Insights January 6th, 2017

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 Running Man we look at the 1987 film and wonder are we living in that reality, securing IoT with Blockchain technology, quantum supremacy, the Internet of Dangerous Things, and picking your own herbs in supermarkets.

Why we may be living in the future of The Running Man

In a world beset by a collapsing economy, the US media conspires with the government to keep the population in check with a combination of heavy-handed policing and a steady stream of vapid reality TV shows. Meanwhile, one of the most powerful men in the world is the host of a reality TV show.
Sound familiar? That was 2017 conjured by campy action thriller The Running Man when it was released 30 years ago.
Sci-fi commonly reveals hidden truths about society. So, it makes you wonder: what else could this dystopian vision say about the world we live in today? If we look at where we are in 2017, what can The Running Man tell us about our changing politics, media and technology?

Read more at BBC.com

A Secure Model of IoT with Blockchain

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ecosystem of ever-increasing complexity; it’s the next wave of innovation that will humanize every object in our life, and it is the next level of automation for every object we use. IoT is bringing more and more things into the digital fold every day, which will likely make IoT a multi-trillion dollar industry in the near future. To understand the scale of interest in the internet of things (IoT) just check how many conferences, articles, and studies conducted about IoT recently, this interest has hit fever pitch point in 2016 as many companies see big opportunity and believe that IoT holds the promise to expand and improve businesses processes and accelerate growth. However, the rapid evolution of the IoT market has caused an explosion in the number and variety of IoT solutions, which created real challenges as the industry evolves, mainly, the urgent need for a secure IoT model to perform common tasks such as sensing, processing, storage, and communicating. Developing that model will never be an easy task by any stretch of the imagination, there are many hurdles and challenges facing a real secure IoT model.
 
Read more at BBVA Open Mind

Google, Microsoft, labs and start-ups will create universal quantum computers in 2017 and achieve quantum supremacy over classical computers

Google started working on a form of quantum computing that harnesses superconductivity in 2014. In 2017 or 2018 Google hopes to perform a computation that is beyond even the most powerful ‘classical’ supercomputers — an elusive milestone known as quantum supremacy. Its rival, Microsoft, is betting on an intriguing but unproven concept, topological quantum computing, and hopes to perform a first demonstration of the technology.
The quantum-computing start-up scene is also heating up. Christopher Monroe, co-founded the start-up IonQ in 2015, plans to begin hiring in earnest this year.
Physicist Robert Schoelkopf at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who co-founded the start-up Quantum Circuits, and former IBM applied physicist Chad Rigetti, who set up Rigetti in Berkeley, California, say they expect to reach crucial technical milestones soon.
The largest trapped ion quantum computer with 20 qubits is being tested in an academic lab led by Rainer Blatt at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
In 2016, Rainer Blatt’s and Peter Zoller’s research teams have simulated lattice gauge theories in a trapped ion quantum computer. Gauge theories describe the interaction between elementary particles, such as quarks and gluons, and they are the basis for our understanding of fundamental processes.
“Dynamical processes, for example, the collision of elementary particles or the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs, are extremely difficult to investigate,” explains Christine Muschik, theoretical physicist at the IQOQI. “However, scientists quickly reach a limit when processing numerical calculations on classical computers. For this reason, it has been proposed to simulate these processes by using a programmable quantum system.”
Read more at Next Big Future

Understanding the Role of Connected Devices in Recent Cyber Attacks

Dutch shoppers pick own herbs in supermarket garden


The Netherlands’ award-winning Albert Heijn supermarket chain recently introduced a new service for its customers – pick-your-own herb gardens. Developed with design agency studiomfd, the Help Yourself Herb Garden lets customers pick exactly what they need, from a full plant to a few sprigs. Herbs are brought in-store as soon as they are fully-grown and ready to be harvested.
The store also provides a sink for shoppers to wash their hands in after gathering the herbs. Urban farming and gardening projects are finding increasingly clever ways to use formerly disused spaces. Recent Springspottings include a Canadian foodbank that set up an aquaponics farm to help fulfill the local need for fresh produce, and a floating farm in Rotterdam’s harbor that is powered by the manure of the animals being raised there.
 
Read more at Springwise

***

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.

Society
headshot

Futurist Keynote Speaker and Consultant - Nikolas Badminton

CEO of EXPONENTIAL MINDS and an award-winning Futurist Speaker, researcher and author. His expertise and thought leadership will guide you from complacency to thinking exponentially, planning for longevity, and encouraging a culture of innovation. You will then establish resiliency and abundance in your organization. Please reach out to discuss how he can help you, and read on to see what is happening in the world this week.

Contact Nikolas