The Future is Faster Than you Think — Notes

Sohil Gupta

39 min readDec 23, 2020

Thanks to the Magic of Moore’s Law, an average $1000 will have the same computing power as a human brain (1⁰¹⁶ cycles/second). 25 years after that, the same laptop will have the power of all the human brains currently on earth.
Elon Musk’s Transportation Transformation for next decade: Hyperloop- LA to California in 35 minutes (760 mph) ; Boring Company- NY to DC in 29 minutes (150 mph initially) ; Starship Megarocket- NY to Shanghai in 39 minutes, for the price of an economy airline ticket (17,500 mph)
Tesla : Electric vehicles ; Waymo : Autonomous vehicles ; Uber : Ridesharing ; SkyportsHQ : Aerial Aviation (Flying Cars)
Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside.
Studies done with fMRI show that when we project ourselves into the future something peculiar happens: The medial prefrontal cortex shuts down. This is a part of the brain that activates when we think about ourselves. When we think about other people, the inverse happens: It deactivates. And when we think about absolute strangers, it deactivates even more. You’d expect that thinking about our future selves would excite the medial prefrontal cortex. Yet the opposite happens. It starts to shut down, meaning the brain treats the person we’re going to become as a stranger. And the farther you project into the future, the more of a stranger you become. This is why people have a tough time saving for retirement or staying on a diet or getting regular prostate exams — the brain believes that the person who would benefit from those difficult choices isn’t the same one making those choices.
Why are divorce rates so high? Marriage was created over four thousand years ago, when we got hitched as teens and death came by forty. The institution was designed for a twenty-year maximum commitment. But thanks to advances in healthcare and lifespan, we’re now looking at a half century of togetherness — which puts a whole new spin on “ ’til death do us part”.
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. Welcome to the future that’s faster than you think.

CHAPTER TWO: The Jump to Lightspeed

Exponential Technologies Part I

Quantum Computing

The coldest naturally occurring spot in the cosmos is inside Bommerang Neebula, at 1.15 Kelvin. The white pipe, a human-made contraption, a next generation cryogenic refrigerator cooled to .003 Kelvin, or just north of absolute zero, is nearly a degree cooler — used to house quantum computer.
IBM’s Deep Blue computer that beat Gary Kasparov at chess examined 200 million moves a second. A quantum machine can bump that up to a trillion or more — and that’s the kind of power hidden inside that large white pipe.
In 1956, our computers were capable of ten thousand FLOPS. In 2015, this had become one quadrillion FLOPS(Floating Point Operations per Second). And it’s this trillionfold improvement that’s been the most important force driving technology forward.
Moore’s Law has been slowing down due to physical limitations in shrinking IC further. In 1971, channel distance — that is, the distance between transistors — was ten thousand nanometers. By 2000, it was roughly one hundred nanometers. Today, we’re closing in on five, which is where the trouble starts.
Replace silicon circuits with carbon nanotubes for faster switching and better heat dissipation.
Apple’s recent A12 Bionic, for example, only runs AI applications, but does so at a blistering nine trillion operations a second.
Geordie Rose, founder of an early quantum computer company D-Wave, came up with Rose’s Law: “The number of qubits in a quantum computer doubles every year. Yet Rose’s Law has been described as “Moore’s Law on steroids,” because qubits in superposition have way more power than binary bits in transistors.
A fifty-qubit computer has sixteen petabytes of memory. That’s a lot of memory. If it were an iPod, it would hold fifty million songs. But increase that by a mere thirty qubits and you get something else entirely. If all the atoms of the universe were capable of storing one bit of information, an eighty-qubit computer would have more information storage capacity than all the atoms in the universe.
“The Six Ds of Exponentials,” or the growth cycle of exponential technologies: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization.
Digitalization: Once a technology becomes digital, meaning once you can translate it into the 1s and 0s of binary code, it jumps on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially.
Deception: Exponentials typically generate a lot of hype when first introduced. Because early progress is slow (when plotted on a curve, the first few doublings are all below 1.0), these technologies spend a long time failing to live up to the hype.
Disruption: This is what happens when exponentials really start to impact the world, when they begin disrupting existing products, services, markets, and industries. An example is 3-D printing, a single exponential technology that threatens the entire $10 trillion manufacturing sector.
Demonetization: Where a product or service once had a cost, now money vanishes from the equation.
Dematerialization: Now you see it, now you don’t. This is when the products themselves disappear.
Democratization: This is when an exponential scales and goes wide.
A user-friendly interface is what bridges the gap between a technology’s deceptive and disruptive phase.

Artificial Intelligence

Social media is making us dumber, but it’s definitely making AI smarter.
The service economy, which now accounts for over 80 percent of the US GDP, divide the economy into 5 main tasks: looking, listening, reading, writing, and integrating knowledge.
The game tree complexity of chess is about 10^40 (1997). In 2017, Google’s AlphaGo defeated the world Go champion, Lee Sedol. Go has a game tree complexity of 10^360. — it’s chess for superheroes. Put differently, we humans are the only species known to have the cognitive capacity to play Go. It only took a couple hundred thousand years of evolution to develop that capability. AI, meanwhile, got there in less than two decades.
In 2018, an AI ran for mayor of a province in Japan. It didn’t win, but the race was a lot closer than anyone expected.

Networks

How fast is 5G? With 3G, it takes forty-five minutes to download a high-definition movie. 4G shrinks that to twenty-one seconds. But 5G? It takes longer to read this sentence than it takes to download that movie. (4G — 5 Mbps; 5G — 50 Mbps)
Back in the early 2000s, on a shoestring budget, Wyler helped bring 3G to communities in Africa. Today, backed with billions from SoftBank, Qualcomm, and Virgin, he’s launching OneWeb, a constellation of about two thousand satellites bringing 5G download speeds to everyone.
In early 2019, Amazon joined this satellite competition, announcing Project Kuiper, a constellation of 3,236 satellites designed to provide high-speed broadband to the world. SpaceX, with a four-year head start on Amazon, topped this in 2019, when the company began to deploy a monster constellation of over 12,000 satellites (4,000 at 1,150 kilometers, and 7,500 at 340 kilometers).

Sensors

Neil Gross in 2000: “In the next century, planet earth will don an electric skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. The skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies — even our dreams.”
In 2009, the number of devices connected to the internet exceeded the number of people on the planet (12.5 billion devices, 6.8 billion people, or 1.84 connected devices per person). A year later, driven by the evolution of smartphones, sensor prices began to plummet. By 2015, all this progress added up to 15 billion connected devices. As most of those devices contain multiple sensors — the average smartphone has about twenty — this also explains why 2020 marks the debut of what’s been called “our trillion sensor world.” Nor will we stop there. By 2030, Stanford researchers estimate 500 billion connected devices (each housing dozens of sensors), which, according to research conducted by Accenture, translates into a $14.2 trillion dollar economy.
Satellites photograph the Earth down to the half-meter range. Drones shrink that to a centimeter. But the LIDAR sensors atop autonomous cars capture just about everything — gathering 1.3 million data points per second.
The “inertial measurement unit” that guided our early rockets is another example. In the mid-sixties, this was a fifty-pound $20 million device. Today, the accelerometer and gyroscope in your cell phone do the same job for about $4 and weigh less than a grain of rice.
An autonomous car generates four terabytes a day, or a thousand feature length films’ worth of information; a commercial airliner, forty terabytes; a smart factory, a petabyte.

Robotics

Elder care, hospice care, infant care, pet care, personal assistants, avatars, autonomous cars, flying cars — the robots are here.

CHAPTER THREE: The Turbo-Boost

Exponential Technologies Part II

Virtual and Augmented Reality

While AR isn’t as cheap as VR (yet), $100 will get you an entry-level Leap Motion headset, while $3000 covers a top-shelf Microsoft HoloLens.

3-D Printing

Convergences between exponential technologies: Design and 3-D printing, Biotech and 3-D printing, 3-D printing and energy, 3-D printing and robotics, material science, construction,

Blockchain

A blockchain is a distributed, mutable, permissible, and transparent digital 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 network — which is how the double-spend problem was actually solved.
If blockchain is a science-fiction technology that’s become science fact, then smart objects seem to invert this process, turning regular reality back into science fiction.

Material Science and Nanotechnology

Materials Science combine Physics and Chemistry.
These tools have helped create the metamaterials used in carbon fiber composites for lighter-weight vehicles, advanced alloys for more durable jet engines, and biomaterials to replace human joints.
the “conversion efficiency” of the average solar panel (silicon)— a measure of how much captured sunlight can be turned into electricity — hovers around 16 percent, at a cost of $3 per watt. Perovskite, a light-sensitive crystal and one of our newer new materials, has the potential to get that up to 66 percent.
Drexler described self-replicating nanomachines — meaning very tiny machines that can build other machines. (Drexler’s assembler, as mentioned in book Engines of Creation) In this world, according to Drexler, a puddle of pond scum can be reorganized into a flawless, multi-carat diamond ring.
Computing is a stranger story, as a bioengineer at Harvard recently stored seven hundred terabytes of data in a single gram of DNA.
On the environmental front, scientists can take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into super-strong carbon nanofibers for use in manufacturing.

Biotechnology

Biotechnology is about using biology as technology. It’s turning the fundamental components of life — our genes, proteins, cells — into tools for manipulating life.
Gene therapy replaces defective or missing DNA inside a cell, gene-editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas9 allow you to repair the DNA inside that cell, and stem cell therapies replace that cell entirely.
Human germline engineering is another CRISPR application, which enables editing the DNA of an embryo itself — think designer babies.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Acceleration of Acceleration

Force #1: Saved Time

Force #2: Availability of Capital

Force #3: Demonetization

Renewables now account for one-third of the world’s power, and their cost has dropped below coal.
At the current rate of decline, solar is five doublings away from being able to produce enough power to meet all of our energy needs. Eighteen months later (2019), after solar doubles again, we’ll meet 200 percent of our energy needs with this tech alone.

Force #4: More Genius

The standard distribution of the Stanford-Binet scale shows that only 1 percent of the population qualifies. Technically, this makes for 75 million geniuses in the world.

Force #5: Communications Abundance

Two-thirds of all growth takes place in urban environments because population density leads to the cross-pollination of ideas. This is why Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West discovered that doubling the size of a city produces a 15 percent increase in income, wealth, and innovation (as measured by the number of new patents).

Force #6: New Business Models

In the twentieth century, this added up to around one major business revolution per decade. The 1920s, for example, gave us “ bait and hook” models, where customers are lured in with a low-cost initial product (the bait, say, a free razor) and then forced to buy endless refills (the hook, aka: razor blade refills). In the 1950s, it was the “ franchise models” pioneered by McDonald’s; in the 1960s we got “hypermarkets” like Walmart.
The Crowd Economy: crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, ICOs, leveraged assets, and staff-on-demand
The Free/Data Economy: “bait and hook” model, essentially baiting the customer with free access to a cool service (like Facebook) and then making money off the data gathered about that customer (also like Facebook).
The Smartness Economy: Take any existing tool, and add a layer of smartness. For example, in 1800, electricity was added to a drill to make it a power drill. Cell phones becomes smart phones.
Closed-Loop Economies: Plastic bank (Waste recycling)
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: autonomous taxis using smart contracts
Multiple World Models: AR/VR/Mixed Reality, Different Avatars for work/play
Transformation Economy: The Experience Economy was about the sharing of experiences — so Starbucks went from being a coffee franchise to a “third place,” that is, neither home nor work, but a “third place” in which to live your life. Buying a cup of coffee became an experience, a caffeinated theme park of sorts. The next iteration of this idea is the Transformation Economy, where you’re not just paying for an experience, you’re paying to have your life transformed by this experience. Early versions of this can be seen in the rise of “transformational festivals” like Burning Man, or fitness companies like CrossFit
Our experience will be better, cheaper, faster.

Force #7: Longer Lives

Two hundred thousand years ago, the average caveperson hit puberty around age thirteen, and had children not long after. By the time most of our ancestors were in their mid-twenties, their children were having children. Once that happened, since food was scarce and precious, the best thing you could do to ensure the survival of your lineage was not steal a meal from your grandkids. Thus evolution built in a fail-safe — a twenty-five-year.
By the Middle Ages, lifespan had crept up to thirty-one. By the end of the nineteenth century, we broke forty for the first time.
Average lifespan hit seventy-six by the turn of the millennium.
our ability to recognize and treat the two largest killers — cardiac disease and cancer — has us living routinely into our eighties. And when we tackle neurodegenerative disease, research shows we can expect average lifespan to reach and perhaps exceed one hundred years.
Senolytic Medicines: In order to prevent runaway cell division (i.e., cancer), the body normally halts this process after a set number of doublings. These shut-off cells, called “senescent cells,” create inflammation, a significant cause of aging. That’s why the Jeff Bezos–backed Unity Biotechnology is attempting to develop senolytic medicines that target and destroy these cells, restoring proper function to previously inflamed tissue.
“Young blood” approach: Elevian startup
Stem cells approach: Samumed LLC, Celularity,
“longevity escape velocity,” or the point at which science can extend your life for more than a year for every year that you are alive. As far future as this sounds, according to Kurzweil, we are a lot closer than you might expect. “It’s likely [that we’re] just another ten to twelve years away from the point that the general public will hit longevity escape velocity.”
We’re heading toward a world of long-lived, AI-enhanced, globally interconnected humans — a world far different from the one in which we find ourselves today.
Researchers now know there are nine major causes of aging, ranging from stem cell exhaustion to epigenetic mutation to telomere attrition. Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/we-are-nearing-longevity-escape-velocity-where-science-can-extend-your-life-for-more-than-a-year-for-every-year-you-are-alive-2020-02-24

CHAPTER FIVE: The Future of Shopping

The First Platform Play

“three defining technologies emerge and converge [emphasis ours] to create… an infrastructure that fundamentally changes the way we manage power and move economic activity across the value chain. And those three technologies are new communications technologies to more efficiently manage economic activity, new sources of energy to power the economic activity, and new modes of mobility… to more efficiently move the economic activity.” For Sears, The US Postal Service was its communications technology, cheap Texas oil was its fuel source, and the automobile was its new mode of transport.
Sears’s fall was swift. In the early 1980s, it was five times as big as Walmart, by total revenue. By the early 1990s, Walmart was twice as big as Sears.”
retail is nestled at the convergence of communications, energy, and transportation breakthroughs.

3-D Printing and Retail

Over the next ten years, 3-D printing will reshape retail in four key ways: The End of the Supply Chain: the end of suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors ; The End of Waste ; The End of the Spare Parts Market ; The Rise of User-Designed Products:

Retail’s Last Hope

For most of history, we didn’t want prepackaged experiences because life itself was the experience.

CHAPTER SIX: The Future of Advertising

Madder

Google and Facebook together command more advertising dollars than all print media on the planet. In 2017, Google’s ad campaign revenue totaled over $95 billion; Facebook’s reached over $39 billion. Taken together, this is roughly 25 percent of all global advertising expenditure.
Web 3.0 (Spatial Web), Reality 2.0 is the next phase. 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.
Voice cloning for a sales call from your mom
AR enabling personalized targeted advertising on TV featuring Your mom, or POTUS, or your crush, etc.
Being followed around department stores by marketers disguised as Mom
AIs can track eye movement as we window-shop
AI doesn’t have to watch commercials to make a purchase for you. It can also restock supplies

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Future of Entertainment

Going Digital

Reed Hastings made 4 key decisions:-
First decision was when he started Netflix, after he had sold his previous company Pure Atria to Rational Software. It rented DVDs over the Internet and used the postal service to deliver them.
Second decision was when he decided never to charge late fees.
In 2007, his third decision came, that of replacing postal service with broadband streaming
Fourth decision was creating content. In 2017, they spent $6.2 billion on original movies and TV shows, outspending major studios such as CBS ($4 billion) or HBO ($2.5 billion), and just shy of the $8–10 billion-a-year range of heavyweight contenders like TimeWarner and Fox. Next year, it doubled to $13 Billion. In 2018, while the big six movie studios released a combined seventy-five films, Netflix’s war chest produced eighty new features and over seven hundred new TV shows.
YouTube democratized content distribution for all of us.

From Passive to Active

Content is about to become much more collaborative, immersive, and personalized.
Lifekind: Tony Robbins

The Holodeck Is Here

Jules Urbach first cofounded Otoy, a company that figured out how to move rendering off the desktop and into the cloud. Next, Urbach cofounded LightStage, a company that specializes in photo-realistic 360-degree image capture.
When we see an object, we’re seeing trillions of photons bouncing off that object. So if you can artificially project trillions of photons toward the eye, at just the right angle and intensity, you can recreate reality, any reality.
Second Life creator and founder of High Fidelity Philip Rosedale and David Eagleman created Neosensory, an Exoskin for haptic feedback
When it comes to attention, active trumps passive, and immersive trumps active. The reason is sensory input. The more senses engaged in an activity, the more attention we pay to that activity.

This Time It’s Personal

Affective computing: the science of teaching machines to understand and simulate human emotion.
Facial expressions, hand gestures, eye gaze, vocal tone, head movement, speech frequency and duration are all signals thick with emotional information.
The technology tells a customer service chatbot if a user’s confused or frustrated, provides advertisers with a way to test the emotional effectiveness of their ads, and gives gaming companies a means to adjust play in real time.

Here, There, and Everywhere

Storytelling to the masses began with print. Books, newspapers, magazines were our first big-league carriers of information, earning them a four-hundred-year run at the center of our entertainment world.
Radio came next, offering a level of intimacy and immediacy never seen before.
Then black-and-white TV created an era of instantly shared visuals. They ruled for half century. Then color TV, then Plasma, then cords were cut, and screens went everywhere.
Then Entered the augmented reality of Magic Leap and the company’s stated purpose: to eliminate the screen altogether. To disrupt that, AR smart contact lens came. Then to disrupt that, Holodeck came, where no head-gear was required.
Over the next five years, AR is projected to create a $90 billion market.
AR is information layer projected atop regular reality.
With AR contact lenses we get a nearly seamless interface with an information layer. Add in haptic gloves and the simulation starts to feel real. Take that simulation off the street and into a room, layer in both photons and ultrasound, and the experience gets even more immersive.
BCIs (Brain Computer Interface) mean that entertainment can be not just customized for our mood, it can be customized for our brains. This is a direct computer-to-cortex connection.

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Future of Education

The Quest for Quantity and Quality

There is a shortage of quantity of teachers worldwide
Two types of students: those who are lost and those who are bored.
Batch processing children is both an industrial hangover and an educational disaster because of basic biology.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media labs, and a nonprofit One Laptop Per Child intitiative

CHAPTER NINE: The Future of Healthcare

Martine and the Moonshots

Martin Rothblatt made the world’s first global satellite radio network, and Sirius XM, still the satellite radio category killer.
Martin embarked on her second moonshot, sex reassignment surgery, and became Martine, staying married to the same woman.
Martine cofounded United Therapeutics, generating $1.5 Bn annually.
Martine took another moonshot: create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs.
Martine helped perfect a way to keep lungs alive outside the body, what’s technically called “ ex vivo lung perfusion.”
Next, Martine attacked the larger problem of organ shortages through xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation is the transplantation of living cells, tissues or organs from one species to another. It’s an old and controversial idea — harvest fresh animal organs to replace failing human ones — but issues of disease, rejection, and animal cruelty have kept it sidelined.
Pig organs are similar to human organs, so she started there. By teaming up with Synthetic Genomics and Craig Venter, the same scientist who decoded the human genome, she made the most complete genetic map of a pig to date. Next, CRISPR knocked out all the genes that led to viruses, eliminating the dangers of disease and producing a “clean” pig. Now their latest goal is the biggest: knock out the genes that lead to organ rejection in humans. If successful, it’ll mean a near infinite organ supply — albeit one that comes with a whole lot of suffering for pigs.
To combat that final problem, Martine is using cutting-edge tissue engineering techniques in an attempt to bypass animals entirely. Out of collagen, she’s begun 3-D printing an artificial lung scaffold. To turn that scaffold into a living lung, she’s experimenting with stem cells.
And, lastly, because it often takes too long to get an organ from its current location to a waiting patient, Martine backed Beta Technologies’ flying car, with plans to use these eco-friendly vehicles to whisk newly minted organs to patients in need.
Finally, at age sixty, just for the fun of it, she became a helicopter pilot herself, and then, in a vehicle designed by her company, set a world record for speed in an electric helicopter.

Turning Sick Care into Healthcare

Today, going to the doctor is about sick care more than health care. It’s reactive, not proactive.
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. If nothing changes, by 2027, this single industry will consume nearly 20 percent of the US GDP.

DIY Diagnostics

Smart sensors in toothbrush and toilet, wearables in bedding and clothing, implantables inside your body — a mobile health suite with a 360-degree view of your system.
Former Google X project leader Mary Lou Jepsen’s startup, Openwater, which is using red laser holography to create a portable MRI equivalent, turning what is today a multimillion-dollar machine into a wearable consumer electronics device and giving three-quarters of the world access to medical imaging they currently lack.
Apple’s fourth-generation iWatch that includes an FDA-approved ECG scanner capable of real-time cardiac monitoring.
Human Longevity Inc. (HLI), one of the companies Peter cofounded. HLI offers a service called “Health Nucleus,” an annual, three-hour health scan consisting of whole genome sequencing, whole body MRI, heart and lung CT, electrocardiogram, echocardiogram, and a slew of clinical blood tests — essentially the most complete picture of health currently available.

Reading, Writing, and Editing the Code of Life

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.

The Future of Surgery

Dr. Peter Kim, An associate surgeon in chief at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, Kim is part of the research team behind STAR — Soft Tissue Autonomous Robot — a robot that can already outperform surgeons on the specific task of suturing soft tissue.
With the ability to perfectly execute routine procedures at a fraction of today’s cost, robo-surgeons bring demonetization into the operating room.
Verb Surgical, a partnership between Alphabet and Johnson & Johnson has a goal of “democratization of surgery.”

Cellular Medicine

Inject patients with living cells which, to a varying degree, can influence and/or revitalize an assortment of functions: regrow hair, rejuvenate tissue, kill cancer, repair cardiac damage, quiet autoimmune diseases, even increase muscle mass.
Neurosurgeon and entrepreneur Bob Hariri helped pioneer the field of cellular medicine with his year 2000 discovery that the human placenta houses an abundant supply of stem cells — providing a noncontroversial supply of this potential treatment option. His company was acquired by Celgene.
As people age, their supply of stem cells rapidly diminishes, a process known as “stem cell exhaustion”
the placenta doesn’t just contain stem cells, but also houses immunological cells such as natural killer cells and T-cells, both of which are critical in the body’s natural ability to fight cancer — as long as they recognize the danger.
Normally our immune system destroys cancer cells at very early stages of development. But, as we age, cancers can pile up. Some go undetected, and that’s when the situation gets dangerous. To attack that danger, we’ve invented a new kind of therapy known as CAR-T (for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell) therapy. In this approach, a patient’s white blood cells are collected and their T cells are separated out and genetically reengineered to target and kill specific cancer cells. These reprogrammed cells are then injected back into the patient, effectively becoming a kind of heat-seeking cancer missile.

The Future of Drugs

The few drug trials 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.
Alex Zhavoronkov figured out that GANs (generative adversarial networks) would allow researchers to verbally describe drug attributes: “The compound should inhibit protein X at concentration Y with minimal side effects in humans,” and then the AI could construct the molecule from scratch.

CHAPTER TEN: The Future of Longevity

The Nine Horsemen of Our Apocalypse

Genomic Instability: DNA doesn’t always replicate according to plan. Typically, these errors in gene expression get caught and corrected, but not always. Over time, these misfires build up, causing our body to wear down — meaning genetic instability leads to genetic damage leads to a limit on lifespan. Think of it as a broken copy machine, except, instead of producing unreadable pages, our broken genetic copier produces diseases like cancer, muscular dystrophy, and ALS.
Telomere Attrition: At the heart of a cell, DNA is packed into threadlike structures called chromosomes. Chromosomes are capped by telomeres, or short snippets of DNA repeated thousands of times. These repetitions act as barriers — like bumpers on a car — designed to protect the core of the chromosome. But as DNA replicates, telomeres get shorter. At a critical shortness threshold, the cell stops dividing, and we become much more susceptible to disease.
Epigenetic Alterations: Nature impacts nurture. Over the course of a lifetime, factors in our environment can change how our genes express, sometimes for the worse. Exposure to carcinogens in the environment can silence the gene that suppresses tumors, for example.
Loss of Proteostasis: Inside a cell, proteins run the show. They transport materials, send signals, switch processes on and off, and provide structural support. But proteins become less effective over time, so the body recycles them. Unfortunately, as we age, we can lose this ability. The trash collector goes on strike and we suffer a toxic buildup of proteins that can, for example, lead to diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Nutrient Sensing Goes Awry: The human body relies on over forty different nutrients to stay healthy. For everything to work perfectly, cells need to be able to recognize and process each of these. But this ability breaks down as we get older. people gain weight as they age is that our cells can no longer properly digest fat. And one reason we die is that this impacts the insulin and IGF-1 pathway and can result in diabetes.
Mitochondrial Dysfunction: Mitochondria are power plants. By converting oxygen and food into energy, they provide the basic fuel for our cells. But performance declines over time. The result is free radicals, a damaging form of oxygen that mangles DNA and proteins and leads to many of the chronic illnesses associated with aging.
Cellular Senescence: As cells undergo stress, they occasionally become “senescent,” both losing their ability to divide and, simultaneously, becoming resistant to death. These “zombie cells” can’t be removed from the body. They build up over time, infect neighboring cells, and ultimately create a zombie apocalypse of inflammatory debilitation.
Stem Cell Exhaustion: As we age, our supply of stem cells plummets, in certain cases by a ten thousandfold decline. Worse, the ones we do manage to hang on to become far less active. This means that the body’s internal tissue and organ repair system loses its ability to do its job.
Altered Intercellular Communication: For the body to function properly, cells need to communicate. This happens constantly, with messages flowing through our bloodstream, immune system, and endocrine system. Over time, signals get crossed. Some cells become unresponsive, others become inflammation-producing zombie cells. This inflammation blocks further communication. Once this happens, messages can’t get through and the immune system can’t find pathogens.

Longevity Escape Velocity

In a petri dish, C. elegans (roundworm) lives about twenty days. Knocking out a gene named rsks-1 increases lifespan by six days; knocking out daf-2, meanwhile, extended it by twenty days. But when both genes were knocked at once, it lived upto 100 days, as opposed to expected 45 days.
Building out on this earlier work on C. elegans , other researchers have since identified over fifty more genes that seem to trigger age-related decline in humans. Five of these genes seem especially key, as removing any of them produces a 20 percent boost in lifespan.
But it’s not just genetics. Martine Rothblatt’s mission to produce an endless supply of human replacement parts is also crucial to longevity. As is the democratization of surgery being provided by robotics, and the drug discovery work being done by AIs and quantum computers.
The old thirty-year lifespan was held constant from the Paleolithic Age to the front end of the Industrial Revolution. During the twentieth century, marvels such as antibiotics, sanitation, and clean water extended our average age to forty-eight years by 1950, then to seventy-two years by 2014.
Ray Kurzweil and longevity expert Aubrey de Grey believe longevity velocity is the threshold beyond which science will be able to extend our lives by a year for every year we live. In other words, once across this threshold, we’ll literally be staying one step ahead of death. Kurzweil thinks this threshold is about twelve years away, while de Grey puts it thirty years out.

The Anti-Aging Pharmacy

Rapamycin: an antifungal, immunosupprresant that blocks cell division, and hence, stops the immune system from rejecting organ transplant. It also inhibits cancer growth.
Metformin: The world’s most common diabetes drug, It blocks sugar production and helps regulate insulin. But it also slows the “burn rate” of cells, defending against oxidative stress, fighting cancer, and — as we recently learned — significantly extending the lifespan of worms, mice, and rats.
Senolytic therapies: These drugs destroy the inflammation-producing zombie cells believed to be one of the causes of aging. Backed by investments from Jeff Bezos, the late Paul Allen, and Peter Thiel, Unity Biotechnology is one of the most interesting of these.
Samumed: This San Diego–based biotech is focusing on the Wnt signaling pathways, which, like the name sounds, are one way the body sends messages. In this case, those messages govern a group of genes that both aid the growth of a developing fetus and seem to play a heavy role in aging. Errors in Wnt signaling have been directly linked to twenty different diseases, including cancer.
“The molecule stays [there] for about six months,” explains Samumed CEO Osman Kibar, “during which it [stimulates] stem cells to grow new cartilage. And that new cartilage is that of a teenager. The key is that progenitor stem cells are there even when you’re eighty years old, they just need to be properly signaled.”

The Bloody Fountain of Youth

One particular molecule, known as “growth differentiation factor 11,” or GDF11, is responsible for revival of organs in an old mouse when transfused with a young mouse’s blood.
here in the twenty-first century, not only are flying cars and personal robots both suddenly real, but, well, so is Dracula.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Future of Insurance, Finance, and Real Estate

The Full Future

1. Finance, Insurance, and real estate are top 10 industries in US.

Coffee, Risk, and the Origins of Insurance

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 Car That Doesn’t Crash

Car insurance premiums are currently calculated according to the age and history of the driver, traits of the car itself, and where the driver and that car live.
the accounting firm KPMG predicts the car insurance market could shrink by an astounding 60 percent by 2040, because autonomous cars shift us from car-as-property to car-as-service, removing the need for consumer-facing auto insurance altogether.

Crowdsurance

Insurance is a game of statistics.
In both health and life insurance, the premiums of the healthy cover the costs of the unhealthy. But the healthy end up paying unnecessarily high premiums for this privilege, making them the consistent losers of this particular game.
In the insurance game, when the lowest risk clients opt out, the statistics stop working. With the ultra-healthy gone from the pool, the risk curve shifts dramatically. To cover costs, either everyone’s rate increases or the insurance company goes bankrupt. But if everyone’s rate goes up, then everyone goes elsewhere for insurance, and, once again, the insurance company goes bankrupt.
Crowdsurance companies: Lemonade, Etherisc

Dynamic Risk

Progressive Auto Insurance (Snapshot): It had one objective: Price auto insurance according to driving habits rather than driving history. Drivers now get insured based on car usage rates (the less you drive, the less you pay), good driving trends (you consistently stay within the speed limit), and low-risk driving times (your daily commute does not take place after midnight).
Thanks to all the data from our wearables, this same shift will soon arrive in health insurance. Insurance companies will suddenly have the opportunity to prevent disease before it happens rather than swoop in post-op to clean up the mess. The upside will be cheaper insurance for healthier living, the downside is Big Brother.
Mckinsey describe this kind of AI-driven, sensor-laden insurance is “pay-as-you-live,” morphing the traditional “detect and repair” role of an insurance company into “predict and prevent.”

Good Money

Gunnar Lovelace founded Thrive Market and Good Money.

An Unusual Proposition

M-Pesa lifted 2 percent of Kenya’s population — over two hundred thousand people — out of extreme poverty. In places rife with corruption, it’s become a way for governments to protect against graft. In Afghanistan, it’s how they now pay the army. In India, it’s pensions. And it’s no longer just M-Pesa offering such services.
In Bangladesh, bKash now serves over 23 million users; in China, Alipay serves just shy of a billion.
Companies are using blockchain (Ripple and R3) to replace the SWIFT network, the standard protocol overseeing international banking transactions.

The AI Invasion

By matching customers who have, say, pesos they want to turn into dollars with customers who want to change dollars into pesos, TransferWise is using a modified dating app to take on the entire foreign currency exchange market. In fact, because it’s easier to match people looking to exchange currency than it is to match people looking to date, the company reached a billion-dollar valuation in under five years.
As villages turned into towns, towns expanded into cities, and cities began to sprawl, neighborly trust broke down. That’s where banks came into play — they added trust back into the lending equation.
No need of trust when there’s data and AI.
With AI, huge groups of people can come together, share financial information, and pool risk, becoming the peer-to-peer market known as crowdlending. (Prosper, Fundingcircle, Lendingtree)
Smart Finance uses an AI to comb a user’s personal data to approve microloans in China.
Every day, roughly 60 percent of all market trades are made by computer. When the market turns volatile, this can climb to as high as 90 percent.

Real Estate

Glenn Sanford create eXp Realty, the first cloud-based national real estate brokerage. He built a fully immersive mega-campus using a virtual world platform called VirBELA

Say Goodbye to Your Broker

Location and proximity are twin pillars of real estate.
Oceanix City, a zero-waste, energy-positive design by Tahitian entrepreneurs Marc Collins and Itai Madamombe.
Today’s scarcity of bespoke addresses for the lucky few will become tomorrow’s prime real estate at affordable prices for the average many.

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Future of Food

The Inefficiency of Food

“All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen.” — Richard Manning, Harpers
Even though millions and millions of metric tons of hydrogen are fused every second, less than one-billionth of that energy actually reaches the Earth. And, of the total that does hit the planet’s surface, less than 1 percent is actually used for photosynthesis.
Improving photosynthesis can remove 50% of inefficiencies of food. (RIPE project backed by Bill Gates)
Apeel Sciences is using biomimicry and materials science to take on the problem of food waste, by creating an artificial peel (cutin) to preserve food longer).
Vertical farming is growing food inside of skyscrapers rather than outside in fields. Relying on hydroponics and aeroponics, vertical farms allow us to grow crops with 90 percent less water than traditional agriculture. (Plenty Unlimited, Aerofarms)
Over 70 percent of humanity will live in cities by 2025.
Right now, 50 to 80 percent of a vertical farm’s cost is human labor, but Iron Ox Robot is changing that.

The Inefficiency of Growing a Cow

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.
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. Farm animals consume 30 percent of the world’s food crops.
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.
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.
70 percent of emerging diseases come from livestock.
Culture meat — Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, Just Inc partnering with Wagyu beef producer Toriyama
Perfect Day Foods, a Berkeley, California–based company, has figured out how to make cheese without need of cows.

PART THREE: THE FASTER FUTURE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Threats and Solutions

Traditionally, the WEF’s concerns are economic — oil crises, financial crashes, that sort of thing. But 2018 marked the first time that fiscal fears didn’t make the top five. Instead, today’s biggest dangers are all ecological in nature: water crises, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, climate change, and pollution.
Dean Kamen is a kind of geek superhero, a nerd Batman in a denim work shirt. For starters, he lives in a secret lair — an island fortress complete with hidden rooms, helicopter launchpads, and after peacefully seceding from the United States, its own constitution. His résumé includes over 440 different patents, including insulin pumps, robotic prosthetics, and all-terrain wheelchairs.
Kamen designed the Slingshot, a vapor compression distillation system powered by a Stirling engine — or, a water purifier the size of a mini-fridge capable of running off any combustible fuel, including dried cow dung. Using less electricity than required to power a hair dryer, the Slingshot can purify water from any source: polluted groundwater, saltwater, sewage, urine, take your pick.
Bill Gates–backed Omni Processor turns human feces into potable drinking water while simultaneously producing electricity for power and ash for fertilizer.
Skysource technology extracts two thousand liters of water a day from the atmosphere — or enough for two hundred people. It does this with renewable energy and at a cost of no more than 2 cents a liter. As the daily water needs for a planet of 7 billion are between 350 and 400 million gallons a day, using technologies like Skysource to tap the more than 12 quadrillion gallons contained in the atmosphere at any one time might be the only way to quench that thirst.
Forty billion tons of CO 2 — that’s the cost of burning fossil fuels. Every year, we dump 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Trees store carbon. If you burn an acre of coniferous forest, it releases 4.81 tons of carbon. Therefore, to release 40 billion tons of carbon requires burning 10 billion acres of forest per year, or the equivalent of 42 million square kilometers. Unfortunately, explained Caleb Scharf, “the entire continent of Africa is a mere 30 million square kilometers. So [Africa], plus another third, on fire, each year.”
Since 1988, 71 percent of greenhouse gas emissions can be backtracked to just a hundred fossil fuel companies.
Cimate change has 3 parts: energy generation, energy storage, and green transportation.
Coal costs about 6 cents a kilowatt-hour (kwh).
In the 1980s, the energy produced by a new wind plant cost 57 cents a kilowatt-hour. Today, in windy locations, it’s 2.1 cents (if you remove all subsidies, it’s 4 cents). That’s a 94 percent decrease in price. Over the next decade, experts predict that number will be sliced in half, bringing us “one cent wind” by 2030.
In 1977, generating one watt of power from a solar panel cost $77. Today, it’s 30 cents, or a 250-fold reduction in price.
Over the past decade, coal stocks have dropped 75 to 90 percent as eight of America’s largest coal companies have filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The United Kingdom now generates more energy from zero-carbon sources than coal.
Over a hundred major cities got 70 percent of their energy from renewables in 2017.
8 percent of the world’s electricity now comes from solar and wind, and it costs less to build a new wind farm or solar plant than it does to operate an existing coal plant.
In sunny parts of the US, solar costs 4.5 cents a kilowatt-hour. In India, where coal was supposed to dominate for most of this century, it’s 3.8 cents. Abu Dhabi: 2.4 cents — which, when this contract was signed, was the lowest energy cost in history. Then Chile beat it with 2.1, and Brazil beat that with 1.75.
Quantum dots are essentially nanoscale chunks of semiconductor material that are starting to show up in solar cells. A typical solar cell turns one photon of sunlight into a single electron of energy, meaning, today, in a very high-end panel, around 21 percent of incoming sunlight becomes outgoing energy. Quantum dots, meanwhile, triple this output, turning a solo photon into a trilogy of electrons, raising that conversion rate to 66 percent.
Two-thirds of solar’s price comes from soft costs — land, maintenance, sun tracking, effectively everything that’s not the panel. Already, companies are using drones to monitor solar and wind farms and built-in sensors to track panel trouble before it starts. But we’re not long from deploying robot technicians for solar and wind farm installation and maintenance, and using AI to supervise those technicians.
Every 88 minutes, 470 exajoules of solar energy hit our planet, which is as much as humanity consumes in a year. In 112 hours — or just less than five days — we get 36 zettajoules of energy, or what’s contained in all proven oil, coal, and natural gas reserves on Earth. If we could capture just one-one-thousandth of that bounty, we’d have six times as much energy as we use today.

The Story of Storage

Gigafactory churns out twenty gigawatts of energy storage per year.
Flow batteries are the next part. While lithium-ion batteries store energy in solids like metal, flow batteries store energy in liquids like molten salt. A typical lithium-ion battery can handle a thousand charge cycles. Flow batteries are the opposite. They’re big and bulky, but can hold a charge for five thousand to ten thousand cycles, lasting decades without need for replacement.

Electric Cars Are Gaining Speed

In America, fueling our cars and trucks accounts for one-fifth of our total energy budget. Adding in planes, trains, and ships produces 30 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, it’s a slightly smaller 20 percent.
Volkswagen has invested in the startup QuantumScape, whose next generation solid state batteries are cheap, light, and — unlike their lithium-ion cousins (and much to the TSA’s relief) — unable to catch fire.
Porsche and BMW collaboration has produced a four-hundred-megawatt charger that works twenty-five thousand times faster than the average smartphone charger. It pushes one hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) of charge into a car battery in three minutes, and can take that same battery 10 percent charged to 80 percent charged in less than fifteen minutes
The average American home ran on 29.5 kilowatt-hours a day, while the average Tesla Model-S has an 85 kilowatt-hour battery pack. In a pinch, this means a fully charged Model-S could power three American homes for almost twenty-four hours.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Drone Reforestation
Reef Restoration
Aquaculture Reinvention
Agricultural Reinvention: Roughly 37 percent of the globe’s landmass and 75 percent of its freshwater resources are devoted to farming: 11 percent for crops, the rest for beef and dairy.
Closed-Loop Economies
World Economic Forum’s top five threats — water crises, climate change, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, and pollution.

Economic Risks: The Threat of Technological Unemployment

In 1790, 90 percent of all Americans made their living as farmers; today it’s less than 2 percent.
The agrarian economy morphed, first into the industrial economy, next into the service economy, now the information economy.
Consider automatic teller machines (ATMs). When they were first rolled out in the late 1970s, there were serious concerns about bank teller layoffs. Between 1995 and 2010, the number of ATMs in America went from one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand, but mass teller unemployment wasn’t the result. Because ATMs made it cheaper to operate banks, the number of banks grew by 40 percent. More banks meant more jobs for human bank tellers, which is why bank teller employment actually rose during this period.
“Despite the fact that 98 percent of the functions of making materials have now been automated, the number of weaving jobs has increased since the nineteenth century.” — T.L. Andrews
The largest increases in productivity don’t come from replacing humans with machines, but rather from augmenting machines with humans.

Existential Risks: Vision, Prevention, and Governance

Nanotech run rampant — aka, Eric Drexler’s “grey goo” — is one familiar example. Another is a pissed off AI waking up, hacking NORAD, and going DEFCON 666 on the entire world.
There’s also genetically modified organisms overrunning ecosystems, cyberterrorists playing good night New York with the power grid, or biohackers playing goodbye San Francisco with weaponized Ebola.

Vision

It’s about time horizons, how far we choose to look into the future. Our brains emerged in an era of immediacy, so we’re a shortsighted species.
“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. This trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed.” — Stewart Brand

Prevention:

Global food web monitoring to protect against catastrophic famines or terrorist attack; atmospheric sniffers that hunt for everything from plague-causing pathogens to the scent of nuclear materials; and rogue-AI detectors — essentially AI built to hunt for rogue AI.
Space-based forest fire–spotting AIs will be communicating with autonomous fire-fighting drones down here on Earth — or an early step toward the dematerialization of emergency services.

Governance:

For most of the last century, standard metrics for business success were number of employees, ownership of assets, that sort of thing.
In our exponential world, agility beats stability, so why own when you can lease? And why lease when you can crowdsource?
Modern ideas about government emerged about three hundred years ago, in a post-revolutionary world, when a desire for freedom from tyranny went hand in hand with a desire for stability. Thus, modern democracies are multi-house systems, a redundancy created to provide checks and balances. To fight tyranny and instability, these systems are designed to change slowly and democratically.
But our exponential world demands much faster reaction times.
In Estonia, 99 percent of all public services are online, with user-friendly interfaces. In total, the nation estimates they’ve reduced bureaucracy so much that they’ve saved eight hundred years of work time.
We’re going to experience a hundred years of technological progress over the next ten years.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Five Great Migrations

Migration, as Ian Golding and Geoffrey Cameron recount, isn’t just people on the march, it’s ideas on the move. It is, as it has always been, a major driver of progress. Migration is an innovation accelerant.
three out of four patents issued to America’s top ten patent-producing universities have at least one foreign-born inventor.
In America, immigrants are twice as likely to start a new business than natives, and are responsible for 25 percent of all new jobs.
In 2016, half of all unicorns — those rare startups valued at more than $1 billion — were founded by immigrants, and each provided at least 760 new jobs.

Climate Migrations:

Estimated number: 700 million.
“Carbon emissions causing 4 degrees C of warming — what business-as-usual points toward today — could lock in enough sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people.”
With a population of 38 million, Tokyo is the largest mega-city on Earth.
The 1947 partitioning of India and Pakistan is considered the greatest forced migration in history, upending some 18 million people.
Two degrees warming will displace 130 million.

Urban Relocations:

Three hundred years ago, 2 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. Two hundred years ago, it was 10 percent. By 2007, the globe had crossed a radical threshold: Half of us now lived in cities.
In 1950, only New York and Tokyo housed 10 million residents, which is the figure required for “mega-city” status. By 2000, there were over eighteen mega-cities. Today, it’s 33.
A hyper-city is a locale with a population above 20 million. By comparison, during the French Revolution, the world’s entire urban population was less than 20 million. By 2025, Asia alone will house ten, maybe eleven hyper-cities.
By 2050, some 66 to 75 percent of the world will have urbanized (9 billion in total population expectation)
A mass movement of 2.5 billion will come from urban relocations.
By 2050, Tokyo loses its title, as Delhi is expected to become the world’s most populous town.
And China out-urbanizes India, adding three hundred new million-plus cities and two mega-cities.
Africa just explodes. From Cairo through the Congo, the continent’s urban population grows 90 percent by 2050. By century’s end, Lagos, Nigeria, could be home to 100 million.
Every week from now until 2050, a million people move downtown.
123 largest metro economies in the world houses only 13 percent of the planet’s population, but produce almost one-third of its economic output.
More people, More productivity: London and Paris, are significantly more productive than the rest of Britain and France. In America, our hundred largest cities are 20 percent more productive than all others. In Uganda, urban workers are 60 percent more productive than rural ones. Shenzhen’s GDP, meanwhile, is three times larger than the rest of China.
Density also drives innovation: Every time the population of a city doubles, its rate of innovation, as measured in number of patents, increases by 15 percent.
As cities grow, they require less, not more, resources. Double the size of a metropolis, and everything from the number of gas stations to the amount of heat needed in the winter — only increases by 85 percent. Turns out, larger, denser cities are more sustainable than smaller cities, small towns, and suburbs. Why? Travel distances drop, shared transportation rises, and less infrastructure — hospitals, schools, garbage collection — is required. The result is that cities are cleaner, more energy efficient, and emit less carbon dioxide.
Unplanned urbanization is a fantastic recipe for crime, disease, the cycle of poverty, and environmental devastation.

Virtual Worlds

The 12 million Africans uprooted by the slave trade (Economics), the 18 million people rerouted by the division of India and Pakistan (Religion), and the 20 million rearranged on Europe’s chessboard in the years following World War II (Politics) were history’s three biggest forced relocations.
Globally, video games consume three billion hours a week. In America, digital media devours eleven hours a day.
In Japan, there’s even a word for it: hikikomori , the lost generation, the invisible youth, the nearly 1 million teenagers who have locked themselves in their rooms and only venture out online.
Video games are addictive. At the root of this addiction is the thrill ride known as dopamine, one of the brain’s primary pleasure drugs. We feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It’s released whenever we take a risk, expect a reward, or encounter novelty.
Nearly all the major uses of the internet — gaming, surfing, social media, texting, sexting, and porn — are dopamine drivers.
Video games are truly addictive to about 10 percent of the population.
There’s also norepinephrine, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin to consider as pleasure chemicals, apart from Dopamine
Digital media isn’t incredibly effective at producing any beyond dopamine, but the immersive nature of VR makes it able to trigger all six.
Flow State: “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.”
VR opportunities: Jobs, education, sex
Al Cooper described the Web as “the crack cocaine of sexual compulsivity.” According to his research, two hundred thousand Americans are already digital sex addicts. Globally, that number creeps into the millions.
Added together, our three largest migrations — the slave trade, the bifurcation of India and Pakistan, and the diaspora of post–WWII Europe — produced a combined 44.5 million exiles

Space Migration

Getting resources from the Moon takes 24 times less energy to get it off the surface compared to the Earth.
O’Neill colonies (rotating cylinders where land is not needed) can support 1 million humans
The cost per person for a one-way ticket to Mars? Musk thinks about $500,000, or, as he said: “low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth and move to Mars.”

Meta-Intelligence: Into the Borg

The leading proponents of building BCI are Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson, who have both created companies, Neuralink and Kernel respectively.
Back in 2014, a team of Harvard researchers sent words from mind to mind via the internet. By 2016, we were using EEG headsets to play video games telepathically, and by 2018, we were piloting drones with our thoughts.
Connecting our brains to the cloud provides us with a massive boost in processing power and memory, and, at least theoretically, can give us access to all the other minds online.
Since the origin of life on this planet, the trajectory of evolution has always been from the individual to the collective.
We went from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms to the massive multi-cellular organisms known as human beings.
Neuralink has a plan for a two-gigabit-per-second wireless connection from the brain to the cloud and wants to begin human trials by the end of 2021.

AFTERWORD

Abundance

Zero-to-Dangerous: The World’s Leading Flow-Hacking Training
Abundance360
Abundance digital
Singularity University
XPRize Foundation
Bold Capital Partners
Human Longevity Inc’s Health Nucleus