Mr. PAUL SAFFO (Institute for the Future): This is a money machine for Google.
Paul Saffo, a futurologist and one of the world's most enthusiastic technophiles, also looks at the downside.
"I really like the idea of buying music once and never having to buy it again, " Saffo says.
Speaking before the students of the Singularity University Executive Program in October, Saffo enumerated seven keys to effective forecasting.
FORBES: Forecasting Amid Rapid Change: Paul Saffo On Cultivating Business Foresight
Human-piloted fighter jets and the humble compact disc are on the top of Saffo's list of technologies soon-to-be gone.
Saffo says this is a growing market, but says boomers are not going to be excited to buy phones with big buttons.
FORBES: The Top 10 Tech Trends: Live From The Churchill Club
The big losers, Mr Saffo thinks, are the suburbs that were built for specific functions in a previous era but are now blighted.
The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley.
Around the turn of the century, as some astronauts, typically executive road warriors, got smarter about packing light, says Mr Saffo, they graduated to an intermediate stage, becoming hermit crabs.
"My nightmare fear is some congressman is going to seize on this and they're going to pass some laws, " says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute of the Future in Menlo Park, Calif.
"We build our new technology edifices on the rubble of older technology, " says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster who relishes telling the story of Disney's ill-fated house of the future and other now neglected technologies.
应用推荐