Signals from the Future
🍔 At Austrian fast-food joints, plant-based options
Do you need to eat meat every day? Not necessarily. At a Burger King in Margaretengürtel, Vienna, your cashier will ask: “Normal oder mit fleisch?” Normal or with meat? (No word yet on a fungi-based bacon option.) Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?
🏘 Homebuyers creating neighborhood compounds
Taking a cue from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, homeowners with significantly smaller net worths are buying up surrounding properties to create family compounds. Many transactions are private, occurring through personal networks. Cities are where we face the future first.
👶🏾 California to give baby bonds to kids who lost parent to COVID
Preparing for the mutualist future, California is spending $100M to create trust funds for children who lost a parent or caregiver to the pandemic. So far, that means funding for about 16,000 kids, who can spend the money once they become adults.
🤖 Racist algorithms turning robots racist, too
Is your bot a bigot? Researchers trained a virtual robot to interact with physical objects using a popular AI language model. With little prompting, they found that when given open-ended instructions, it reverted to racist, sexist stereotypes.
👋 Amazon to test palm-scanning technology
At 65 Whole Foods stores, a hover of your hand over a scanner is all that’s needed to check out, pay, and leave. Customers can set up their palm-scanning account by registering their print at a kiosk or point-of-sale station at participating stores. Who needs bracelets?
Find hundreds of categorized Signals from the Future at Future Factors, IFTF Vantage’s proprietary, easy-to-use platform for sharing and synthesizing signals from today that are likely to affect tomorrow’s transformations.
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