Insights June 2nd, 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 – Augmented Reality Workspaces we look at Meta’s new AR Workspace, Kurzweil talking about programming matter, solar being bigger than coal, IDEO’s view on innovation, and why Elon Musk’s tunneling isn’t a good idea.

Meta Cuts Ribbon on New AR Workspace

Meta CEO and founder — and Next Reality 50 member —Meron Gribetz unveiled a new operating environment for augmented reality called Meta Workspace for the audience at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara, California, today.
Gribetz demonstrated several features of the operating environment. One such feature is a new gesture called Airgrab that allows users grasp holograms with one or both hands and manipulate it within the AR environment.
“This is kind of the future of maybe the PC era, where I can take anything I can do on a PC and put it around me,” said Gribetz to the AWE audience, who responded with applause.
“Our customers want to do more than chase digital critters and monsters: 80 percent of them are coming from industry, only 5 percent entertainment,” said Gribetz in a news release.

They want to take their work to new heights. Design products in life-sized 3D, view holographic multiple monitors to free their traders and engineers from their screens, visualize data in ways that are far more relatable. To enable all of this, we decided our top priority was going to be creating the most intuitive AR experience possible, and gear it toward getting real world work done in ways never achievable before.

— Meron Gribetz

Ray Kurzweil Predicts When We’ll Be Able to Program Matter

In this video, Kurzweil predicts when he thinks we’ll get programmable matter—or the ability to manipulate everyday objects at the atomic level—and what that means not just for the things around you, but for you as a person.
According to Kurzweil, beginning with virtual reality in the digital realm and moving into the physical with programmable matter, people will make themselves into avatars of other people, or even each other.

Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal

President Trump has promised to revive the coal industry and double down on fossil fuels, creating “so many energy jobs,” but he has not focused on the increasingly important role of renewable power in America’s energy economy.

Last year, the solar industry employed many more Americans than coal, while wind power topped 100,000 jobs.

Power creation jobs in 2016 = 1.9 million

Those numbers come from a Department of Energy report published in January by the Obama administration that provides the most complete picture available of American energy employment.

A Department of Energy spokesperson for the current administration declined to discuss the report on the record.

In 2016, 1.9 million Americans were employed in electric power generation, mining and other fuel extraction activities, according to the report – a field we’ll call power creation for short.

IDEO studied innovation in 100 companies here’s what it found

How do you measure “innovation?” It’s something that every organization seems to be after–just look at AT&T’s Innovation Pipeline, Sephora’s Innovation Research lab, and the University of Pennsylvania’s punny Pennovation Center–but it’s extremely hard to quantify.

The global design firm Ideo set out to answer this question by studying the company’s 26-year archive of projects that focused on clients’ internal team dynamics, as well as external sources focused on innovation (including Fast Company‘s annual Most Innovative Companies lists). Defining what innovation meant across many different companies was complex, but ultimately, Ideo found that the most important element is the organization’s ability to adapt and respond to change. In the end, Ideo identified six basic vectors that it says are instrumental to an innovative, adaptive company: Purpose, experimentation, collaboration, empowerment, looking out (i.e. staying informed about what’s happening in the industry), and refinement (the ability to successfully execute new ideas).

Elon Musk’s tunnel plan is surprisingly outdated—and bad

The last time Elon Musk was asked to speak at a TED conference was in 2013. He sat down with TED founder Chris Anderson to talk about his many big ideas, including a mass-market electric vehicle, a new way for homeowners to generate and share solar power, and a reusable rocket for space exploration. Four years later, Musk has brought all of those projects to market (or, just outside of Earth’s atmosphere, as it were), so it made sense for TED to bring him back this year to update the world on his projects and inspire us with an ambitious new vision. He didn’t.

What did we get in this year’s TED Talk? A really bad, really old idea for fixing traffic.

Future Trends – Augmented Reality Workspaces

Meta Cuts Ribbon on New AR Workspace

Ray Kurzweil Predicts When We’ll Be Able to Program Matter

Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal

IDEO studied innovation in 100 companies here’s what it found

Elon Musk’s tunnel plan is surprisingly outdated—and bad

Nikolas Badminton

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