The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.
Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.
Sebastian Thrun, previously the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and now the head of Google’s autonomous car lab, feels the benefits will be significant. “There are nearly 50 million auto accidents worldwide each year, with over 1.2 million needless deaths. AI applications such as automatic breaking or lane guidance will keep drivers from injuring themselves when falling asleep at the wheel. This is where artificial intelligence can help save lives every day.
Today we have more than one and a half billion connections to the Internet. But this is small in comparison to the number of connections to the electric grid, which is at least tenfold larger. Just think of the number of electric appliances you have plugged in at home, compared to the number of IP addressable devices. This is a huge opportunity.
Our days of isolation are behind us. In today’s world, what happens “over there” impacts “over here.
Plus, doing anything big and bold is difficult, and at two in the morning for the fifth night in a row, when you need to keep going, you’re only going to fuel yourself from deep within. You’re not going to push ahead when it’s someone else’s mission. It needs to be yours.
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.
This difference is key. Thinking in probabilities – this business has a 60 percent chance of success – rather than deterministically – if I do A and B, then C will definitely happen – doesn’t just guard against oversimplification; it further protects against the brain’s inherent laziness.
The greatest tool we have for tackling our grand challenges is the passionate and dedicated human mind.
Online, no one can see what color you are, which gods you worship, how you dress, what your hair looks like, if you smoke or smell or smile too much. This anonymity allows people who wouldn’t normally sit on a park bench together to share deeply meaningful and potentially profitable experiences.
The lineage of agriculture is a lineage of humans rearranging plant DNA. For a very long time, crossbreeding was the preferred method, but then came Mendel and his peas. As we began to understand how genetics worked, scientists tried all kinds of wild techniques to induce mutations. We dipped seeds in carcinogens and bombarded them with radiation, occasionally inside of nuclear reactors. There are over 2,250 of these mutants around; most of them are certified.
The adjacent possible” is theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s wonderful term for all the myriad paths unlocked by every novel discovery, the multitude of universes hidden inside something as simple as an idea. 27 Abundance is one of those simple ideas. Its time has come. It.
One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway.
Right now, there is another asteroid striking our world, already extinguishing the large and lumbering, already clearing a giant path for the quick and nimble. Our name for this asteroid is “exponential technology,” and even if this name is unfamiliar, its impact is not.
A week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than the average seventeenth-century citizen encountered in a lifetime.
The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs – such as affordable aerial ridesharing – will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time. It.
The ego-belittling truth the Internet makes visible is that none of us is as unique as we’d like to believe.
Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years.
One concept lately gaining momentum is “impact investing” or “triple-bottom-line investing,” whereby investors back businesses that generate financial returns and meet measurable social or environmental goals.
We are starting to direct the evolution of our biology and of our minds ourselves... As we begin to liberate our thoughts, our memes, our consciousness from the biological constraints that we presently have, this will allow us to evolve far faster and ever faster.
We’re heading toward a future where AI will make the majority of our buying decisions, continually surprising us with products or services we didn’t even know we wanted. Or, if surprise isn’t your thing, just turn that feature off and opt for boring and staid. Either way, it’s a shift that threatens traditional advertisers, while offering considerable benefits to the consumer.