live through others the almost unimaginable reality of a human floating freely in space.

Since then we have become detached from what NASA and other space agencies are doing up above as we have allowed ourselves to become somewhat jaded.  The first time things happen we are captivated, as they continue in on-going frequency they seem to lose their impact.  We no longer stop what we are doing to stand, listen and watch in awe. We again get absorbed both in our personal lives and the seemingly urgent and much more important political, cultural and economic dynamics of our world.

The Hubble telescope has been in orbit for 15 years.  In that time it has altered the knowledge and theories scientists have held about the universe and its infiniteness.  It has shown us …

The fundamental force dominating the global economic condition right now is fear.  The equity markets seem to have no other reality.  Any rally of a day or two when buyers enter the market to take advantage of historic lows in share prices is then wiped out by the longer term, more powerful emotion of outright fear and increasingly entrenched pessimism..

The media does occasionally gives us the heart warming human interest story and tells us of jobs out there but serve this up only after spending most of the time delivering bad news with a tone of concern and a furrowed brow.  We turn on the news, or open the paper with an expectation of learning of something else that sounds bad and, yup, there it is, another story of a company or a country in crisis or people having lost everything. Watching the stock market indices has become a …