Right now, most companies are working on their budgets for 2021. Given the soul-crushing amount of uncertainty ahead, budget planning for FY21 will be a challenging, arduous process. Making allocations for signal tracking, scenario planning and longer-term visioning might seem frivolous, or outright irresponsible, given the circumstances.

There’s a problem with that logic. Covid-19 aftershocks are still erupting. If you don’t think about the next-order outcomes of all this ongoing change, you will put your organization’s short-term survivability and long-term growth at risk.

Post-pandemic disruption will endure because a host of lower-magnitude tremors are incrementally shifting every other facet of…

With so much uncertainty all around, the Future Today Institute answers: What are the most important emerging tech trends that are likely to impact your organization this year?

Everyone is feeling anxious. In the wake of the global Covid-19 outbreak we are suddenly dealing with a crushing amount of uncertainty. It might feel like there is no point in planning. Organizations, like people, have limbic systems. Organizational anxiety can spread fast and cause leaders and teams to make poor decisions. Without concrete answers to questions about the future, anxiety grows. It’s a vicious, terrible cycle.

Your goal right now isn’t…

I’ve been fielding lots of questions this week from clients, journalists, researchers and friends working in various parts of the federal government. Everyone is feeling anxious. We’re suddenly dealing with unprecedented, wide-sweeping changes. To the surprise of political analysts, Bernie Sanders lost the Michigan primary last night and it’s looking now like Joe Biden is (some would say improbably) the de facto Democratic nominee. Oil prices are plunging because of an overnight price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. The Dow is on a wild ride, dropping thousands of points and bouncing back up. Major events are postponed or cancelled…

With so much uncertainty all around, FTI answers: What are the most important emerging tech trends that are most likely to impact business, governing and society in the near-future?

It’s time to get comfortable with deep uncertainty. In the coming year, the first commercial spacecraft will take humans into space for fun rather than research, opening a massive business opportunity for insurers, space companies and the hundreds of providers within the space ecosystem that make all the needed peripherals and components. We’ll also see the launch of of galactic ride sharing companies, which will transport a variety of payload into…

By now you’ve heard of the Turing Test. In a paper published in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing proposed a thesis and a test: If someday, a computer was able to answer questions in a manner indistinguishable from humans, then it must be “thinking.”

The test was built on deception and “won” once a computer successfully passed as a human. It goes like this: there is a person, a machine, and in a separate room, an interrogator. The object of the game is for the interrogator to figure out which answers come from the person and which come from…

In the 2018 edition of the Future Today Institute’s annual emerging tech trends report, we wondered what makes smart cities “smart.”

What makes a city “smart?” In 2016, 78 cities applied for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s “Smart City” challenge, which would award the winner $40 million in federal grant money to upgrade their urban transit systems. DoT selected Columbus, Ohio, as the winner for its proposal to deploy self-driving electric shuttles, launch smart cards to provide free car-sharing services, and develop a connected traffic light system to reduce traffic jams throughout the city. The City of Melbourne (Australia) has…

With the start of a new year, FTI answers: What are the most important emerging tech trends that will radically transform business, governing and society in the near-future? We’ve identified 225 Emerging Tech Trends for 2018 plus 10 weak signals for next year.

Last year proved to be a restless nail-biter, and 2018 promises more of the same. Strap in, because you’re likely to witness a number of events that don’t appear to follow the familiar political, technological or business narratives.

A great wave of disruption — anchored in artificial intelligence, robotics, self-driving cars, genomic editing, cognitive computing, the Internet of Things, and big data — is underway. As these technologies move from the fringe to the mainstream, they promise to forever change how we live, work and play.

Our 2017 Tech Trends Report, now in its 10th year, focuses on mid- to late-stage emerging technologies that are on a growth trajectory.

We have identified more than 150 trends for the coming year across numerous industries, and our broad scope was intentional. …