Dr. James Canton

Media Testimonials

"Canton predicts this nano-bio-IT convergence will lead to embedded devices that will enhance human productivity, such as chips that stream information directly to the cerebral cortex, or embedded devices that enhance human intelligence or memory."
Computerworld

"Canton predicts that customers will drive innovation and that customer-generated products and services will be huge"
Computerworld

"James Canton claims in his book, The Extreme Future: The Top Trends That Will Reshape the World in the Next 20 Years, knowledge networks will be the foundation of our future economy."
Forbes

"Dr. James Canton serves notice that new technologies sweeping the financial services sector will rock your world in the next three to five years"
New York Times

"Dr. Canton predicts that the value of networks of interaction will increase exponentially as soon as fast bandwidth becomes available"
Fortune Magazine

"Dr. Canton is named Digital Guru for his timely insight and digital predictions"
CNN

"Dr. James Canton has seen the future and warns to guard against complacency, not technology"
Wall Street Journal

"Dr. Canton is one of the top 21 speakers for the 21st century"
Successful Meetings Magazine

"The major future trend that will affect everyone in business in the future will be the emergence of the innovation economy. Innovation will be the currency of the future marketplace" Indicated Dr. Canton.
US NEWS & World Reports

"Dr. Canton says there have been more technological innovations that have caused changes in culture and business in the past 25 years than in the previous 10,000 years"
Selling Power Magazine

"Dr. Canton says identify areas of vulnerability, have security teams at the ready and conduct through security tests at least every 90 days to insure your organization's economic sustainability in the event of attack."
CEO Magazine

"Dr. Canton is a futurist who envisions a whole new business world"
Wireless Review Magazine

"Dr. Canton predicts that the CFO of the 21st Century needs to understand technology better than the CIO of the 20th Century"
eCFO Magazine

"The merging of the physical and the virtual world will have a profound impact on education, entertainment, and health care. Doctors will be on the Net as they operate on patients; education will become an experience of cyber-traveling to engage in synthetic adventures; entertainment will become interactive, sensory, and infinite in its possibilities" Predicted Dr. James Canton
Business 2.0 Magazine

"Dr. Canton forecasts that consumers will be given a full sensory experience in cyberspace that will come to rival walking through a physical mall"
Executive Technology Magazine

"Dr. Canton provides fresh takes on the Global Digital Economy"
Yahoo

Client Testimonials

Population - Demographics - Workforce

Keynote Audio Podcasts

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  CIO Magazine Interview's Dr. Canton
  Sponsored by IBM
• 
  Technofutures and the Innovation Economy
  Consumer Bankers Association
• 
  The Extreme Future
  Trend Buro's 11th Annual Trend Day
• 
  NPR and The Extreme Future
  NPR Interviews Dr. Canton on new book, The Extreme Future
• 
  Natl. Agri-Mktg. Assn. and The Extreme Future
  NAMA Interviews Dr. Canton on Agriculture in The Extreme Future

Download Free Book Chapters

Please find selected chapters from the book Technofutures: How Leading-Edge Technology Will Transform Business in the 21st Century by Dr. James Canton

• Welcome to the Extreme Future chapter 1
• The Four Power Tools - chapter 2
• Future of E-Business -chapter 7
• Future of Health Care chapter 10
• High-Tech Innovation and Leadership chapter 14

Invisibility Cloaks for Smart Materials Anyone?

Invisibility Cloaks for Smart Materials Anyone?

The quest for smart materials that can render the wearer invisible has been a holy grail for physics. Arcane reports and pseudo-science have unconfirmed reports tracking invisibility for many generations. Now with advances in nanoscience, basically a material science revolution, smart materials that can "bend light" and re-frame perception of the viewer may be a step closer to reality. Why is this important? My forecast reveals this is not so much about making things invisible. It  shows that we are entering a new era of smart materials that can be designed for making fundamental new sources of energy, eating pollution, crafting fantastically smart computers and making new pharmaceuticals for disease management. 

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, say they have created materials that bring them closer to creating invisibility cloaks. Look for their research in two journals, Nature and Science. The researchers used 3-D metamaterials, or composites with the ability to bend electromagnetic waves, to negatively refract light. InfoWeek reported, "What we have done is take two very different approaches to the challenge of creating bulk metamaterials that can exhibit negative refraction in optical frequencies." Xiang Zhang, professor at Berkeley's Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, said in a statement, "Both bring us a major step closer to the development of practical applications for metamaterials." 

This is big breakthrough. The Berkeley researchers stacked layers of silver and nonconducting magnesium fluoride and cut nanoscale-sized fishnet patterns into them for the metamaterials. They measured a negative index of refraction at wavelengths as short as 1,500 nanometers. We will reduce this with nano-computers within the next five years, this futurist forecasts. 

Future-Readiness: How to Think About Strategy

Business strategy is a framework to see the convergence of trends that create opportunity. Strategy takes into consideration the holistic forces of change, competition, resources, time and assets. Discover how to think and plan more strategically about your organization's future. Learn how to develop scenarios and frameworks to do productive and effective strategic thinking. Find out how to become future-ready by thinking more effectively about strategy.

Dr. James Canton
CEO
Institute for Global Futures

The Science of 'Surrogates'

By Alan Boyle

Touchstone Pictures

Click for video: A lifelike face is installed on a robot in a scene from 
"Surrogates." Click on the image to watch a video about the trends behind the film.

Bruce Willis' latest action movie takes place in a world where humans mostly stay behind closed doors and interact using lifelike cyber-substitutes. These robotic "surrogates" pass along all their sensations - during work, play and even sex - via virtual reality. In this wired-up world, you can be anybody you want to be through your surrogate: a healthier, younger version of yourself, or a super-athlete, or a supermodel. (Will that be male or female?)

So "Surrogates" is meant as pure science fiction, right? Wrong. The filmmakers and futurists behind the movie say they're aiming for an only slightly enhanced version of present-day trends.

"In the near future, robots are going to start to look like humans," said James Canton, founder of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures. "I think within 10 years you're going to have the world of the surrogates."

You don't even have to wait 10 years to experience the kind of virtual life that eventually goes so wrong in "Surrogates," said the film's director, "Terminator 3" veteran Jonathan Mostow.

"Right now on the Internet you can go and you can shop, talk with your friends, get the news. You can express your opinion. You can pretty much live a full human life without ever leaving your home," Mostow told me.

Not that the movie is a Michael Moore-ish diatribe against the Twitterpated lives that many of us lead nowadays. Like most folks in Hollywood, Mostow recognizes that the film will not fly unless it's the entertaining, thrill-a-minute action ride theatergoers expect from a Bruce Willis movie. But he also means it to be something more.

"We do know just from the test audiences who have seen the movie that people are finding it very thought-provoking," Mostow said. "It's a little bit different from your typical Hollywood thriller."

How is it different? Here's an explanation from Canton, who helped out on the film project: " 'Surrogates' is clearly a near-future vision when you mash up nanotechnology, and of course computing, robotics and the advances in materials science. All these technologies are converging so quickly, and that convergence is what 'Surrogates' covers so well, without getting into the details."

If you want to delve into the real-life details, you can look at the research being conducted in Japan to create sociable robots suited to serve the country's aging population. More signs of change can be seen on far-off battlefields, where the military is using surrogates ranging from bomb-defusing robots to bomb-dropping drones.

Other trends include the rise of online worlds such as "Second Life," where users guide avatars through activities ranging from cyber-boinkingto virtual commerce to the same headaches people experience in real life. Then there's the milieu created by Twitter, Facebook and other online networks. Researchers say the personal interactions on social-networking sites can be just as complicated - and occasionally just as boring - as real life.

Canton said he's already caught glimpses of the road ahead. Imagine, for instance, an extension of the force-feedback technology currently used to make video-game controllers shake and kick back in your hands. "I can tell you I've seen work in the labs that take force-feedback and make it totally sensory and cognitive," he told me.

Like his fellow futurist Ray Kurzweil, Canton believes the time is fast approaching when machines will be more intelligent than natural-born humans - part of a phenomenon dubbed "the singularity." But Canton thinks the age of the surrogates - a society in which machines are used as extensions of human capabilities rather than self-actuating entities - will come well before the singularity.

Baby-boom demographics could accelerate the current trend, he said.

"It's likely that one of the key areas will be memory loss due to Alzheimer's," Canton told me. "Well before we have drugs to mediate memory loss, people will have both cloud-computing and wetware implants to help them with retrieving information. You're going to see this emerge much quicker, and it's going to be driven by baby boomers and baby-boomer economics."

Canton isn't saying that the approach of the singularity - or the surrogates - will be totally a good thing. In fact, that's what the movie is all about. He said the Bruce Willis character "is challenged by a world that has been so dominated by these surrogates that the level of authenticity and humanness has been modified or even mutated."

"That's the big challenge," he said. "There's a wonderful social message in this that I think audiences will find both interesting and provocative as well as entertaining."

That's certainly the way director Jonathan Mostow feels about the film.

It's not as if Mostow started out with a completely blank slate: The movie's screenplay is based on "The Surrogates," a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele that came out in 2005. And that work, in turn, was inspired by "The Cybergypsies," a book about online addiction in the dial-up modem era. (Those two works, by the way, make a perfect dual selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club - a semi-regular listing of books on cosmic themes that have been around long enough to turn up at libraries and secondhand-book shops.)

Even though the concepts that gave rise to "Surrogates" go back a quarter-century, Mostow told me the movie includes a few twists that should give today's Twitterers, texters and Facebookers something to think about.