Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
In Future Trends: Drone Racing, Minecraft, Go, and Holacracy we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, January 29th, 2016.

The Drone Racing League Is Building an Insane New Sport

Car racing leagues like NASCAR get lots of slack for being boring. For outsiders, it’s tough to see the fun in watching people drive in circles again and again — even if they’re doing it at 160 miles an hour within an inch of one another.
But what if the vehicles racing against one another weren’t cars, but flying robots? That’s the idea behind drone racing, where pilots twist, turn and flip their tiny aircraft around complex courses. All this, while their body stays put thanks to special goggles that deliver a first-person view from their drone’s camera.

Via Time and see this previous post on wordpress-717089-2667163.cloudwaysapps.com on the local Canadian scene.

Minecraft for Education

Hear what educators are saying about using Minecraft to transform classroom learning. Microsoft acquired a learning game called MinecraftEdu that allows teachers to use Minecraft in the classroom, with lessons and activities to teach subjects including STEM, history, language, and art. Microsoft says it will use this acquisition to build out its own “Minecraft Education Edition,” which will launch into free trials as of this summer. Minecraft is already being used in over 7,000 classrooms in more than 40 countries as part of their curriculum today.

Via TechCrunch

Google Makes Learning Neural Networks Free

Developed by Vincent Vanhoucke, Principal Scientist at Google, and the Google Brain team’s technical lead, and Arpan Chakraborty, “Deep Learning” is an intermediate to advanced level course offered as part of Udacity’s Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree program. The catch is that students are assumed to have already taken a course in machine learning.

Via Creators Project

Google DeepMind: Ground-breaking AlphaGo masters the game of Go

The game of Go is widely viewed as an unsolved “grand challenge” for artificial intelligence. Games are a great testing ground for inventing smarter, more flexible algorithms that have the ability to tackle problems in ways similar to humans. The first classic game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952. But until now, one game has thwarted A.I. researchers: the ancient game of Go.

Via Deep Mind

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh reveals what it was like losing 18% of his employees in a radical management experiment

A few days into the new year, 50 employees quit their jobs at Zappos. That was OK with CEO Tony Hsieh.
It was the deadline for the 150 employees working on an intensive tech project to decide if they wanted to take a severance package or begin working under the self-management system known as Holacracy. Under it, there are no traditional bosses or job titles, and the standard hierarchy is eliminated.

Via Business Insider
See the last 4 week’s Future Trends articles here:

• Future Trends: Skills in 2020 and Sneaky Drones

• Future Trends: Global Risks, Spying, and Branded Dreams

• Future Trends: Muscles, H-Bombs, and Drinking Robots

• Top-5 Futures for December 25th: Step Aside Santa, We’ve Got Elon Musk

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Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.