Entries by Ross Dawson

Zen and the Art of Creating the Future

I have been deeply interested in Zen since my late teens. When I moved to Japan in my late 20s, ultimately spending 3 ½ years there, the reasons included my fascination with Zen. Soon after I arrived in Tokyo I found a Zen master, Nishijima-Sensei, who held weekly meditation sessions followed by lectures in English […]

About getting predictions wrong as a futurist (and how to create the future you want)

Over the years I have created a lot of content – books, reports, visual frameworks and far more – that has been very widely seen. From all this undoubtedly the one piece that has been the most visible globally is my Newspaper Extinction Timeline launched in October 2010, that predicted for each country in which […]

Review of the Newspaper Extinction Timeline: What We Got Wrong and the Future of News from Here

In October 2010 I launched the now-infamous Newspaper Extinction Timeline, shown below. It launched an immediate and enduring conversation, with the timeline discussed in newspapers and publications in over 30 countries in the first week after its launch. Over the years it has attracted some support, plenty of criticism, and hundreds of citations, including from […]

Decline of News-on-paper: United States

Mapping the decline of news-on-paper [Latest update: December 15, 2017]The Newspaper Extinction Timeline, released in 2010, predicted that news-on-paper would become “insignificant” in the U.S. Read the Review of the Newspaper Extinction Timelinefor full context. This page compiles some of the most recent available data on the state of news-on-paper in the U.S. Note that there are […]

6 characteristics of education of the future and how credentials will change

The Commonwealth Bank Jobs and Skills of the Future Report I wrote recently dug into how work and jobs are changing and what skills will be required. These shifts in work mean it is crystal clear that education must also change. Below is an excerpt from the report giving a snapshot of some of the […]

The potential and dangers of the ‘autonomous economy’ where machines transact with machines

Australia’s largest bank Commonwealth Bank has just released a very interesting white paper Welcome to the machine-to-machine economy, anticipating machines engaging in financial transactions with other machines or parties, for example hiring and paying for their own maintenance workers. This would require them to have their own bank accounts and payment systems. Source: Commonwealth Bank