From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The design and collaborative power of an individual engineer or technologist is more powerful than it's ever been. The tasks themselves are getting more accessible too. Putting a robotic spacecraft out into space is becoming fairly routine.
The future is baked into the population of today, and that makes it very convenient for looking at the next couple of decades as our future soldiers are today in nursery school, and our future retirees are entering college.
Over half the sub-Saharan African population is under 18 years old, versus Latin America, where over half the population is under 25 years old and Asia, where it is under 35 years old. These EM populations are young, expansive and dynamic.
We have to leave behind the myth that our economies are actually fit for the present that we understand, and the vision of the future we want to create. We need to redesign economics for our times.
Our mission is to expand the economic sphere of influence of humanity off the surface of the planet and into the solar system. Currently we have a vibrant economy in space that goes out to the geostationary belt- where the communication satellites are- and it stops.
This isn't a passing fad. Something fundamental is going on here.
My favourite question when evaluating a startup idea is, 'Is this from the future?' I'm not interested in your ideas about the future; I want to understand why you are living in it today. Why are you living in a different future right now than other people are?
China for example, aims to increase their buying by 400,000 barrels a day in the last quarter of 2012, and will be adding over 750,000 barrels of new refining capacity. That economic engine is still turning.
If you want to have a great startup idea, don't try to think of a startup. If you focus on creating a startup, you'll be grounding yourself in the present, studying customers living in the present, their problems in the present, and their unmet needs in the present.
Thanks to monetary policy, business cycles are far less volatile today than they were in the 19th century, when we had huge swings. But if cryptocurrency takes over the way its proponents would like, we could return to the ups and downs of the pre-monetary policy era.
Alibaba's vision statement includes a mention of how long it wants to last, and that is specifically 102 years. Jack Ma wanted Alibaba to be the only internet company that spanned three centuries.
We're heading to a world where we can eliminate disease, increase our intelligence, and access all the food, healthcare, energy and education we could desire.