Future Today #053 - Tech Trends, Green Skills, State of AI, Chorus

Welcome to Future Today!?A newsletter for those curious about social innovation, disruptive technologies and futures studies. In it I share weekly articles, reports and interesting links, and recommendations of books, movies, series, events and courses.

?? The Future Today Institute's Tech Trends Report . Learn the key trends impacting finance, insurance, transportation, healthcare, sports, logistics, telecom, work, government and policy, security, privacy, education, agriculture, entertainment, music, CPG, hospitality and dining, ESGs, climate, space and more. Discover critical insights. See what strategic action you can take on the futures, today.

?? Future Landscapes of Intimacy . In times where rapid digitalization and fewer human interactions are redefining our traditional concepts of romance, sex and relationships, we immerse ourselves on what it means to be “intimate” in our modern world. The following ideas cover different perspectives and dimensions on what is emerging when talking about intimacy in our modern world.

?? Global Green Skills Report 2022 . The Global Green Skills Report 2022 provides new data on green skills and jobs from all across the world, to empower policymakers, governments and business leaders with actionable insights to help them transition the global workforce to a green economy future.

?? Regulator Says Self-Driving Cars Don't Need Brake Pedals or Steering Wheels to Be Safe . New rules announced late Thursday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reverse the agency’s previous requirements for cars to pass crash standards. The NHTSA said the updated regulations were meant to amend “wording that has or will become obsolete as applied to new design,” while still retaining comparable safety standards.?

?? Introducing Chorus . For the last three and half years my small team at X has been working with partners to explore these challenges and better understand why these bottlenecks, delays and waste occur. From logistics companies in the U.S. and Europe, to medical distributors in Asia- Pacific, the reason we heard over and over is a lack of visibility into where various product components and finished goods are, and what condition they’re in.

?? The State of AI in 9 Charts . On March 16, Stanford HAI released the 2022 AI Index, the fifth annual report analyzing AI’s impact and progress year-over-year. The index is an independent program developed by an interdisciplinary team at HAI in partnership with academia, industry, and government. It analyzes and distills trends in the industry, from investment and startups to technical capability, education and public policy.

?? Paying for groceries with the palm of your hand: Washington tests the supermarket of the future (ES) Whole Foods opened a few weeks ago in Washington, D.C., the first store without employees, where you can pay with the palm of your hand once it is linked to a bank card without having to go to the cash register.?

???? Will European tech regulation finally allow the minnows to thrive? These could be the most important changes yet in the digital era, developed now we know about the side effects of the appearance of huge companies capable to monopolize entire areas of business, setting up platforms they wrote the rules for, or of creating business models based on the exploitation of user data that has led to widespread abuse of privacy in some cases.?

?? Special Relativity Theory Expands the Futures Cone’s Conceptualisation of the Futures and The Pasts . The aim of this article is to investigate whether it is possible to expand the way the future cone is used in futures studies, especially in considering various alternative developments of the future and the interconnections between different futures, different pasts and the present.

?? 50 years ago, one Sci-Fi movie invented a pivotal new genre . Back in 1972, while the seeds of the modern environmental movement were starting to take root, a sci-fi movie called Silent Running arrived. The emotional elements of this intriguing space film had a seismic impact on viewers of a certain age, one that still resonates in today’s time of climate change.

If you liked it... Share it! Don't be shy! And subscribe! If you want to get in touch with me, ping me at [email protected]. See you next week!

?? Read the newsletter in Spanish