With the arrival of 4th industrial revolution, automation and AI, the future of employment could look very different.

That artificial intelligence (AI) is growing faster than ever before is no surprise. Our Future Proof blog has already discussed many of the consequences of this growth. But while we can go on about what AI will mean to our future, who exactly will create this AI. Or, better yet, what are the countries leading the AI revolution?

Earlier this year, 7-Eleven opened its first fully-automated store. It is located in Seoul, South Korea, in the world's 5th largest building. For now, it's only open to employees of Lotte, owner of Korea Seven. But soon, fully-automated stores could open everywhere.

Until recently, space tourism was the stuff of science fiction. But now, thanks in large to private companies pushing for it, we are only a couple of years away. While this spells exciting times, it also brings up questions about our very own nature.

A recent Intel study has estimated that the "passenger economy" will be worth US$7 trillion by 2050. The "passenger economy," a term coined by the American technology company, is the full economic and societal value stemming from fully autonomous vehicles. In this economy, there are both winners and losers.

IoT is a network of smart devices that are connected to each other and exchange data, but it is not necessarily sensitive and responsive to people. When it is, we call it Ambient Intelligence, something that truly resembles a futuristic scenario out of a sci-fi movie.

China is planning to launch a Social Credit Score (SCS) system that ranks its 1.3 billion residents according their trustworthiness by 2020. It has been called as a futuristic version of Big Brother as it uses large variety of data to monitor and evaluate its citizens’ behaviour. How would you feel if your trustworthiness was publicly measured with a single algorithm-based score?

Arguably the most significant driver of change in real estate is the tidal wave of urbanisation. This new wave of urbanisation is linked with many major changes, such as digitalisation, development of science and technology, changes in values and customer needs, sharing economy, experience economy, and innovation economy.

Do you know enough about the future to get you where you want to go? Foresight guides every organization to some extent. With a dose of systematic foresight, teams of all kinds can dramatically improve their chances of consistently making the right choices in a rapidly changing world.

Many tech giants and experts believe that we will see a decline in present-day smartphones within the next decade. Smartphones will be challenged by a wide range of wearable gadgets and smart systems which provide new, convenient ways to communicate and enjoy the benefits of the digital world.

When we start to challenge business as usual and the ‘way we do things around here’, alternative futures can be revealed, like hidden worlds coming into view. We move from this idea of the default future, one future as an extension of now, to many.

Bitcoin value increased more than 500% since the beginning of the year. This is tens of times more than the growth of any high-growth tech company on NASDAQ or the NYSE over the last year. Even better, if you invested $100 in Bitcoin in 2010, today you'd be a multimillionaire. This has gotten many people thinking: Are cryptocurrencies the future?