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 – Powerlines for Mesh Networks we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, September 23rd, 2016. AT&T’s mesh network testing, trying to change the world, cheap robots, playing with Human DNA, and the future of journalism.

AT&T’s AirGig uses power lines for multi-gigabit, wireless broadband

AT&T is developing wireless technology that uses power lines to guide wireless signals to their destination and potentially deliver multi-gigabit Internet speeds. The technology is experimental and not close to commercial deployment, but it could potentially—in a few years—be used to deliver smartphone data or home Internet.
Project AirGig from AT&T Labs, announced yesterday, revives the possibility of using power lines for Internet service—but in a surprising way. Signals would not travel inside the power lines, butnear the lines. “Low-cost plastic antennas and devices located along the power line” send wireless signals to each other, using the power lines as a guide, AT&T said.
“We’re experimenting with multiple ways to send a modulated radio signal around or near medium-voltage power lines,” AT&T’s announcement said. “There’s no direct electrical connection to the power line required, and it has the potential of multi-gigabit speeds in urban, rural, and underserved parts of the world.”
Read more at Arstechnica

When You Change the World and No One Notices

Note: This is a brilliant article and must be read in full…
Big breakthroughs typically follow a seven-step path:

• First, no one’s heard of you.
• Then they’ve heard of you but think you’re nuts.
• Then they understand your product, but think it has no opportunity.
• Then they view your product as a toy.
• Then they see it as an amazing toy.
• Then they start using it.
• Then they couldn’t imagine life without it.

This process can take decades. It rarely takes less than several years.
Stanford professor Paul Saffo put it this way:

It takes 30 years for a new idea to seep into the culture. Technology does not drive change. It is our collective response to the options and opportunities presented by technology that drives change.

Read more at CollaborativeFund.com

How to build a robot that “sees” with $100 and TensorFlow

Object recognition is one of the most exciting areas in machine learning right now. Computers have been able to recognize objects like faces or cats reliably for quite a while, but recognizing arbitrary objects within a larger image has been the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence. Maybe the real surprise is that human brains recognize objects so well. We effortlessly convert photons bouncing off objects at slightly different frequencies into a spectacularly rich set of information about the world around us. Machine learning still struggles with these simple tasks, but in the past few years, it’s gotten much better.
Deep learning and a large public training data set called ImageNet has made an impressive amount of progress toward object recognition.TensorFlow is a well-known framework that makes it very easy to implement deep learning algorithms on a variety of architectures. TensorFlow is especially good at taking advantage of GPUs, which in turn are also very good at running deep learning algorithms.

Read more at O’Reilly Media

Breaking Taboo, Swedish Scientist Seeks To Edit DNA Of Healthy Human Embryos

Read more at NPR

The Future of Journalism: Empowered, Nonlinear, Essential

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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.