From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Part of the reason I'm arguing the time is right is because unlike back in the 60s when these ideas about complexity economics were first floated by people like Herbert Simon, we now have all the tools to do it. Computers are a billion times more powerful, the data is vastly better, our understanding of psychology is vastly better, we know a lot more about how to program models like this.
The distinction between offline and online retail will vanish, as consumers will not be able to tell where one started and the other finished. This is what we call at Farfetch 'Augmented Retail'.
This is a race to the future, a future powered by renewable energy sources and underpinned by efficient energy use. The winning nations, corporation and citizens will reap enormous benefits in terms of jobs, sustainable economic development, energy security and vastly improved local environments.
Our envy of birds certainly helped drive our will to fly, however I think Leonardo was probably held back by trying to emulate the flapping of birds; that doesn't work with human muscles. We had to free ourselves of the perception that you need to flap your wings.
We are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.
The digital world has democratized content – it's now available on every platform all the time – and we're going to see a whole raft of new stars, because talent can be rewarded.
We live downstream of a very high-quality tool for manipulating each other in a collaborative way, which has been augmented by the perverse incentives surrounding manipulating each other in a hostile way. The explosion in the number of people who are interacting with each other has- today- made the problem effectively unsolvable.
I fully believe the future of financial infrastructure will be built on blockchain. We handle around US$5 billion per day for all transactions, around 3x more than PayPal. This is only the beginning.
Your attention hasn't collapsed, it's been stolen from you by big forces. Once we understand those forces, we can begin to build meaningful solutions.
We use these tools to do things quicker – but that never help us get on top of everything because they systematically increase the size of the 'everything' – It's a rigged game!
In the future, these blood tests will allow us to offer treatments for Alzheimer's disease 10, 20, or even 30 years before symptoms start to manifest, much like how we currently handle cholesterol. This early detection and intervention will be our strategy for combating Alzheimer's.
Technology isn't a 'thing,' it's a social structure that people act upon the universe through. The social structure has incentives, roles and governance which determine the meaning and effect of the technology, not the engineering itself.