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 – Zuck Talks Big, Meaningful Projects we look at Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard commencement speech, Hololens and the NFL, the solar industry is growing,NASA is fast-tracking its 16 PSYCHE mission, and an essential read about automation and job losses.

Watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard commencement speech here

College dropout-turned-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally got his degree today, and now he’s about to give Harvard’s 366th commencement speech.

Read more at TechCrunch

Microsoft HoloLens and the NFL look into the future of football

Microsoft shows us what the future of watching the NFL might be like if we all had a HoloLens in our home.

Solar jobs growing 17 times faster than US economy

Solar employment expanded last year 17 times faster than the total US economy, according to an International Renewable Energy Agency report published on Wednesday that cited data from the Solar Foundation.

Overall, more than 260,000 people work in the solar industry, up by 24% from 2015.

The solar business has benefited from the falling cost of solar energy and generous federal tax credits that make it more affordable for businesses and homeowners to install solar panels.
“It seems to be one of the few areas of high-paying, blue-collar jobs — and you don’t have to learn to code,” said Bryan Birsic, CEO of Wunder Capital, a fintech company that allows investors to help finance solar panel installations.
See more at CNN

NASA Just Fast-Tracked Its Mission to Explore a $10,000 Quadrillion Metal Asteroid

It might have just pushed back its manned mission to Mars, but NASA just fast-tracked a planned journey to 16 Psyche – an asteroid made almost entirely of nickel-iron metal.
Estimated to contain $10,000 quadrillion in iron alone, if we could somehow mine Psyche’s minerals and bring them back to Earth, it would collapse our comparatively puny global economy of $78 trillion many times over. Fortunately for the economic stability of our planet, NASA plans on looking but not extracting.
“It’s such a strange object,” Lindy Elkins-Tanton, lead scientist on the NASA mission and the director of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, told Global News Canada back in January.
“Even if we could grab a big metal piece and drag it back here … what would you do?” she adds.
Read more at Science Alert

The zombie robot argument lurches on

The media are full of stories about robots and automation destroying the jobs of the past and leaving us jobless in the future; call it the coming Robot Apocalypse. We are also told that automation and technology are responsible for the poor wage growth and inequality bedeviling the American working class in recent decades, and that looming automation will only accelerate and ratchet up these problems. Recent research by economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University is but the latest fuel for the automation media narrative (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017a).
What is remarkable about this media narrative is that there is a strong desire to believe it despite so little evidence to support these claims. There clearly are serious problems in the labor market that have suppressed job and wage growth for far too long; but these problems have their roots in intentional policy decisions regarding globalization, collective bargaining, labor standards, and unemployment levels, not technology.
Read more at the Economic Policy Institute