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 – Riding the Hyperconnected Wave we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, October 28th, 2016. We listen to the latest keynote from Nikolas Badminton, looking at a driverless world, MIT’s AI Nightmare machine, curing certain forms of blindness, and using veins as authentication.

Riding this Hyperconnected Life with Nikolas Badminton

In this episode we see Nikolas at the Asia-Pacific Communications Summit talking about the birth of the internet, technoshamans, the predictions of Rushkoff and McKenna, how technology companies are controlling out psycho-social-physiological urges to create hyperconnectivity. Implied value and a return to the human condition of love and connection are discussed.

Listen to more Modern Futures Podcasts here.

Wanis Kabbaj: What a driverless world could look like

What if traffic flowed through our streets as smoothly and efficiently as blood flows through our veins? Transportation geek Wanis Kabbaj thinks we can find inspiration in the genius of our biology to design the transit systems of the future. In this forward-thinking talk, preview exciting concepts like modular, detachable buses, flying taxis and networks of suspended magnetic pods that could help make the dream of a dynamic, driverless world into a reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3mPswFBwmg

MIT’s Nightmare Machine

http://nightmare.mit.edu/
http://nightmare.mit.edu/

http://nightmare.mit.edu/

Curing Blindness: Gene Therapy in U.S. Is On Track for Approval as Early as Next Year

The first gene therapy for an inherited disease in the U.S. is closer to reality than ever before.
Spark Therapeutics is only the second company to pursue an application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for such a treatment, but it’s likely to be the first to hit the market.
Speaking at EmTech MIT 2016 on Tuesday, Katherine High, Spark’s cofounder, confirmed that the company is on track to launch its first product next year. The gene therapy, known as SPK-RPE65, targets mutations in people’s eyes that often lead to blindness. Currently, there are no drugs available to treat these disorders, known as inherited retinal dystrophies.
Spark plans to complete its FDA application by early 2017. If approved next year, the therapy would become the first for an inherited disease to be given the green light in the U.S. Two such gene therapies, Strimvelis and Glybera, have already been approved in Europe.
 
Read more at MIT Technology Review

New biometric method uses your smartphone camera to identify you by the veins in your finger

Hitachi today announced the development of highly-accurate finger vein authentication technology using the camera commonly integrated in the standard smartphone. This technology will enable the use of biometric authentication using finger vein patterns to be available as a personal identification method for smartphone transactions such as online shopping, providing higher security and accuracy as well as preventing unauthorized use.
Read more at Futuristech

***

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.