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: Skills in 2020 and Sneaky Drones we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, January 22nd, 2016.

Top 10 skills in 2020

“Creativity will become one of the top three skills workers will need. With the avalanche of new products, new technologies and new ways of working, workers are going to have to become more creative in order to benefit from these changes.” World Economic Forum

Forget Apps, Now The Bots Take Over

This Norwegian Megacopter just set a new record for drone lifting power

Henning Pedersen and students of the University of Oslo (all Norway) built a giant drone which has flown into the record books after achieving the Heaviest payload lifted by a remote-controlled multicopter. .

Named the Megacopter, the unmanned autocraft lifted an incredible weight of 61 kg (134 lb 7.6 oz, excluding the weight of the craft itself) when it was officially tested at the Oslo Science Park, Oslo, Norway
Via The Verge

Sneaking Drones into Prisons

Inmates in the U.K. have been organizing deliveries of drugs and electronics via small drones, The Sun reports.
Over the weekend, The Sun reported a drone crash at the Category B Bullingdon jail in Bicester, Oxfordshire. The drone contained large amounts of cannabis, as well as cellphones and chargers. “The drone was in a part of the jail without CCTV,” an insider told The Sun. “It was well-planned. We’ve no idea how many times this method of smuggling has been used before.”
Via Fast Company

One step closer to fusion power

For the first time, researchers show two types of turbulence within plasma that cause significant heat loss. Solving this problem could take the world a step closer to fusion power which has the promise of limitless and relatively clean energy.

Learn more: http://mitsha.re/XmrC3
Via MIT
See the last 4 week’s Future Trends articles here:

• 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

• Top-5 Futures for December 18th: Laser weapons on planes by 2020

***

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.