Tag Archives: future

Space Travel

If you could take a trip to the Space Station, would you go?

If there was a shuttle to an outpost on Mars, is that I trip you would want to take?

Does the idea of weightlessness, and escaping gravity appeal to you?

I wonder if leaving Earth’s atmosphere is something that will be as accessible as traveling to a distant continent in my lifetime? Pay for a ticket, hop on a spacecraft, and spend a luxurious week in zero gravity.

Part of me wonders if I’d enjoy it as much as I think I will, and part of me thinks I’d feel nauseated for most of the trip. But I want to go! I want to experience weightless and see the entire earth from space. I want to do a space walk. I want to put my feet on the moon or on Mars.

I want to holiday off planet. This is a bucket list destination. Who’s with me?

Creativity and NFT’s

I think by now everyone has heard of NFT’s.

NFTs (or “non-fungible tokens”) are a special kind of cryptoasset in which each token is unique — as opposed to “fungible” assets like Bitcoin and dollar bills, which are all worth exactly the same amount. Because every NFT is unique, they can be used to authenticate ownership of digital assets like artworks, recordings, and virtual real estate or pets. – Coinbase

Right now I think many people see this as a fad, and there are all kinds of tokens being created and sold for ridiculously high prices, which both make the news, and seem like a silly waste of money. But there is something here that is pretty special in two different ways. And when the dust settles and the fad-y-ness goes away, it is creatives who will benefit from these tokens.

1. Re-sale of art.

When an artist sells an original, they get the sale price and then they don’t benefit if the art is resold. Often an artist will take years to get popular (much less famous) and their early work is essentially given away compared to their later work when they become known. With NFT’s, artists can get a percentage of the resale value. The token can be tracked and if sold on an NFT market (rather than a private transaction) then the artist can keep a commission.

2. Tokens tied to real world rewards.

There is a DJ named 3LAU (Justin David Blau) who sold NFT’s of his work in an auction,

“The way 3LAU structured his auction was very cutting edge and the mechanics of the auction should be noted. There were 33 available winning slots in total for the auction. Slot #1 was the Platinum Tier, slots #2 – 6 was for the Gold Tier, and slots #7 – 33 was the Silver Tier. Each tier contained digital artwork, music, and physical goods (Vinyl) connected with the project. The winner of the Platinum Tier also won a custom song created by 3LAU with the winner’s creative direction, tokenized as a 1 of 1 NFT.” ~ Dennis Martin

In another auction, the top tier included lifetime tickets to every concert he does. And since this is an NFT that can trade hands, it can be sold if the buyer no longer wants this.

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So while you’ll read things like, A Rare CryptoPunk Ape NFT Was Sold for $10 Million USD in Ethereum, and wonder why? Or how this can be sustained? Or if this is just a fad? NFT’s will have value desired by others. Yes, there will be silly collectables selling for way too much. But there will also be the ability to play games and earn items of value that can be traded rather than just hoarded. And that is another way NFT’s will be used to trade items people will want to pay for.

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Collectables and video games aside, NFT’s will be a game changer for artists and creatives. And in a world where automation is making items better, cheaper, and faster; and where jobs themselves are becoming more automated, there will be more time and space for artists to hone their crafts as a way of making a living. NFT’s will be part of that future where artists can sell their work, provide experiences for their fans, and benefit from the resale of their work as their popularity grows.

NFT’s might seem like a fad to you, but they are here to stay, and some time in the near future you’ll end up owning one if you attend a live show, or buy a piece of art, or maybe even choose to pay for a song of artist you love to listen to.

Market volatility

Three years ago I put a little bit of money into cryptocurrency and then the market took a huge dive. It was hard to watch this ‘investment’ dive to 25-30% of what I put in. But it wasn’t like I put in more than I could afford to lose, and I didn’t panic and sell at the bottom. I held on… or as they say in crypto, HODL (a term started with the word HOLD being written with a typo, and now standing for Hold On for Dear Life).

Late last year my investment jumped back up to break even, and then soared, and I learned my first lesson about investing, and that is dollar cost averaging. If I had not put the investment in all at once, but instead had put money in monthly, I would have done so much better. The reality is that this strategy works better than 90-95% of investment strategies. So, unless investing is the thing you do, your best strategy is to put a small amount of money in every month, no matter what the market does. The volatility works to your advantage, and no one knows when the market is going to dip.

Last night was one of those dips. Wham, 20-25% down! It’s sad, but I bet many new investors lost a lot of money and sold out when they felt the pain of watching their investment sink. For me, I’ve seen this before, and my small investment is doing better than if I had put that money into an RRSP or Tax Free Savings Account. But I’ll be honest and say that for a couple years, it didn’t seem like this.

What’s interesting is that adoption of cryptocurrency is growing, the use-cases for them are incredible. Smart contracts (that cut out expensive bank and lawyer fees), back-end tracking of supply chains, and decentralized borrowing are a few places that blockchain technology are literally ‘taking over’. Also, while many people struggle with the idea of NFT’s (Non Fungible Tokens) these are revolutionary in the way an artist or creator can gain profit from the resale of their work. And the Metaverse is something that will grow and holds amazing potential… and huge profits in the multi-billion dollar gaming market.

What’s really going to change the crypto market is the speed of adoption. If you own cryptocurrency now, you are about 2-3% of the world’s population. It took about 12 years to get to this percentage. It will probably take less than 2 more to get to 5%. Three years ago I had to drive into Vancouver to put money into crypto, and because my investment was quite small, I had to pay a premium at over 5%. Now I use Netcoins, (full disclosure, that’s a referral link), and it’s a simple e-transfer, and a 1.5% premium on the purchase. Easy. And everyone has seen adds for Crypto.com, where you can buy, stake (lock in and earn interest), and even spend (with a prepay visa) crypto.

Both the interest and access have opened up dramatically, and the adoption of cryptocurrencies is about to explode. But with this comes even more volatility. With this comes the high speculation gambles and the fear selling when the market does what it did last night. And cryptocurrency is risky. It’s not a normal thing to watch the volatility of 10-25% rises and dips and think, ‘easy come, easy go’. But I enjoy looking into the projects and investing a little bit in them. I’m not planning on taking any profits out until after I retire, and I’m not putting enough in to make a difference in my day to day living and spending habits. So the volatility isn’t much more than entertainment. Though I will admit, the appeal to put a bit more money in when I see a big dip like this is pretty strong.

One thing that I fear is that a lot of younger people, with less disposable income are jumping into meme coins (popularized coins that only serve to be traded with little other purpose). These are high risk, and susceptible to ‘pump and dump‘ schemes where they simultaneously buy causing a jump in price, and get people excited to catch the ride up, then those behind the scheme dump their coins on the market taking massive profits at the top, and leaving everyone else holding the coin at a much lower value.

A 20-year old thinking long term and dollar cost averaging, will do well. A similar person seeking massive profits will end up losing their investment 4 out of 5 times, but they will know someone who was the 1 out of 5 profit-maker and think that they can do the same. Betting on short term market volatility is risky and will cause a lot of people pain. Where as, knowing that market volatility is profitable over the long term and dollar cost averaging is what smart investors do.

It’s a simple formula where risk over a shorter time can lead to greater profits but will more likely lead to greater losses, and risk over a longer time might not get the huge gains, but it will reduce the risk of loss: Invest a small amount, repeat, and HODL. The next lesson is when to take profits… I have a strategy, but I’m still trying to learn more from people a lot smarter than me.

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(Disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor and I don’t play one on the internet… this is not financial advice.)

The death and rebirth of alone

I’m listening to Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death‘. I’ve shared the amazing cartoon based on the introduction before, looking at the contrast of the dystopian novels ‘Brave New World‘ by Huxley and ‘1984‘ by Orwell, and “the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” I’ll share the comic again below.

But first, a thought about how we amuse ourselves with digital entertainment. I think that if Postman was alive today his fear of television as an entertainment distraction would have been exponentially magnified with the advent of the post Truth world that the internet and smartphone have propelled us into. In some ways this book feels dated, and in others prophetic. Television no longer has the grasp on everyone it did when this was written in 1985, but everything about Postman’s concerns are just amplified with entertainment and distraction constantly at our fingertips.

One thing this brought to mind is the fact that kids today are never bored, at least not bored like I was sometimes as a kid. I mean, I couldn’t contact my friends after school whenever I wanted, and I couldn’t choose something else to watch when nothing was on tv that I wanted to watch. I just got bored. Then I figured out a way to fill the time… by myself… all by myself as in ‘all alone’.

I don’t think kids today know how to be alone, but they certainly know how to be lonely. They are always connected yet feel disconnected. They are always ‘on show’ but many just feel ‘off’. They see social media of everyone’s best self, and feel like they can’t be that person themselves.

The new ‘alone’ is constantly connected, but always feeling alone.

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Writing that last sentence reminded me of a poem I wrote, ‘A Life Consumed‘.

Below is Postman’s Huxley/Orwell comparison I mentioned above.

A metaphor for meta

By now most people have heard about Facebook’s plan to open up The Metaverse to everyone: a virtual environment where we interact and engage in a digital world.

Back at the start of September I wrote Future Tech: Prescription Glasses Metaphor, and shared how wearable technology will enhance us. In it I said, “The future I shared above is a future with a metaphorical 30/20 vision. It is the ability to see and feel things that people today can not see or feel without augmentation… and this will be the new version of 20/20 vision.”

Essentially, if you aren’t augmenting your sight with added (meta) data from the world, normal vision would be like you are walking around with bad vision, missing out on what everyone else can see. The Metaverse is a bit different. It isn’t augmentation of reality, it is an alternate reality, albeit a virtual one. It is a world unto itself, with locations to visit and items to consume and purchase.

There are a lot of movies about people being trapped in a virtual world or a video game, this is a space people choose to go to. It has all the trappings of the present world, but without the crowds, pollution, and effort to commute to different places. But while I haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that first coined the Metaverse, from what I understand it’s quite dystopian, with capitalism reigning supreme and the rich controlling the virtual world. Sure, it will produce some new winners, the early adopters who understand how to build and capitalize in this new frontier. However, the rich will also do very well, and be the early buyers who build the infrastructure for profit. Facebook will profit the most, with a younger generation that was a demographic that they were losing.

It’s going to happen. It’s going to be a space everyone finds value visiting. From moviegoers, sitting in a virtual theatre with the biggest screen they’ve ever seen right ‘in front of’ their eyes. To birthday parties of friends in other parts of the world. To business meetings. To music concerts and live performances. To actual video games where you spend both time and money living in an alternate reality.

Except it won’t just be a vacation land and escape. It will be a temporary happy pill for some, and a permanent place of work for others. It will not bring happiness for most, it will only extend the rat race of the physical world into a virtual world.


if this feels like a dystopian outlook, it’s not because of the inability for this new Metaverse to be a great place, but rather because those who build it and first explore it won’t be there to make it an ideal place to enjoy, they will be there to make it a market to gain profit and power.

Welcome to the virtual rat race.

The future is on the blockchain

I know that there is a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) about the future of cryptocurrencies, but the reality is that the future will be recorded on blockchains.

Here are 3 ways that transactions will be tracked ‘on chain’:

1. Smart contracts.

When you make large purchases like a house, that includes a loan, the paperwork needs to be handled by lawyers or a notary, because the handing over of debt has to handled correctly or the transaction could leave both the seller and new owner holding the same debt at the same time, or the debt not being owned by either. Smart contracts recorded on the blockchain eliminate this by having the necessary transactions happen simultaneously only after all parties agree.

2. Decentralized finance.

If you have collateral for a loan, you won’t need a bank to borrow. These loans will provide opportunities for people who tend to only be able to access high interest loans to find more appropriate financing. And, the door will be open for loans slightly larger than micro loans, in many countries where this is currently challenging. When finance becomes decentralized regulations become a challenge, and the limits of borders and centralized control break down. There will be a Robin Hood effect where people with small amounts of equity can be both lenders and borrowers, taking the the decision-making and profit-making out of the exclusive hands of the rich.

3. Artists profit.

NFT’s – Non Fungible Tokens are baffling to many people and there are a lot of uses cases that seem silly. But usually when an artist sells a piece of work, they don’t get any value in the resale. NFT’s allow an artist to get a percentage of resale value. This is a game changer for creative people and NFT’s will be a way to track both digital and physical works of art in the future.

There are many other reasons to record transactions on a blockchain, but I think these three uses will be paramount.

We live in a time warp

When you are 10, 5 years is half a lifetime. 10 years is half your life at 20, and 20 years is half your life at 40.

By the time you hit 40, your first 20 years are a distant memory, and you remember choice moments, but you don’t remember those years like when you were younger. The distance in time causes you to lose your ability to hold on to old memories. You can’t hold an ever accumulating amount of memories, and so some fade away. So time stretches the past into a distance too far to see everything.

Meanwhile, 1 year at 10 used to be 1/10 of your life. A year at 20 is 1/20th of your life and a year at 40 is 1/40th of your life. Each year, the lengths of a year as compared to the rest of your life diminishes. So time also shrinks the future while it stretches the past. We live in a time warp, and time goes by faster every day.

Sometimes it’s good to reflect on this, if only just to appreciate the fleeting moments in a day, and know that unless we appreciate the time we have, we can only appreciate the memories that we know will fade away.

Dropped calls

I live in an old house, and rather than traditional drywall, we have plaster with wire mesh in it. This makes our house a bit like a Faraday cage. Some days when reception is bad, I have to find a spot that works and stay still to keep the call from fading in and out, and sometimes I even have to go outside.

But I notice it’s not just at home. I have bad zones in my school too, and will even tell someone I’m talking to on the phone, ‘You might lose me for a couple seconds as I walk through this hallway.’

My running joke is: iPhones are amazing, they can do so much, it’s too bad they don’t make good phones.

I do find it odd that I’m better off on a Zoom call or WhatsApp, streaming a video call on wifi, than I am making a simple phone call. As the world slowly moves towards global wifi, I think we might see an end to traditional phone calls. We’ll still carry phones with us (one way or another), we just won’t be tied to a phone network and locked into phone company contracts. And we won’t be dropping as many calls.

Come Together

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Twin Towers falling in New York. I’m guessing everyone over the age of 35 can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they found out about this. I bet they can also describe at least one visual from that incident that clearly sticks out in their minds. A few months later, I got to hear a first-hand story of an educator that was in a nearby building, and what the evacuation was like. Four years ago I visited the museum at ground zero, and what we thought would be an hour-long visit was almost 3 hours.

What strikes me now is not just the horror of what happened, but that this was a defining moment for so many people. It changed their perspective on the world. It made the world a more dangerous place, where just getting on a plane or going to work could cost you your life because of the decision of a few people intent on doing something evil, based on the illusion that they will benefit greatly in the after-life. How many people have died across the world, across the past few hundred years, in the name of a God that wants to punish non-believers.

It was also a time to come together. To feel a common pain, and to support those that needed help. It was a time when political affiliation and religion gave way to being a good samaritan, a good human being.

Why do we need a man-made catastrophe to make us come together? I think now more than any time since 9/11/2001 we could have people find a way to coexist with their neighbours/neighbors in a tolerant and caring way… no matter their political or religious ideologies.

If we don’t come together now, there will be a man-made reckoning soon… because we live in a world where a few crackpots can weaponize and wreak havoc on a scale that will make global news. And so I’d rather we find a way to use tolerance rather than violence to move us out of false dichotomies. I want to see us come together before the under 35 year-olds are put through their own defining 9/11 incident. I fear that if we don’t, the incident might be more divisive rather than unifying, and that scares me.

Future Tech: Prescription Glasses Metaphor

It’s the early 2030’s and you are walking downtown, heading to a specialist appointment. You don’t know where the office is, but you aren’t looking at a map on your phone. You haven’t done that in a few years. No, instead, you are looking through a contact lens that is like a heads-up display giving you augmented reality directions. There is simultaneously an arrow flashing 3 times in your view, showing you that you need to turn right in 15 meters, and a haptic vibration from an implant in your right elbow. The vibration you feel in your elbow has a pattern of long-short-short, which you have set to let you know is a map direction.

Had the vibration been in both elbows with a short-short pause short-short vibration, then you would know that it was a phone call from one of your chosen favourites, and your heads-up display would have shown you the name and/or photo. You have it set so that you need to look down and right to see the name and face of the person calling, but it could have been set to come up right into your line of sight. If the call was from an unknown number, you would not even have been bothered. Instead the call would have been answered by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that (for voice phone calls) sounds like you, but with a decision tree to decide if the call is worth bugging you, leaving you a message for later, or even blocking the call if it determines it is spam. Since you are just walking, it might have offered you a text version of the message on an augmented display, but if you were in the specialist’s office, the AI would have waited until your appointment was over to notify you of a message.

You arrive at the specialist’s office and because you connected on LinkedIn, your AI has identified the secretary from her profile picture, and her name pops up above her head so that you can greet her appropriately. You wave your hand over a scanner, stare briefly at a ‘Yes’ box to indicate that you want to share your personal medical information, and you are done signing in. Because this is a medical specialist, that data includes the last year’s worth of bio information like heart rate, blood-sugar levels, and even blood pressure. A small implant collects this data in a just slightly more sophisticated way than the current apple watch. If the doctor didn’t want to run some specific tests on you, all this would have been done remotely, with the Zoom call actually happening through your contact  lenses and an implant in your ear. To get around the fact that you don’t have a camera on your face, the person you are talking to sees a perfect rendition of your face, and even if you were watching, you wouldn’t know that is wasn’t actually you. It even uses your voice intonation to help determine the emphasis on facial expressions, so if you said the same thing twice, it would look subtly different, rather than robotic.

Is this a future you want? Because it’s coming… and you will embrace it. You will participate in it. Because to not do so, would be to have a disadvantage.

When my youngest daughter was 9, we took a trip to England and France. In Paris we went to the Eiffel Tower, and it was there that we learned our daughter needed glasses. We had just come back from China, where we had been living for 2 years, and we hadn’t had eye exams in almost 3 years. We got to the top of the tower and my wife started pointing out things to look at, and my daughter couldn’t see any of them. At 9, she didn’t know that she couldn’t see well. She thought everyone saw the way she did. Distant hills were supposed to be blurry. What about street and store signs? Who needed to see those, they were in Chinese anyway, and we couldn’t read them. Once we returned home, we went to the optometrist and our daughter has worn glasses or contacts ever since.

The future I shared above is a future with a metaphorical 30/20 vision. It is the ability to see and feel things that people today can not see or feel without augmentation… and this will be the new version of 20/20 vision. The same way that my daughter was disadvantaged without her glasses, any person not augmenting their lives with technology will be disadvantaged compared to those around them. They will be less connected, less informed, less able to see. It would be like my daughter realizing that she couldn’t see like everyone else, and still deciding not to get glasses. Augmented reality will be the prescription glasses of the future, and you can choose to use the prescription, or stay in the dark.