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February 6 - March 3, 2020
“Uber’s goal,” explained Holden from the stage, “is to demonstrate flying car capability in 2020 and have aerial ridesharing fully operational in Dallas and LA by 2023.” But then Holden went even further: “Ultimately, we want to make it economically irrational to own and use a car.”
Despite reports that we are approaching the heat death of Moore’s Law—which we’ll address in the next chapter—in 2023 the average thousand-dollar laptop will have the same computing power as a human brain (roughly 1016 cycles per second). Twenty-five years after that, that same average laptop will have the power of all the human brains currently on Earth.
Solitary exponentials disrupt products, services, and markets—like when Netflix ate Blockbuster for lunch—while convergent exponentials wash away products, services, and markets, as well as the structures that support them.
In the aerial ridesharing equation, we’ve solved safety and noise, but price still requires a few more innovations.
For consumers, the benefits of this transformation are many. Most Americans will tolerate a commute of thirty minutes or less, but with a robo-chauffeur behind the wheel and a car that can become anything—a bedroom, a meeting room, a movie theater—you might not mind living farther afield, where lower-cost real estate lets you buy more house for less money. Giving up that car allows you to turn your garage into a spare bedroom, your driveway into a rose garden, and you won’t need to buy gas again—ever. The cars are electric, and they recharge themselves at night. No more hunting for parking
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So think about this timetable: Autonomous car rollouts by 2020. Hyperloop certification and aerial ridesharing by 2023. By 2025—going on vacation might have a totally different meaning. Going to work most definitely will.
Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Think about the internet itself. While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished.
Over the next decade, we’ll see these kinds of opportunities arise in dozens of industries. As a result, if the internet is our benchmark, more wealth could be created over the next ten years than was over the previous century.
Unfortunately, established organizations will have a hard time keeping pace. Our biggest companies and government agencies were designed in another century, for purposes of safety and stability. Built to last, as the saying goes. They were not built to withstand rapid, radical change. This is why, according to Yale’s Richard Foster, 40 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be gone in ten years, replaced, for the most part, by upstarts we’ve not yet heard of.
To put this in different terms, individual car ownership enjoyed over a century of ascendency. The first real threat it faced, today’s ridesharing model, only showed up in the last decade. But that ridesharing model won’t even get ten years to dominate. Already, it’s on the brink of autonomous car displacement, which is on the brink of flying car disruption, which is on the brink of Hyperloop and rockets-to-anywhere decimation. Plus, avatars. The most important part: All of this change will happen over the next ten years.
Within a decade, we will live in a world where just about anything that can be measured will be measured, constantly. It’s a world of exceptionally radical transparency.
Yet the real revolution lies beneath bitcoin: blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed, mutable, permissible, and transparent digital ledger. We’ll take them one at a time. Distributed means it’s a shared, collected database, so everyone on the network—that is, anyone who owns the currency—has a copy of the ledger. Mutable means that anytime anyone enters new information in the ledger, all ledgers change. It’s permissible in the same way that cash is permissible—anyone can use it. Finally, the system is transparent because everyone on the network can see every transaction on the
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The real innovation, though, is how transactions are recorded in the ledger. In normal financial exchanges, when money is moved around, a trusted third party is needed: If I cut you a check, it’s a third party, typically a bank, who ensures I have the cash to cover it.
But cryptocurrencies remove the middleman from the exchange, instead validating transactions with every computer on the network. Once deemed valid, the record of that transaction is bundled with other records into a “block,”...
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By cutting out the middleman and bringing accounting into the digital age, blockchain is doing to banks what the internet did to traditional media: gutting them. For starters,...
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Blockchain also provides an easy way to transfer that money, especially between countries.
What’s more, one reason so many people don’t have a bank account is because they also lack an official identity. Blockchain solves this problem as well, providing people with a digital ID that will follow them around the internet. What can we do with this identity? Own our own data, for one. Blockchain IDs could also facilitate fair and accurate voting. Lastly, if your identity can be established, then a reputation score can easily be attached. This score allows for things like peer-to-peer ridesharing, which today require trusted third parties named “Uber” and “Lyft.”
And it’s for all of these reasons that the tech is exploding.
All of this has an impact on the rate of innovation. As this bonanza of extra hours continues to pile up, inventors, entrepreneurs, those proverbial gals and guys in the garage, will get far more time to experiment, fail, pivot, fail again, pivot again, and, eventually, get it right.
For those unfamiliar, crowdfunding is pretty straightforward. The “crowd” in question refers to the billions of people currently online. The funding part means asking that crowd for money. Typically, a crowdfunder presents their product or service to the world, usually via a video posted to a dedicated site like Kickstarter, and asks for money in one of four forms: as a loan (technically peer-to-peer lending), as an equity investment, in exchange for a reward (e.g., a T-shirt), or as an advanced purchase of the proposed product or service.
The very first crowdfunding project took place in 1997, when the British prog-rock band Marillion raised $60,000 through online donations to finance a US tour.
More importantly, the scale of disruption is increasing. What began as accelerating and converging technologies has become accelerating and converging markets, meaning the business model changes of the last few decades are nowhere near the changes that are coming.
Because of the convergence of high bandwidth 5G connections, augmented reality eyewear, our emerging trillion-sensors economy, and, to stitch it all together, powerful AI, we have gained the ability to superimpose digital information atop physical environments—freeing advertising from the tyranny of the screen.
It’s another reason we may be looking at the end of the shopping mall, because reality becomes the shopping mall.
When it comes to healthcare, the system itself is often sicker than the patients. Even the terminology is misleading. Today, going to the doctor is about sick care more than healthcare. It’s reactive, not proactive. Doctors make after-the-fact interventions, fighting a rearguard battle that’s often inefficient, overpriced, and in certain cases, downright surreal. In the US, for example, fear of liability has doctors spending $210 billion per year on procedures patients don’t need.
The research side isn’t any better. Out of every five thousand new drugs introduced, only five make it to human testing, and only one of those is actually approved. This is why the average medicine takes twelve years to get from lab to patient, at a cost of $2.5 billion, and Americans spend an average of $10,739 per person per year on healthcare—more than any other country on Earth.
On the technological front, every step in the medical treatment train is being reinvented. On the front end, the convergence of sensors, networks, and AI is upending medical diagnostics. In the middle, robotics and 3-D printing are changing the nature of medical procedures. On the back end, AI, genomics, and quantum computing are transforming medicines themselves.
Concurrently, as a result of these convergences, two major paradigm shifts are under way. The first is the shift from sick care to healthcare, from a system that is retrospective, reactive, and generic, to one that is prospective, proactive, and personalized.
The next is a change in management. For most of the last century, the healthcare industry was an uneasy partnership between big pharma, big government, and the full spectrum of doctors, nurses, and trained medical professionals. Now we’re witnessing an invasion. Many of the big technology companies are getting into this game, all intent on making an impact. “If you zoom out into the future,” Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said (in that same interview with the Independent where...
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Racing Apple are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, Baidu, Tencent, and others. As we shall see in a moment, all of these companies have three clear advantages over the establishment: They’re already in your home, into artificial intelligence, and experts in collecting and analyzing your data. While it remains an open question whether we want to turn our healthcare over to the big technology companies, what is certain is that these three advantages are fundamental to detecting diseases early enough to make a difference, which is definitely the first step in turning sick care into healthcare.
All of these developments point toward a future of always-on health monitoring and cheap, easy diagnostics. The technical term for this shift is “mobile health,”
But the biggest news isn’t about this company or that technique, it’s that half of the thirty-two thousand most common genetic disorders are caused by an error in a single base pair—meaning one letter in the code is out of place. This may be something we can soon correct.
It really is a war. The body count is high. Ninety percent of all drug possibilities fail. The few that do succeed take an average of ten years to reach the market and cost between $2.5 billion and $12 billion to get there.
Three major changes are under way. First, by shifting the risk from the consumer to the service provider, entire categories of insurance are being eliminated. Next, crowdsurance is replacing traditional categories of health and life insurance. Finally, the rise of networks, sensors, and AI are rewriting the ways in which insurance is priced and sold, remaking the very nature of the industry.
The tale of food is a tale of waste. Inefficiency is built into every step of the story.
Since over 70 percent of humanity will live in cities by 2025, driving farm-grown vegetables an average of two thousand miles to reach our urban plates is not only wasteful, it’s unhealthy.
Beyond eliminating travel time, vertical farms solve a number of other problems. Since they are completely closed environments, the need for pesticides also disappears. As does the need for water. Relying on hydroponics and aeroponics, vertical farms allow us to grow crops with 90 percent less water than traditional agriculture—which is critical on our increasingly thirsty planet.
The largest player around is the Bay Area–based Plenty Unlimited Inc. With over $200 million in funding, Plenty is taking a smart tech approach to indoor agriculture. Plants grow on twenty-foot-high towers, monitored by tens of thousands of cameras and sensors, and optimized by big data machine learning. This allows them to pack forty plants into the space previously occupied by one. It also produces yields 350 times greater than outdoor farmland, and uses less than 1 percent as much water. And rather than bespoke veggies for the wealthy few, Plenty’s processes allow them to knock 20 to 35
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Scary fact: By 2050, to feed a population of 9 billion, the world will need 70 percent more food than it did in 2009. A lot of that food will be meat. By 2050, primarily thanks to the modernization of China and India, global meat consumption is expected to increase by 76 percent.
Today, 50 percent of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, with 80 percent of that land reserved for livestock. A quarter of the planet’s available landmass is currently used to keep 20 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, and 1 billion sheep alive—that is, until we can kill and eat them.
Meat production accounts for 70 percent of global water use. Compared to fifteen hundred liters required to produce a kilogram of wheat, it takes fifteen thousand liters to produce a kilogram of beef,
Meat is also responsible for 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gases and a considerable portion of our deforestation problem. In fact, we’re in the midst of one of the largest mass extinctions in history—and more on this in Chapter Thirteen—and loss of land for agricultural production is currently the largest driver of that extinction.
Today, we must raise an entire cow to produce a single steak. We also need to deal with all the waste and the greenhouse gases that cow produces along the way, and dispose of the animal’s carcass on the back end. Yet, as advances in biotechnology have begun converging with advances in agrotechnology, we can now bypass this entire process, growing that same steak from a single stem cell—no cow required.
Cultured meat uses 99 percent less land, 82 to 96 percent less water, and produces 78 to 96 percent less greenhouse gases. Energy use drops somewhere between 7 and 45 percent depending on the meat involved
Since we’re growing steak from stem cells, we can increase helpful proteins, reduce saturated fat, and even add vitamins. The meat requires no antibiotics and, given the danger of diseases like mad cow, is actually safer for humans. By turning to cultured meat, we’re lowering the global disease burden and, since 70 percent of emerging diseases come from livestock, decreasing our risk of pandemic.
In a few years, humans will become the first animals that get their protein from other animals without any animals being harmed along the way. Slaughterhouses will become a ghost story we tell our grandchildren.
For this reason switching to clean energy tops pretty much every list of what we can do to stop climate change. And most experts agree, that switch has three major parts: energy generation, energy storage, and green transportation.
Tesla has also shown their batteries work at scale. In a 2018 project to upgrade a solar/wind farm in Australia, Tesla built the largest battery facility ever—one hundred megawatts of storage—in fewer than a hundred days. What’s the big deal? First, we can now build fully integrated solar/wind/battery plants that produce energy at a price cheaper than coal. Second, we can do this over the course of a summer.
In 1790, 90 percent of all Americans made their living as farmers; today it’s less than 2 percent. Did those jobs disappear? Not exactly. The agrarian economy morphed, first into the industrial economy, next into the service economy, now the information economy. Automation produces job substitution far more than job obliteration.
In our research involving 1,500 companies, we found that firms achieve the most significant performance improvements when humans and machines work together.” BMW, for example, saw an 85 percent increase in productivity when they replaced their traditional—that is, automated—assembly line process with human/robot teams.
