From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
If you whisk these individuals an additional 200 hundred years forward to present day Jerusalem, these individuals would be entirely shocked. Past knowledge will be largely obsolete. New technologies would appear as witchcraft. Occupations would require incomprehensible skills, and life expectancy would instantaneously double.
We are now living with a great deal of uncertainty, which will increase. As a society, though, we have to be prepared for threats we cannot conceive, we must build resilience not just in developed countries, but particularly in conflict areas.
Transformation is about understanding how the market is evolving and positioning your organization for the future that's unfolding. It's about ensuring that you're there when that future arrives.
As humans, we've evolved in a world where the pace of change was slow. Our minds are not structured for the pace of rapid change that we're seeing and, increasingly, will experience. One way that we deal with the accelerating rate of change is by sort of riding on top of that tsunami of change rather than being crushed by it.
Today, we are asking the opposite question – will luxury brands continue to be sold offline? 20 years after we started, when people were suspicious about whether luxury brands could be sold on the internet, the opposite question is now the big consideration!
Cultured meat can be very helpful. You can design them in such a way that they will have wonderful health benefits for the entire population. This is where exactly where we're going, but it doesn't have to, other producers might do something else.
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.
What if we move to a world where, because robots are so cheap... cheap labour doesn't really matter anymore? What will be China's main comparative advantage after that?
The workplace of the future is hard to predict specifically, but one thing we can predict is that we will increasingly rely on human intelligence and creativity as opposed to human capacity to perform repetitive tasks.
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.
Much of our future work may end up being about convincing them that we are conscious, and worth keeping around.