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 – The City of Tomorrow we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, December 2nd, 2016. We see discussions in the city of tomorrow, automated warehouses, bringing cryptocurrency into the light, bringing down drones, and the future of dentistry.

Matthew Claudel: “The City of Tomorrow”

Automating the Grocery Warehouse

Robotics company Symbotic is trying to change the food distribution industry. The company has developed a system to automate warehouse jobs formerly done by humans. Video: Robert Libetti. Photo: Michael Rubenstein for The Wall Street Journal

Why the US government wants to bring cryptocurrency out of the shadows

A US government request to trawl through the personal data of millions of users of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase signals the start of an effort to pull digital currencies like bitcoin into the mainstream, experts have said.
The “John Doe” summons, a broad order for data on all Coinbase users in 2013, 2014 and 2015, was filed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in a federal court in California on 17 November.
In the summons, the IRS said that all of Coinbase’s users in that period “have not been or may not be complying with US internal revenue laws”.
Coinbase has said it will fight the request in court.
Cryptocurrencies – digital assets which exist entirely online but are exchangeable for goods or services – have grown in popularity in recent years, in part because they grant a degree of user anonymity. Coinbase is the largest bitcoin exchange and its best-known brand.
But user confidentiality has also caused headaches for governments, who worry the currencies are being used for drug dealing, money laundering or tax evasion. Digital currencies are currently taxed as an asset like gold, with capital gains tax due when there is an appreciation in value.
However, the extent to which bitcoin users with US tax liabilities have been declaring such assets is unclear.
In documentation supporting its petition, the IRS referred to three anonymous cases of taxpayers who had used virtual currencies to evade tax, two of which were “corporate entities with annual revenues of several million dollars” which used Coinbase wallets and concealed bitcoin transactions as “technology expenses” on their tax returns.
Read more at The Guardian

Anti-drone gun takes down targets from 1.2 miles away

There are numerous systems built to take down wayward or dangerous drones, but they tend to have one big catch: you need to be relatively closeto the drone, which could be scary if the robotic aircraft is packing explosives. DroneShield thinks it can help. It’s introducing the DroneGun, a jammer that disables drone signals (including GPS and GLONASS positioning) from as far as 1.2 miles away. Like most rivals, it doesn’t destroy the target drone — it just forces the vehicle to land or return to its starting point. Anti-drone teams can not only disable threats from a safe distance, but potentially locate their pilots.

Read more at Engadget

The Amazing Future of Dentistry and Oral Health

Let’s take a look at the 8 greatest innovations for dental health!

1. Smart toothbrush
2. Augmented Reality
3. Virtual Reality
4. Teledentistry
5. Computer-assisted design and 3D-printing
6. Intra-oral camera
7. Dental regeneration
8. CRISPR

Read more at The Medical Futurist
Additional note: Nikolas Badminton worked with Inliant Dental Technologies to brand and position their amazing AR system:

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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.