Technology is running wild as things like virtual reality, 'smart' buildings and products, and fully connected online and offline worlds are making their presence felt throughout many of the future's top trends.

We haven't quite reached the point of flying cars, jetpacks, and moon colonies quite yet, but many of the design trends featured in the forecast are impressive in their forward thinking nonetheless.

In the health world, functional fitness is gaining popularity in cities thanks to its life-improving benefits. In fact, the ultimate goal of functional fitness is to train and develop the body's muscles for activities performed on a daily basis, from sitting down or rising up from a chair to picking up an object from the ground.

Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI ) could help put the human touch back into health by reducing bureaucracy and administrative duties that can take time away from personalized care. Companies are bringing in AI to make administrative tasks a lot quicker, such as screening drug candidates, streamlining finance processes, adverse event reporting and more.

Everything around us will become "smarter." We'll live in a "made" environment, not just a "built" one. Buildings, settings, and products will integrate connectivity and "know" that we're present. Most aspects of our everyday lives will reflect this, enabling us to make real-time, just-in-time connections to people, places, goods, and services.

Artificial intelligence and robotics are developing so quickly that in the next decade it's predicted that they'll take away approximately 25 million jobs in the United States from humans. In case you don't know how many jobs that is, that's about three times as many jobs as was lost during the recent Great Recession in the US.

Digital is here to stay, embrace it fully. Digital will be such an integral part of daily life that we'll leverage it much more fully. We'll accept how it interacts with us, consciously feeding its data streams to make our lives better. Our iHumanity will be a shared, global phenomenon, but different locales and generations will give it their own spin.

In the environment, robots that can crawl across the seafloor dispatching invaders with poisons or electric shock are being investigated as a potential tool for combating invasive species. The technology is now being tested to control crown-of-thorns starfish, which have devastated Great Barrier Reef corals in recent years, and invasive lionfish, which are competing with native species in the Caribbean Sea.

While this this next trend is still in its infancy compared to where it will go, the success of virtual and mixed reality is starting to make its way into media and entertainment. As user behaviors rapidly evolve and consumption occurs across an ever-expanding universe of distribution environments and platforms, companies with the deepest, most direct insight into their fans have a decisive advantage.

In psychology, in an effort that could vastly improve treatments, psychologists are delving more deeply than ever before into the roles played by genes and gene expression in mental illness, substance abuse and neurodevelopmental disorders. These psychologists are intent on closing an important research loop.

Think that's a lot to cover?

We're just getting warmed up!

Check out our blog for more details on these and many other trends, advancements and curiosities facing us in the near future.