latest posts

Cell Phones are Transformative

It can be argued that the three most transformative technologies of the last twenty years are the personal computer, the Internet and the cell phone.  I have written often in Evolution Shift about the first two, but not of the third, until now. 

As is often the case, a look into the future first entails a look back to the past.  In 1984 there were 25,000 cell phones sold in the U.S.  In 1990 that number had grown to1,888,000 units sold, and in the year 2000 52,600,00 units were sold — a million phones a week!  That number has continued to …

It Starts with Hide and Seek

The first interactive game we play with infants is ‘peekaboo’.  Once they can walk we move on to hide and seek.  There is absolutely no one I know that can say that they never played hide and seek.  This primitive, universal children’s game is where we often first use our intelligence in three dimensional space to search, choose and find.  So it comes as no surprise that the first step in creating life like robots would be to teach them the game of hide and seek.

Robotics is now moving from the operation of robots remotely to the interaction of robots …

This post goes into that age old category of ‘learn something everyday’. As regular readers of this blog know, I believe that we must do everything we can to both find alternative sources of energy and slow down the accelerating global warming trend. One of the key ways to accomplish both of these is through technological innovation.

The other day I read an article in the New York Times that was nothing less than thrilling regarding technology and global warming. Six years ago the architect Richard Meier designed a church in Rome. The dominant design element was …

In the post below, we looked at reasons why coffee and caffeine might have become the ‘drug’ of the current decade.  In our ‘always on’ culture, the need for a stimulating pick me up is clear.  I would now like to explore the other aspects of this new coffee culture, as it is the manifestation of a number of social trends and cultural dynamics that are fundamentally changing our society.

Starbucks [for this post I will use them, the biggest brand, as the representation of all the new wave of coffee houses] is often thought to be brilliant because they …