The current financial crisis is part of a larger realignment going on in the world.  There is a new Age that is beginning and with it comes a new restructuring of many facets of human life.  We are now entering the Shift Age, which is the global stage of human evolution.  This means that many aspects of humanity, certainly economics are being reorganized from the way they were during the Information Age and the earlier Industrial Age.

All year, in this column and in speeches given around the country, I have stated that the economic downturn we are going through must be looked at from a new perspective.  The ‘is it a recession or not’ and ‘is it a bear stock market or not’ is a far too narrow focus for insightful discussion.  There is something much larger that we are beginning to move through.

We are beginning to move into a new global reorganization of human society.  We have known for close to a decade that we are moving …

As a futurist, I view the financial crisis that exploded last week from a high level, long term perspective.  The macro forces that are reshaping our world must be considered when such a crisis occurs.  In addition this particular crisis will force us to reevaluate long held economic ideals that may no longer have validity in their purest forms.

It is important to state that there are many traceable causes to this crisis. It is these particulars that politicians and those that need to blame something or someone will focus on as a way to justify a point of view or to seek retribution.  There will be much argument about who is to blame and what needs to be done to protect the U.S. and global financial system from further meltdown.  This is an important discussion to have, as long as there is perspective and an honest desire to right the ship rather than to just be right.

There have been financial crises in the past that can be looked at for guidance and for reassurance.  Guidance in how to handle what now confronts us, and reassurance that we can and will weather this crisis.  The Great Depression has been mentioned a lot this past week, as it was the specter of such a calamity that provoked the actions made by the Fed and the Treasury Department .  This was due in part to the fact that Ben Bernanke is regarded as an authority on this historical economic event.  Perhaps a more …

Last week the Internationale Funkausstellung was held in Berlin.  This is the largest consumer electronics convention in Europe, equaling and perhaps surpassing the CES show that occurs every January in Las Vegas.  One of the central themes behind major new product launches was the Internet and the central role it is now beginning to play in the wirelessly networked home.

This has been something that has interested me for years and a subject about which I have written here and here in this blog.  As recently as five years ago, the topic of convergence was a speculative, hot one in media and technology circles.  The convergence discussed then was would there be convergence of the computer and the television?  Would people ever fully accept viewing television content on the computer?   Well we now have the answer to that loud and clear:  yes! Even Steven Jobs doubted this would happen.  He famously said that the profound difference between computers and televisions was that people leaned forward when interacting with computers and leaned back when watching television and that therefore this content convergence would not happen.  Well it did.

Now this convergence is combining with wireless connectivity to begin to change the connection of technology in the home.  The long predicted vision of technologists and futurists of the home of the future where everything is connected and can be monitored and controlled is now beginning.

Sony introduced plug-in adapters to allow some of its Bravia television sets to connect wirelessly to the …

The new age we are now entering, The Shift Age, will be a time of great transformation.  One of the areas that will undergo the greatest transformation is health and medicine.  It is expected that nanotechnology will bring great changes in both medical treatments and life expectancy.  The miniaturization of computer and chip technology will finally initiate the era of the bionic human to some degree.  There will breakthroughs in pharmacology and discoveries that will basically be unintended consequences of research into the treatment and cures of many diseases.

One such incredible discovery was reported last week by researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego.  They reported that they had found two drugs that increased muscle endurance without exercise.  The two drugs, Alcar and GW1516 increased the endurance of ‘couch potato mice” dramatically.  Alcar increased the mice’s endurance by 44% after just four weeks of treatment.  GW1516 increased endurance by 75% but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

Across the country the sound of overweight couch potatoes clapping their remotes together was positively deafening.  On Wall Street, the price of publicly traded health club chains plummeted as sellers shorted the stocks.  Kidding on both accounts.

This discovery is analogous to eating meals without calories or smoking cigarettes without any negative health consequences. The “no pain, no gain” mantra spoken by thousands of personal trainers nation-wide might thankfully be retired.

There are some serious immediate positive possibilities for these drugs.  Health conditions such as obesity and diabetes which …