Faith Popcorn | |
---|---|
Born | Faith Plotkin May 11, 1943 New York City |
Alma mater | New York University (BA) |
Occupation | Futurist |
Employer | Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve |
Known for | The Popcorn Report, Clicking, EVEolution,The Dictionary of the Future |
Children | 2 |
Website | faithpopcorn |
Faith Popcorn (born Faith Plotkin, May 11, 1943) [1] is a futurist, author, and founder and CEO of the marketing consulting firm BrainReserve. She has written three best selling books: [2] [3] The Popcorn Report (1991), Clicking (1996), and EVEolution (2000).
Born as Faith Plotkin, [4] [5] she later legally changed her name to "Faith Popcorn." [4] She was born in New York City, where both of her parents were lawyers [6] and spent her early childhood in Shanghai before returning to the United States. She attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York City, [2] followed by New York University. [4] Accepted into NYU Law School, she decided instead to go into advertising in the early 1970s, which she said she considered to be more glamorous. [7]
After working in advertising for eight years, [2] she founded the marketing consulting firm BrainReserve in 1974. [8] It works with companies to identify future trends that will affect their business. [9] Popcorn is reported to have advised Coca-Cola, in 1981, to go into bottled water [10] and to have told Kodak in the late 1980s to go into digital instead of print. [11]
She coined terms like "cocooning" ("the impulse to stay inside when the outside gets too tough and scary", such as turning a home into a nest) and "Cashing Out" ("the impulse to change one's life to a slower and more rewarding pace", sometimes manifested by people who quit corporate jobs). [12] Her company created a "TalentBank" [12] of 10,000 experts who provide forecasts about trends across many topics. [13] It also analyzes newspapers, magazine and other sources, and conducts thousands of consumer interviews to spot future trends. [4] [13]
In a series of nine 2006 predictions of major trends, she forecast a cultural trend toward more physical contact, including "mechanized hugging booths." [14] She also said that "second hand nostalgia" would become a trend and that advances in genetics might allow people to custom design pets with bits of their own DNA so their dogs and cats resembled them. [14] Other examples from this series of predictions included "mood tuning" products, such as clothing infused with "neuro-chemicals" to enhance confidence or mental acuity, and demand for exercising "brain fitness", possibly manifesting itself in "brain trainers" to exercise recall or "retort coaches" to help people sharpen their wit. [14]
A 2008 Los Angeles Times entertainment section article, following Popcorn's predictions over a period of five years, credited her with identifying trends such as "food coaches" and "transcouture". [15] In 2014, she predicted to The Hollywood Reporter that films would become immersive events, taking place all around the viewer, who could choose their own avatar as characters. [16] She also predicted fan films, similar to fan fiction. [16] In 2015, she renewed her 1991 prediction that "humanoid robots" would become companions and workers. [8] At an IBM-sponsored conference, she predicted robots would replace one third of jobs in the developed world and that governments would initiate a "disemployment tax" as an incentive to keep people employed. She forecasted virtual reality vacations and said that the average adult would work for several companies simultaneously. [17]
Business book author William A. Sherden takes a skeptical view of her ideas about cocooning. He provides statistics showing double-digit percentage growth in activities outside the home in the five years following her prediction. [18] The U.S. Postal Service paid $566,000 to Popcorn to envision a viable future for the post office, an engagement that was criticized by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma in a list of 100 examples of "wasteful" spending. [19]
Popcorn lives in Manhattan and Wainscott, Long Island. [20] She is single and has two adopted children. [8] [20]
Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a non-fiction book by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil about artificial intelligence and the future course of humanity. First published in hardcover on January 1, 1999, by Viking, it has received attention from The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. In the book Kurzweil outlines his vision for how technology will progress during the 21st century.
The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist can be categorized as either permanent, meaning that it will exist forever, or temporary, meaning that it will end. In the Occidental view, which uses a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the projected timeline that is anticipated to occur. In special relativity, the future is considered absolute future, or the future light cone.
A prediction, or forecast, is a statement about a future event or data. They are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge. There is no universal agreement about the exact difference from "estimation"; different authors and disciplines ascribe different connotations.
Forecasting is the process of making predictions based on past and present data. Later these can be compared (resolved) against what happens. For example, a company might estimate their revenue in the next year, then compare it against the actual results creating a variance actual analysis. Prediction is a similar but more general term. Forecasting might refer to specific formal statistical methods employing time series, cross-sectional or longitudinal data, or alternatively to less formal judgmental methods or the process of prediction and resolution itself. Usage can vary between areas of application: for example, in hydrology the terms "forecast" and "forecasting" are sometimes reserved for estimates of values at certain specific future times, while the term "prediction" is used for more general estimates, such as the number of times floods will occur over a long period.
Singularitarianism is a movement defined by the belief that a technological singularity—the creation of superintelligence—will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity benefits humans.
Futurists are people whose specialty or interest is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present, whether that of human society in particular or of life on Earth in general.
Futures studies, futures research, futurism, or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social/technological advancement, and other environmental trends; often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and work in the future. Predictive techniques, such as forecasting, can be applied, but contemporary futures studies scholars emphasize the importance of systematically exploring alternatives. In general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and an extension to the field of history. Futures studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to explore the possibility of future events and trends.
Coolhunting is a neologism coined in the early 1990s referring to a new kind of marketing professionals who make observations and predictions in changes of new or existing "cool" cultural fads and trends. Coolhunting is also referred to as "trend spotting," and is a subset of trend analysis.
Theodore Modis is a strategic business analyst, futurist, physicist, and international consultant. He specializes in applying fundamental scientific concepts to predicting social phenomena. In particular, he uses the law of natural growth in competition as expressed by the logistic function or S-curve to forecast markets, product sales, primary-energy substitutions, the diffusion of technologies, and generally any process that grows in competition. He is a vehement critic of the concept of the Technological Singularity. He has suggested a simple mathematical relationship between Entropy and Complexity as the latter being the time derivative of the former.
Cocooning is staying inside one's home, insulated from perceived danger, instead of going out. The term was coined in 1981 by Faith Popcorn, a trend forecaster and marketing consultant. It is used in social science, marketing, parenting, economic forecasting, self-help, religion, and has become part of standard English as defined by multiple dictionaries.
Predictive analytics is a form of business analytics applying machine learning to generate a predictive model for certain business applications. As such, it encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from predictive modeling and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events. It represents a major subset of machine learning applications; in some contexts, it is synonymous with machine learning.
Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.
Stock market prediction is the act of trying to determine the future value of a company stock or other financial instrument traded on an exchange. The successful prediction of a stock's future price could yield significant profit. The efficient-market hypothesis suggests that stock prices reflect all currently available information and any price changes that are not based on newly revealed information thus are inherently unpredictable. Others disagree and those with this viewpoint possess myriad methods and technologies which purportedly allow them to gain future price information.
Gerald Celente is an American trend forecaster, publisher of the Trends Journal, business consultant and author who makes predictions about the global financial markets and other important events.
Amy Lynn Webb is an American futurist, author and founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute. She is an adjunct assistant professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, a nonresident senior fellow at Atlantic Council, and was a 2014–15 Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to futures studies:
Adam Hanft is an American brand strategist who also writes and speaks on business and cultural trends for a variety of print, television and online media. His blog SpinSeason.com, which analyzes politics in a cultural context, is a partner blog of Salon.com. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of New York University's College of Arts and Sciences, Hanft serves on the Board of Directors of Scotts Miracle-Gro, the world's largest marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products. He is also a strategic adviser to Conduit, Israel's largest Internet company, LaunchBox digital, an early stage venture capital firm; to Luminoso, a text analytics firm that was incubated in the MIT Media Lab; and to Keas, a provider of wellness solutions using game mechanics.
Fashion forecasting began in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It started as a way of communicating about fashion and slowly transformed into a way to become ahead of the times in the fashion industry. Fashion forecasting predicts the moods of society and consumers, along with their behavior and buying habits and bases what they may release in the coming future off of the forecast. Fashion trends tend to repeat themselves every 20 years, and fashion forecasting predicts what other trends might begin with the rotation of fashion as well. Fashion forecasting can be used for many different reasons, the main reason being staying on top of current trends and knowing what your consumer is going to want in the future. This method helps fashion brands know what to expect and what to begin producing ahead of time. Top name brands and high end companies such as Vogue and Gucci even use this method to help their designers become even more informed on what is to come in the fashion industry.
Daniel Burrus is an American technology futurist, business adviser, author, and public speaker in the areas of business strategy, global trends, and disruptive innovation. He has written on the topics of business transformation and technology-driven trends, with his book Flash Forsight becoming a New York Times Bestseller in 2011.