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: AI, Pizza, and Tesla Wow! we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, May 6th, 2016.

Siri’s creators say they’ve made something better that will take care of everything for you

“Get me a pizza from Pizz’a Chicago near my office,” one of the engineers said into his smartphone. It was their first real test of Viv, the artificial-intelligence technology that the team had been quietly building for more than a year. Everyone was a little nervous. Then, a text from Viv piped up: “Would you like toppings with that?”
The engineers, eight in all, started jumping in: “Pepperoni.” “Half cheese.” “Caesar salad.” Emboldened by the result, they peppered Viv with more commands: Add more toppings. Remove toppings. Change medium size to large.
About 40 minutes later — and after a few hiccups when Viv confused the office address — a Pizz’a Chicago driver showed up with four made-to-order pizzas.

Via The Washington Post
 

SkinTrack: Using the Body as an Electrical Waveguide for Continuous Finger Tracking on the Skin

SkinTrack is a wearable system that enables continuous touch tracking on the skin. It consists of a ring, which emits a continuous high frequency AC signal, and a sensing wristband with multiple electrodes. Due to the phase delay inherent in a high-frequency AC signal propagating through the body, a phase difference can be observed between pairs of electrodes. SkinTrack measures these phase differences to compute a 2D finger touch coordinate. Our approach can segment touch events at 99% accuracy, and resolve the 2D location of touches with a mean error of 7.6mm. As our approach is compact, non-invasive, low-cost and low-powered, we envision the technology being integrated into future smartwatches, supporting rich touch interactions beyond the confines of the small touchscreen.

Via Future Interfaces Group

Tesla puts pedal to the metal, 500,000 cars planned in 2018

Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA.O) said it was stepping up production plans for its upcoming Model 3 mass-market sedan and would build a total of 500,000 all-electric vehicles in 2018, two years ahead of schedule, but warned that spending will ramp up in tandem.
The company, which three months ago aimed to make a net profit in the final quarter of this year, gave no profit target on Wednesday and said capital spending would rise about 50 percent more than previously forecast this year, to around $2.25 billion.
Via Reuters
 

US companies given permission to try and bring people back from the dead

Scientists in the US have been given permission to try and bring dead people back to life.
Initial tests will use a range of techniques on 20 subjects to see whether they show any sign of regeneration, or the reversal of brain death.
The group behind the tests hope that they can pioneer ways of keeping people alive after their brains have been judged to have died – and then to potentially re-grow their brains and help them overcome such trauma.

Via The Independent
 
See the last 4 week’s Future Trends articles here:

• Future Trends: Human Head Transplants Are Ready

• Future Trends: Cyborgs, Democracy, and Cardboard Houses

• Future Trends: Facebook Wants it All

• Future Trends: Storing Data in DNA, and VR Drugs

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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.