From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We are now living with a great deal of uncertainty, which will increase. As a society, we have to be prepared for threats we cannot conceive, we must build resilience not just in developed countries, but particularly in conflict areas.
Arguably, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.
The third and deepest reason this matters—why it's not just commercially meaningful but potentially world-changing—is the ability to bridge different levels of abstraction.
When you look at the numbers, 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. In short, these EM populations are young, expansive and dynamic, not like the stable, more risk-averse populations of the world's developed economies.
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?
I remain a technical optimist… the problem is not artificial intelligence, it's natural stupidity.
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.
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.
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, but what people want is to be able to price that trade-flow.
For commercial markets, a shift to collaborative economies is not far behind, and businesses must change their thinking about the nature competition, defending value, and other strategies if they wish to grow in an uncertain future.
At some point, if this kind of technological progress continues, it would seem that our descendants will become entirely digital: uploads or artificial intellects implemented on computers.
At some point, if this kind of technological progress continues, it would seem that our descendants will become entirely digital: uploads or artificial intellects implemented on computers. At that point, it is possible that evolutionary selection will again become an important driver of change—but not necessarily of change for the better.