Insights April 21st, 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 – Working Less we look at how our work lives will change in the future, Impossible Burgers, London’s autonomous shuttles, solar-powered river cleanup, and Nikolas Badminton talks about BC as an ‘exponential province’.

There will be much less work in the future. We need to rethink our societies

We need to balance the debate that celebrates the virtues of rapid change, agility and entrepreneurship; with consideration of the ways societies, and their citizens, cope with and benefit from the considerable turbulence generated by technological change. The political backlash to this comparative lack of concern is seen in Trumpism and Brexit. Globalisation, productivity and innovation may be the mantra for their beneficiaries, but for many they mean job losses, working harder, and ever more uncertainty at work.

Read more at World Economic Forum

In Its New Factory, Impossible Foods Will Make 12 Million Pounds Of Plant-Based Burgers A Year

Inside a former baked-goods factory near the Oakland airport, a construction crew is installing giant vats that will soon be used to scale up production of the Impossible Burger–a plant-based meat designed to look and taste good enough that meat eaters will want to order it, not vegetarians.

The “meat,” developed by a team led by former Stanford biochemistry professor Patrick Brown, is currently being produced in a 10,000-square-foot pilot facility in Silicon Valley and a 1,500-square foot space in New Jersey. The new facility, at around 60,000 square feet, will dramatically scale up production capacity. When the factory is fully ramped up, it will be able to produce at least 1 million pounds of Impossible Burger meat a month, or 250 times more than today.