Category Archives: Futurist

As a futurist, my goal is to expand our understanding of the future.Every day, thousands of emerging technologies spring to life, thousands of researchers make new discoveries, and thousands of new trends start to reveal themselves.

As we move down the path of advancing technology, our relationship with the future has never been clearer; making this both the most exciting and scariest time to be alive, in all human history. There is a constant battle being waged over the needs of the present vs. the needs of the future.

Naturally the future cannot be our only priority; otherwise, we lose our ability to function in the present. Near-term issues invariably take precedent over long-term potential; yet, our ability to prioritize importance is directly tied to our vision of the future.Still, it is our vision of the future that determines our actions today.

I use this phrase a lot: The future creates the present! Yes, this is just the opposite of what most people think. They believe the work were doing today will automatically create the future, but from a little different perspective, it is the images of the future that we hold in our head that determines the decisions well make today.

When I change someones vision of the future, inevitably, this changes the way they make decisions today!

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Thomas Frey - Architect of the Future - Futurist Speaker

Futures studies, or futures research, is the systematic study of possible, probable and preferable futures. The field has broadened into an exploration of alternative futures and deepened to investigate the worldviews and mythologies that underlie our collective prospects.

Governments and leaders around the world are increasingly looking to systemic foresight to manage uncertainty and build resilience. For example, the government of the United Arab Emirates has a Ministry for the Future, and the UN Secretary General recently proposed a global Summit of the Future in 2023.

Futurists collaborate with businesses, governments and other partners to explore future scenarios and help people think about and prepare for things that havent happened yet. Dr. Stuart Candy, USC Berggruen Fellow and Associate Professor of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, is a professional futurist and experience designer known for pioneering experiential futures, a range of practices for bringing possible scenarios to life through tangible artifacts and immersive storytelling.

As we welcome Dr. Candy into the Forum Expert Network, we discuss his motivations to explore this domain, what developments have him most excited, what he wishes people knew about his work, and how we could make the concept of the future more inclusive and accountable.

I happened across the foresight field, or futures studies, back in high school. It was immediately inspiring to me wide-ranging and imaginative, analytically insightful, ethically engaged and practically applied. However, over some years of working with foresight in government, I found that policymakers had limited capacity to envision alternative futures, and even where the field had a certain currency, its legacy methods werent necessarily having great impact.

So, I began re-visiting longstanding creative interests of mine that had perhaps begun to fall away during my formal education in history and law making things, films, theatre, games and asked: how might thinking about futures be made more accessible and compelling through these modes?

What began as a trickle has, over time, become more like a flood: practitioners, scholars, activists, and others around the world are now working in countless different ways on these intersections. A range of these are documented in our recent collection Design and Futures.

The central challenge this work addresses could certainly be called global, but equally, it's psychological. It is an aspect of the human condition that exists at every scale of action and institution, from the personal to the planetary. That challenge is: how to engage the various possible worlds we might find ourselves in later not just intellectually, in the abstract, but more deeply as potential lived realities? The field traditionally has been very strong on frameworks for organizing thought, but less so on converting those anticipations into embodied insights and making them stick.

Design and futures were largely non-overlapping worlds when we started joining the dots in the mid-2000s, and a decade ago, the term "speculative design" wasnt even in the mix. However, new framings that speak to different groups are part of the vitality of how the work has taken off, and Im glad to help people explore futures more effectively under any banner. I have now spent well over a decade bringing futures often into new spaces, especially by growing and gardening those connections between foresight and media, arts, and design, which is intended to help acculturate build into our cultures these ways of thinking.

I would add that to my mind, designers have special duties because they create fragments of the future on behalf of everyone. Similarly, to the extent that a leader in any context has an outsized capacity to shape things, they have a commensurate responsibility to practice and enable high quality futures thinking.

Perhaps the most critical challenge is the need for futures literacy in the culture. Take politics and journalism, institutions that inherently deal with the future but that do not have a well-established habit of "rigorous imagining". Lack of futures literacy is apparent when otherwise discerning journalists demand that you provide predictions for their piece on "the future" (note the singular form) of any issue they are covering.

It is also apparent when policymakers, technologists, pundits, and other public figures issue a constant stream of authoritative-sounding forecasts, but no one checks back later to see how they fared, or asks how this diet of images of the future might be exerting influence and serving some interests more than others. Raising collective futures literacy, or "social foresight", not just across organizations but also throughout society, is an essential way for us all to navigate the predicaments that we face as a species.

The greatest development right now is the rapid widening of those who initiate, run, and take part in foresight work. Its incredibly exciting. People in various sectors, bringing diverse cultural, organizational, and disciplinary backgrounds and sensibilities, are picking up the tools to build strategic foresight and experiential futures approaches in particular, and adapting them for their own contexts and needs.

Theres more participation and interest than there has ever been, which is as thrilling as it is overdue. Organization leaders and governments, too, are taking the cue to improve their foresight approaches which is necessary in this time.

Playing with emerging media tools and technologies is a fun and productive aspect of opening up new ways of thinking through experiential futures. For instance, for the World Economic Forums own Global Technology Governance Summit this year, with my Carnegie Mellon students we designed online media websites and podcasts that behaved as if they were "from" decades out, each examining technology governance dilemmas and interventions that might be waiting in the wings.

Another project, for the UNESCO Futures Summit, pictured a future after the Sustainable Development Goals are achieved, via a digital showcase of world-changing organizations and initiatives in the year 2045. Here, we created a digital trade show for visitors to wander and explore at their leisure, using an online collaboration software Miro. Earlier this year, we created TikToks from the future, just as an experiment. The result was a range of wonderfully mundane, sometimes provocative or hilarious, vignettes of everyday futures, made with zero budget, and exploring food, autonomous vehicles, real estate, travel, and more.

Yet, the medium itself does not necessarily need to be cutting-edge or experimental to be effective. To support the UN Development Programmes annual innovation gathering, mid-pandemic, my collaborators and I created physical artifacts from alternative futures for global development and sent them in the mail for people to receive at their homes, ahead of a global event that took place entirely online.

Every storytelling approach offers different ways to think and feel into what alternative scenarios might be like. Since no one can visit the future to get hard information about it, we must use whatever it takes to stoke our collective imaginative and deliberative capacities.

The role of a futurist is more like that of an artist or writer than an accountant or lawyer. Its as much an art or craft as a profession, and there are as many kinds of futurists as there are ways of thinking about the future. The tradition I identify with is notable for being radically imaginative, critical, inclusive, and democratic. And to me, taking words like "future" and "futurist" back from the ways they have been abused, pre-populated or colonized with a tremendous amount of baggage is part of the project in hand.

It could also be helpful for more people to be aware that experts in the field generally dont call it "futurism" that word refers more to an art movement early last century thats unrelated.

Building the habit of mapping futures can be life changing. For institutions or organizations, it can really shift how they operate. Likewise at an individual level and its remarkable to get to see this among my students. I think a reason it can have such impact is that its a way of situating the "what" and "how" of daily effort within the larger "whys" in our lives. Investing in foresight capacity helps to knit vital day-to-day work to the meaningful longer-term and bigger-picture questions, and to keep those ties alive.

I believe the biggest collective impact of all this is unfolding right before our eyes, but its a large story, so you must look for it on a timescale of decades or generations rather than months or years. We, as humans, are learning how to codesign our futures. This is ultimately a transformation in culture and governance.

Well, I love that question. Its central to what we have been up to. My own approach to developing and socializing experiential futures widely has been to keep several hats at the ready, sometimes wearing more than one at once. As a creative, I devise projects and interventions to make particular questions, and new horizons of thought, available for particular occasions and audiences

As an educator, I learn from these experiments to devise new frameworks, and distribute them to emerging practitioners and whoever else can use them in their own context. And as a strategic consultant, I collaborate with organizations, governments and communities on their challenges to apply what we are learning, and show how it can work, which helps address those challenges while also earning greater legitimacy and visibility on behalf of a wider futures community, growing the audience of users and learners for the underlying practices.

If youre wondering about what a broader "we" can do, just about every organization has potential to grow their foresight capacity, and make more space to engage with alternative futures, which can help support creativity and innovation on one hand as well as risk mitigation and resilience on the other.

One project weve developed over some years which I think exemplifies this hybrid activity rather well, is a card deck called The Thing From The Future. Its a tool for diversifying and deepening imagination. Weve used it with UN agencies and the International Red Cross, as well as the BBC, NASA JPL, US Conference of Mayors, Skoll World Forum and other partners all over the world. It is a game that has the purpose of lowering the bar to using imagination with skill, and having conversations that matter, but playfully.

The future is not just something that happens to us, it is something we have the ability to shape. And part of what is interesting is, the more people and institutions tune in, participate, and act, the truer this becomes.

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What is 'futures studies' and how can it improve our world? - World Economic Forum

He says that companies want to "increasingly manipulate you."Hacked Humans

Yuval Harari, a world-renowned social philosopher and the bestselling author of Sapiens, has a stark warning: we need to start regulating AI,because otherwise big companies are going to be able to hack humans.

Harari believes that the rapidly increasing sophistication of AI could lead to a population of hacked humans, according to a report from CBSs 60 Minutes. To deal with this issue, hes calling on the worlds leaders to begin regulating AI and data collection efforts by large corporations.

To hack a human being is to get to know that person better than they know themselves,he told the show. And based on that, to increasingly manipulate you.

At the heart of the issue is the proliferation of tech companies whose business is gathering massive amounts of data about their users. Harari worries that people are increasingly ceding their personal lives to private entities that dont have their best interests at heart.

Netflix tells us what to watch and Amazon tells us what to buy, he said on the program. Eventually within 10 or 20 or 30 years such algorithms could also tell you what to study at college and where to work and whom to marry and even whom to vote for.

Harari urged nations to take the threat of powerful AI seriously, suggesting that clear and strict guardrails be put in place to ensure data isnt wielded to manipulate the public.

Certainly, now we are at the point when we need global cooperation. You cannot regulate the explosive power of artificial intelligence on a national level, Harari said to 60 Minutes. He added that data should never be concentrated in just one place saying, Thats a recipe for a dictatorship.

Its a chilling but plausible outlook especially now that some tech companies are looking to convince users to reject physical reality entirely and embrace a virtual one of its own making.

READ MORE: Yuval Harari Warns Humans Will Be Hacked If Artificial Intelligence Is Not Globally Regulated [60 Minutes]

More on dangerous AI: Former Google Exec Warns that AI Researchers Are Creating God

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Expert Warns That Human Beings Are Going to Start Getting Hacked - Futurism

Also, they're creepy as hell. Digital Workforce

While the metaverse might seem like a far off dream, more fit for the pages of a Neal Stephenson novel than reality, some are already attempting to cash in the concept and even provide a digital workforce for it.

Enter Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based company that says its designing AI-driven digital humans for clients to use for things like customer service, promotional videos, and education. However, the company also has its sights set on the future with co-founder Greg Cross saying it plans to create a digital workforce for a potential metaverse, according to The Verge.

When were playing a game, we adopt a certain persona or personality, when were coaching our kids football team we adopt another persona, we have a different personality when were at the pub having a beer with our mates, Cross told the Verge. As human beings, were always adjusting our persona and the role we have within those parameters. With digital people, we can create those constructs.

Soul Machines digital people run on a system thats creepily called Humans OS 2.0. Its an Autonomous Animation Platform with a digital brain that allows the AI to learn from its interactions with real people, according to its website. A video of the OS in action shows that the digital humans are ripped from the uncanny valley.

Cross hopes that the AI will be able to fulfill the future needs of flesh and blood humans, in and out of the metaverse or even duplicate them.

At some point in the future, you might be able to create a digital version of yourself or multiple versions of yourself, and they can go out and do stuff, make money for you, make money for your company, while youre doing something else thats a whole lot more fun, Cross told the Verge.

Creating digital people with the ability to learn for the sole purpose of working for real humans brings up a whole host of difficult ethical questions.

After all, if these digital people are indeed intelligent no matter how artificial having them work for us could be akin to a form of slavery or indentured servitude, especially if technological advances make them more intelligent as time goes on. It might also inadvertently create a new class structure of AI humans not unlike the video game Detroit: Become Human.

Cross, however, isnt deterred.

[Technology] has always been used by most of us to do incredibly good things and by a few of us to do the things that arent very nice or simply plain evil,he told the site. That is a reflection of the human condition.

READ MORE: This Company Is Making Digital Humans to Serve the Metaverse [The Verge]

More on digital people: This CGI Influencer Is Shilling for More than 100 Brands

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A Startup Is Creating Digital Human Servants to Work in the Metaverse - Futurism

This is the lamest dystopia ever. McRib NFT

McDonalds has announced that the McRib is back kind of.

In a tiring display of late-stage capitalism, the burger chain announced that its created McRib NFTs in celebration of the sandwichs 40th anniversary, according to a press release. The company added that it would be giving away the NFTs as part of a sweepstakes on Monday November 1st to give people the chance to enjoy it year-round digitally.

Our McRib NFTs are digital versions of the fan favorite sandwich almost as saucy as the McRib itself and were giving them away to a few lucky fans on Twitter beginning Nov. 1, the press release read.

All that sauce and not a drop of irony.

The restaurant giant isnt the first to get into the NFT trend. Megacorps including Coca-Cola, Taco Bell, and Nike have all offered NFTs to its customers this year. The only difference with McDonalds is that its giving away the McRib tokens for free, as part of a marketing ploy for the sandwichs upcoming release.

Honestly, thats to be expected. Jumping aboard flashy trends are easy ways for corps to gin up hype and extra money but boy, oh boy is it tiring.

Nothing quite sucks the fun and cool factor out cool new tech quite likethe Golden Arches using it to peddle a sandwich. Unfortunately, it just shows that, in a lot of ways, we are truly living in a cyberpunk dystopia one where behemoth corps will use any and all digital tools to make a buck, while most of us will eat it up like so many McRib sandwiches.

READ MORE: McDonalds USA Unveils First-Ever NFT to Celebrate 40th Anniversary of the McRib [PR Newswire]

More on NFTs: NFT Developer Absconds with $2.7 Million

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McDonald's Created a McRib NFT Because We Live in Hell - Futurism

Like it or not, its time to embrace the metaverse.

On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed his company Facebook Inc. would be rebranding itself as Meta, to better reflect its focus on building the metaverse, described by Zuckerberg as an embodied internet where youre in the experience, not just looking at it.

The concept of the metaverse, meanwhile, has been around long before Facebook even existed. Often described as the successor to the internet, futurists and tech experts have envisioned the metaverse as a place where our physical realities converge with various virtual experiences in a shared virtual space. This idea has been explored in some way or another by science-fiction authors or Hollywood filmmakers over the past several decades, generally depicted as a virtual-reality platform where users can create an avatar to interact with fellow members of the digital population.

The concepts name the metaverse was even adopted from the 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which the plot plays out in both virtual and physical realities.

The term predates the internet we know today, explains Trond Undheim, PhD, a futurist and author whose podcasts explore technological innovation and artificial intelligence, among other topics. But it has now become the term for the gradual shift in digital communication whereby the internet is becoming a hybrid reality, meaning its becoming physical and digital at the same time.

The easiest way to envision this concept, perhaps, is to observe the gaming community which is the closest any group has come to entering the so-called metaverse, as far as Undheim is concerned. These gamers have established virtual avatars of themselves, which interact with other virtual avatars across persistent online worlds. Theyre working together in real time, arranging meet-ups, even spending in-game currencies all while communicating via headsets or chat.

There have even been reports of people hosting their wedding inside the cutesy virtual world of Nintendos Animal Crossing and inviting their friends digital avatars to attend after the pandemic canceled their real-world receptions. More recently, Fortnite reimagined Washington D.C. circa 1963 to teleport players back to the Capitol to watch Martin Luther King, Jr. give his iconic I Have a Dream speech.

But the future of open-world gaming is just one of the many ways the metaverse will take hold of our lives. Big Tech, of course, is ready to take things a step further.

As Zuckerberg described in a video released Thursday, Meta is trying to build a part of the metaverse that would let users do almost anything you can imagine or at least be a place where they can interact, work, shop, play games, gather for social events or create content. He also claims Metas efforts will create millions of job opportunities, much like the internet eventually created jobs that were previously unheard of.

I expect that the metaverse is going to open up lots of opportunities for people in the exact same way, Zuckerberg said. But the reality is that no one knows exactly which models are going to work and make this sustainable.

In addition to Facebook, which had previously boasted its virtual playgrounds and boardrooms, Microsoft has also been discussing its own metaverse apps for creating, and connecting to, all-new shared digital spaces.

The pandemic only accelerated the need for at least some types of metaverse-adjacent experiences, with more folks working from home and relying on technology in order to be places that they cant physically be. Theres also growing interest in making virtual events more accessible, allowing users to attend art galleries or concerts with other online friends, or patronize virtual businesses where they can spend their hard-earned currency (or cryptocurrency) on goods or services real or digital.

The metaverse is different and much more powerful than a complete virtual reality, Undheim says, because it is combining the two without merging them all the way.

It doesnt truly exist yet, he adds. But well know it when we see it.

Much of the technology needed to create the metaverse already exists, or is currently in development. But there are still several hurdles to cross before the concept can be put into use, including bandwidth requirements, and getting enough people on board. Undheim also fears that the metaverse may become too commercialized very early on, making users feel alienated or exploited before the concept has a chance to reach its full potential.

What Undheim does know, though, its that the metaverse is coming relatively fast, too.

We will see this wash over us in the next five to seven years, Undheim believes. [Its here] the moment a reasonable person would say, I dont really know if I would value my physical reality over interacting online. Maybe they dont even recognize the distinction between the two.

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What is the metaverse? - fox4kc.com

AIs Impact On Businesses And Solution Providers

While most peoples understanding of artificial intelligence is as likely to come from watching science fiction movies such as Ex Machina, AI is in reality already an important and growing part of everyones daily lives. And the impactgood or badwill only continue to grow, said Kevin Surace, futurist, inventor and entrepreneur.

Surace, who has given keynotes on the future of technology at events from conferences to the TED stage to the U.S. Congress, Sunday helped open the NexGen 2021+ conference, held this week in Anaheim, Calif., with a look at how the interactions between AI, the Internet of Things and the cloud not only impact businesses and ordinary citizens but also the solution providers who help their customers navigate the future of technology. The NexGen 2021+ conference is hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

Surace early on in his keynote said that he does not have all the answers about the impact of future technology.

I do not have a crystal ball. All I can do as a futurist, all I can do is help us take a little journey together three years, five years, 10 years into the future, maybe 20, and say, with these technologies coming along, what does the future look like for us? What does it look like for our businesses?

Surace said that some time ago he noted that AI was about to change our lives forever, and the brightest future awaits those who embrace this change with fervor.

And I really meant it then. And I mean it today. We see people in our industry, in fact in all industries, at the customer level, at the MSP level, saying, Well, artificial intelligence stuff, I dont know when its going impact me, I dont know how its going to. Trust me. It can impact you today. It can make money for you today. It can help your customers move forward today.

Here is what Surace had to say about the future of AI and related technologies.

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Futurist Kevin Surace On AI, IoT And Cloud: Solution Providers Have To Embrace The 'Big Disruption' - CRN

LOS ANGELES, October 27, 2021--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Faraday Future Intelligent Electric Inc. ("FF") (NASDAQ: FFIE), a California-based global shared intelligent electric mobility ecosystem company, today announced its upcoming work with Munro & Associates, Inc., a world class engineering and manufacturing consulting firm, who will help to evaluate and co-create Faraday Futures flagship vehicle, the FF 91 Futurist.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211027006151/en/

Faraday Future to Host EV Industry Veterans Munro & Associates to Help in the Co-Creation of its FF 91 Futurist Flagship Vehicle. (Photo: Business Wire)

Over the next year, Faraday Future will host Munro & Associates at the Faraday Future headquarters and offer hands-on experiences with the intelligent techluxury FF 91 and create independent comparative analysis against the current ultra-luxury market. Having performed quality assessments for over 100 vehicles in the past decade, the Munro team will provide valuable feedback and outside perspective on Faradays flagship offering.

"We are excited to work with Munro & Associates, who has a tremendous amount of experience in the electric vehicle space and has a highly respected reputation within the industry," said Faraday Future Global CEO Carsten Breitfeld. "We are grateful to be on the right track in our production of the FF 91 Futurist and to have the support and opportunity to co-create our products and technologies with this esteemed firm."

For over 30 years, Munro & Associates has helped within manufacturing industries such as aerospace, defense, automotive, marine, medical, heavy industries, MTDM, consumer electronics and more. They have a successful track record of assisting companies to reduce their "time to market," research and development, engineering and manufacturing costs while increasing the quality of the companies products, processes and systems. Munro & Associates is led by Sandy Munro who has provided even-handed assessments for every go-to market EV since 1991. He is an engineer by trade, a frequent speaker, senior advisor, and influencer with a strong presence on social media.

Story continues

"Were looking forward to being a part of history, and joining the process to help co-create the cutting-edge FF 91 Futurist vehicle with Faraday Future," said Corey Stueben, President of Munro & Associates. "Were confident that our expertise and assessments will help drive forward Faraday Futures progress."

Working with Munro & Associates is an important next step in bringing the FF 91 Futurist to market and understanding where it will compare within the EV and automotive industry. The FF 91 Futurist Alliance and FF 91 Futurist models represent the next generation of intelligent internet electric vehicle (EV) products. They are high-performance EVs, all-in-one all cars, and ultimate robotic vehicles, allowing users to "gain back their time" in the third internet living space. The models also encompass extreme technology, an ultimate user experience and a complete ecosystem.

Users can reserve an FF 91 Futurist model now via the FF intelligent APP or FF.com at: https://www.ff.com/us/reserve

Download the new FF intelligent APP at: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1454187098 or https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.faradayfuture.online

ABOUT FARADAY FUTURE

Established in May 2014, FF is a global shared intelligent electric mobility ecosystem company, headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Since its inception, FF has implemented numerous innovations relating to its products, technology, business model, profit model, user ecosystem, and governance structure. On July 22, 2021, FF was listed on NASDAQ with the new company name "Faraday Future Intelligent Electric Inc.", and the ticker symbols "FFIE" for its Class A common stock and "FFIEW" for its warrants. FF aims to perpetually improve the way people move by creating a forward-thinking mobility ecosystem that integrates clean energy, AI, the Internet and new usership models. With the ultimate intelligent techluxury brand positioning, FFs first flagship product FF 91 Futurist is equipped with unbeatable product power. It is not just a high-performance EV, an all-ability car, and an ultimate robotic vehicle, but also the third internet living space.

ABOUT MUNRO & ASSOCIATES, INC.

Founded in 1988, Munro & Associates Inc. is a world class engineering and manufacturing consulting firm based at a 47,000 sq. ft. headquarters and benchmarking center in Auburn Hills, Mich. With offices in Canada, Europe, Australia and Asia, the firm specializes in upfront, predictive methods to increase profitability by improving quality, reliability and value, while reducing total lifecycle costs.

Munro's unique Lean Design methodology enables engineers to build accurate business cases for product design, and manufacturing process optimization. Using Munro's Design Profit software, teams can create highly accurate predictive models that analyze quality, manufacturability, weight and cost reduction, labor and sustainability metrics. For more information, visit http://www.leandesign.com.

FOLLOW FARADAY FUTURE:

https://www.ff.com/ http://appdownload.ff.com https://twitter.com/FaradayFuture https://www.facebook.com/faradayfuture/ https://www.instagram.com/faradayfuture/ http://www.linkedin.com/company/faradayfuture

NO OFFER OR SOLICITATION

This communication shall neither constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which the offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release includes "forward looking statements" within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words "estimates," "projected," "expects," "anticipates," "forecasts," "plans," "intends," "believes," "seeks," "may," "will," "should," "future," "propose" and variations of these words or similar expressions (or the negative versions of such words or expressions) are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, conditions or results, and involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other important factors, many of which are outside FFs control, that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Important factors, among others, that may affect actual results or outcomes include FFs ability to execute on its plans to develop and market its vehicles and the timing of these development programs; FFs estimates of the size of the markets for its vehicles and cost to bring those vehicles to market; the rate and degree of market acceptance of FFs vehicles; the success of other competing manufacturers; the performance and security of FFs vehicles; potential litigation involving FF; the result of future financing efforts and general economic and market conditions impacting demand for FFs products. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties described in the "Risk Factors" section of the preliminary registration statement on Form S-1 recently filed by FF and other documents filed by FF from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and FF does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211027006151/en/

Contacts

For Faraday FutureInvestors: ir@faradayfuture.com

Media:John Schillingjohn.schilling@ff.com

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ADDING MULTIMEDIA Faraday Future to Host EV Industry Veterans Munro & Associates to Help in the Co-Creation of its FF 91 Futurist Flagship Vehicle...

"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't give you fries with that."I Said Fries!

McDonalds is partnering with IBM to implement artificial intelligence tech to take orders at its drive-thru lanes.

In my mind, IBM is the ideal partner for McDonalds given their expertise in building AI-powered customer care solutions and voice recognition, McDonalds CEO Chris Kempczinski said during a Wednesday earnings call, as quoted by CNBC.

Its arguably the last thing we need: the kind of frustration we get from trying to communicate with AI-powered software cough, Siri could make anybody rip their hair out the next time they hit up a fast food joint.

And thats not to mention losing more human jobs to automated systems, a worrying trend thats already well underway.

In 2019, the restaurant chain bought a tech startup called Apprente and renamed it McD Tech Labs. As part of the partnership, IBM will acquire the company.

McDonalds has already tested the tech developed by Apprente at several restaurants in Chicago this summer.

At the time, McDonalds claimed the system could already handle about 80 percent of the orders that come its way, filling them with about 85 percent accuracy.

Bizarrely, Kempczinski claimed human workers were actually eager to help the system out. Weve had to do a little bit of training of just keep your hands off the steering wheel, let the computer do its work,' he said at the time.

The companys shares were up two percent Wednesday after the chain beat Wall Street estimates with its third quarter earnings, CNBC reports.

McDonalds is betting big on technology to drive sales, as already evidenced in a widespread rollout of automated order-taking kiosks.

But whether its AI technology will be able to keep up with disgruntled drive-thru customers remains to be seen.

READ MORE: McDonalds and IBM could bring AI-powered drive-thrus to more restaurants [Engadget]

More on automation: Buffalo Wild Wings Is Allowing Robots to Take Over the Deep Fryer

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

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During an appearance this week at the University of Virginia, NASA boss Bill Nelson made some eyebrow-raising remarks about a possible connection between military sightings of unidentified flying objects and the search for alien life.

Ive talked to those pilots and they know they saw something, and their radars locked on to it, Nelson told the crowd at the university, which is where he got his law degree. And they dont know what is. And we dont know what it is. We hope its not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology.

Thats an interesting analysis on its own. But look what he said next, when he started directly speculating about the search for life beyond Earth:

But its something, Nelson added during the wide-ranging event. And so this is a mission that were constantly looking, Who is out there? Who are we? How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilize? And are those same conditions out there in a universe that has billions of other suns and billions of other galaxies? Its so large I cant conceive it.

Provocatively, Nelson even went on to conjecture that alien civilizations could be found in a parallel universe.

Now there are even theories that there might be other universes, Nelson added. And if thats the case, who am I to say planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?

Obviously, Nelson isnt claiming to have any specific information, and in all likelihood he was just having some fun during a public appearance. Its also not Nelsons first time opining that theres almost certainly alien life out there somewhere.

But it worth contrasting Nelsons freewheeling style with that of his immediate predecessor, Steve Jurczyk, who was much more reserved and circumspect on the topic. Take this interview he did with Futurism earlier this year:

You know, its, uh, hard to say, he told us with a laugh when asked about the search for alien life. But you know, part of the Mars mission is looking for past signs of life, and were detecting planets around other stars, right? With Kepler and eventually with the James Webb Space Telescope and other missions, we want to do direct imaging of exoplanets, planets around other stars. So were advancing our knowledge there.

But so far, no aliens, he said.

READ MORE: Space Jam: Former Senator Talks Aliens, Asteroids and Star Trek With Larry Sabato [University of Virginia]

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Head of NASA Suggests That UFOs Could Be Alien Technology - Futurism