Well, here’s the sobering truth: 90 percent of all drug possibilities fail. The few that do succeed take an average of 10 years to reach the market and cost anywhere from $2.5 billion to $12 billion to get there.

But what if we could generate novel molecules to target any disease, overnight, ready for clinical trials? Imagine leveraging machine learning to accomplish with 50 people what the pharmaceutical industry can barely do with an army of 5,000.

Welcome to the future of AI and low-cost, ultra-fast, and personalized drug discovery. Let’s dive in.

GANs & Drugs

Around 2012, computer scientist-turned-biophysicist Alex Zhavoronkov started to notice that artificial intelligence was getting increasingly good at image, voice, and text recognition. He knew that all three tasks shared a critical commonality. In each, massive datasets were available, making it easy to train up an AI.

But similar datasets were present in pharmacology. So, back in 2014, Zhavoronkov started wondering if he could use these datasets and AI to significantly speed up the drug discovery process. He’d heard about a new technique in artificial intelligence known as generative adversarial networks (or GANs). By pitting two neural nets against one another (adversarial), the system can start with minimal instructions and produce novel outcomes (generative). At the time, researchers had been using GANs to do things like design new objects or create one-of-a-kind, fake human faces, but Zhavoronkov wanted to apply them to pharmacology.

He figured GANs 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. To turn his idea into reality, Zhavoronkov set up Insilico Medicine on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and rolled up his sleeves.

Instead of beginning their process in some exotic locale, Insilico’s “drug discovery engine” sifts millions of data samples to determine the signature biological characteristics of specific diseases. The engine then identifies the most promising treatment targets and—using GANs—generates molecules (that is, baby drugs) perfectly suited for them. “The result is an explosion in potential drug targets and a much more efficient testing process,” says Zhavoronkov. “AI allows us to do with fifty people what a typical drug company does with five thousand.”

The results have turned what was once a decade-long war into a month-long skirmish.

In late 2018, for example, Insilico was generating novel molecules in fewer than 46 days, and this included not just the initial discovery, but also the synthesis of the drug and its experimental validation in computer simulations.

Right now, they’re using the system to hunt down new drugs for cancer, aging, fibrosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, diabetes, and many others. The first drug to result from this work, a treatment for hair loss, is slated to start Phase I trials by the end of 2020.

They’re also in the early stages of using AI to predict the outcomes of clinical trials in advance of the trial. If successful, this technique will enable researchers to strip a bundle of time and money out of the traditional testing process.

Protein Folding

Beyond inventing new drugs, AI is also being used by other scientists to identify new drug targets—that is, the place to which a drug binds in the body and another key part of the drug discovery process.

Between 1980 and 2006, despite an annual investment of $30 billion, researchers only managed to find about five new drug targets a year. The trouble is complexity. Most potential drug targets are proteins, and a protein’s structure—meaning the way a 2D sequence of amino acids folds into a 3D protein—determines its function.

But a protein with merely a hundred amino acids (a rather small protein) can produce a googol-cubed worth of potential shapes—that’s a one followed by three hundred zeroes. This is also why protein-folding has long been considered an intractably hard problem for even the most powerful of supercomputers.

Back in 1994, to monitor supercomputers’ progress in protein-folding, a biannual competition was created. Until 2018, success was fairly rare. But then the creators of DeepMind turned their neural networks loose on the problem. They created an AI that mines enormous datasets to determine the most likely distance between a protein’s base pairs and the angles of their chemical bonds—aka, the basics of protein-folding. They called it AlphaFold.

On its first foray into the competition, contestant AIs were given 43 protein-folding problems to solve. AlphaFold got 25 right. The second-place team managed a meager three. By predicting the elusive ways in which various proteins fold on the basis of their amino acid sequences, AlphaFold may soon have a tremendous impact in aiding drug discovery and fighting some of today’s most intractable diseases.

Drug Delivery

Another theater of war for improved drugs is the realm of drug delivery. Even here, converging exponential technologies are paving the way for massive implications in both human health and industry shifts.

One key contender is CRISPR, the fast-advancing gene-editing technology that stands to revolutionize synthetic biology and treatment of genetically linked diseases. And researchers have now demonstrated how this tool can be applied to create materials that shape-shift on command. Think: materials that dissolve instantaneously when faced with a programmed stimulus, releasing a specified drug at a highly targeted location.

Yet another potential boon for targeted drug delivery is nanotechnology, whereby medical nanorobots have now been used to fight incidences of cancer. In a recent review of medical micro- and nanorobotics, lead authors (from the University of Texas at Austin and University of California, San Diego) found numerous successful tests of in vivo operation of medical micro- and nanorobots.

Drugs From the Future

Covid-19 is uniting the global scientific community with its urgency, prompting scientists to cast aside nation-specific territorialism, research secrecy, and academic publishing politics in favor of expedited therapeutic and vaccine development efforts. And in the wake of rapid acceleration across healthcare technologies, Big Pharma is an area worth watching right now, no matter your industry. Converging technologies will soon enable extraordinary strides in longevity and disease prevention, with companies like Insilico leading the charge.

Riding the convergence of massive datasets, skyrocketing computational power, quantum computing, cognitive surplus capabilities, and remarkable innovations in AI, we are not far from a world in which personalized drugs, delivered directly to specified targets, will graduate from science fiction to the standard of care.

Rejuvenational biotechnology will be commercially available sooner than you think. When I asked Alex for his own projection, he set the timeline at “maybe 20 years—that’s a reasonable horizon for tangible rejuvenational biotechnology.”

How might you use an extra 20 or more healthy years in your life? What impact would you be able to make?

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: andreas160578 from Pixabay

With the dramatic demonetization of genome reading and editing over the past decade, and Big Pharma, startups, and the FDA starting to face aging as a disease, we are starting to turn those answers into practical ways to extend our healthspan.

In this article, I’ll explore how genome sequencing and editing, along with new classes of anti-aging drugs, are augmenting our biology to further extend our healthy lives.

Genome Sequencing and Editing

Your genome is the software that runs your body. A sequence of 3.2 billion letters makes you “you.” These base pairs of A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s determine your hair color, your height, your personality, your propensity for disease, your lifespan, and so on.

Until recently, it’s been very difficult to rapidly and cheaply “read” these letters—and even more difficult to understand what they mean. Since 2001, the cost to sequence a whole human genome has plummeted exponentially, outpacing Moore’s Law threefold. From an initial cost of $3.7 billion, it dropped to $10 million in 2006, and to $1,500 in 2015.

Today, the cost of genome sequencing has dropped below $600, and according to Illumina, the world’s leading sequencing company, the process will soon cost about $100 and take about an hour to complete.

This represents one of the most powerful and transformative technology revolutions in healthcare. When we understand your genome, we’ll be able to understand how to optimize “you.”

• We’ll know the perfect foods, the perfect drugs, the perfect exercise regimen, and the perfect supplements, just for you.
• We’ll understand what microbiome types, or gut flora, are ideal for you (more on this in a later article).
• We’ll accurately predict how specific sedatives and medicines will impact you.
• We’ll learn which diseases and illnesses you’re most likely to develop and, more importantly, how to best prevent them from developing in the first place (rather than trying to cure them after the fact).

CRISPR Gene Editing

In addition to reading the human genome, scientists can now edit a genome using a naturally occurring biological system discovered in 1987 called CRISPR/Cas9.

Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9, the editing system was adapted from a naturally-occurring defense system found in bacteria.

Here’s how it works. The bacteria capture snippets of DNA from invading viruses (or bacteriophage) and use them to create DNA segments known as CRISPR arrays. The CRISPR arrays allow the bacteria to “remember” the viruses (or closely related ones), and defend against future invasions. If the viruses attack again, the bacteria produce RNA segments from the CRISPR arrays to target the viruses’ DNA. The bacteria then use Cas9 to cut the DNA apart, which disables the virus.

Most importantly, CRISPR is cheap, quick, easy to use, and more accurate than all previous gene editing methods. As a result, CRISPR/Cas9 has swept through labs around the world as the way to edit a genome. A short search in the literature will show an exponential rise in the number of CRISPR-related publications and patents.

2018: Filled With CRISPR Breakthroughs

Early results are impressive. Researchers have used CRISPR to genetically engineer cocaine resistance into mice, reverse the gene defect causing Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in dogs, and reduce genetic deafness in mice.

Already this year, CRISPR-edited immune cells have been shown to successfully kill cancer cells in human patients. Researchers have discovered ways to activate CRISPR with light and use the gene-editing technology to better understand Alzheimer’s disease progression.

With great power comes great responsibility, and the opportunity for moral and ethical dilemmas. In 2015, Chinese scientists sparked global controversy when they first edited human embryo cells in the lab with the goal of modifying genes that would make the child resistant to smallpox, HIV, and cholera. Three years later, in November 2018, researcher He Jiankui informed the world that the first set of CRISPR-engineered female twins had been delivered.

To accomplish his goal, Jiankui deleted a region of a receptor on the surface of white blood cells known as CCR5, introducing a rare, natural genetic variation that makes it more difficult for HIV to infect its favorite target, white blood cells. Because Jiankui forged ethical review documents and misled doctors in the process, he was sentenced to three years in prison and fined $429,000 last December.

Coupled with significant ethical conversations necessary for progress, CRISPR will soon provide us the tools to eliminate diseases, create hardier offspring, produce new environmentally resistant crops, and even wipe out pathogens.

Senolytics, Nutraceuticals, and Pharmaceuticals

Over the arc of your life, the cells in your body divide until they reach what is known as the Hayflick limit, or the number of times a normal human cell population will divide before cell division stops, which is typically about 50 divisions.

What normally follows next is programmed cell death or destruction by the immune system. A very small fraction of cells, however, become senescent cells and evade this fate to linger indefinitely. These lingering cells secrete a potent mix of molecules that triggers chronic inflammation, damages the surrounding tissue structures, and changes the behavior of nearby cells for the worse. Senescent cells appear to be one of the root causes of aging, causing everything from fibrosis and blood vessel calcification to localized inflammatory conditions such as osteoarthritis to diminished lung function.

Fortunately, both the scientific and entrepreneurial communities have begun to work on senolytic therapies, moving the technology for selectively destroying senescent cells out of the laboratory and into a half-dozen startup companies.

Prominent companies in the field include the following:

Unity Biotechnology is developing senolytic medicines to selectively eliminate senescent cells with an initial focus on delivering localized therapy in osteoarthritis, ophthalmology, and pulmonary disease.

Oisin Biotechnologies is pioneering a programmable gene therapy that can destroy cells based on their internal biochemistry.

SIWA Therapeutics is working on an immunotherapy approach to the problem of senescent cells.

In recent years, researchers have identified or designed a handful of senolytic compounds that can curb aging by regulating senescent cells. Two of these drugs that have gained mainstay research traction are rapamycin and metformin.

(1) Rapamycin

Originally extracted from bacteria found on Easter Island, rapamycin acts on the m-TOR (mechanistic target of rapamycin) pathway to selectively block a key protein that facilitates cell division. Currently, rapamycin derivatives are widely used for immunosuppression in organ and bone marrow transplants. Research now suggests that use results in prolonged lifespan and enhanced cognitive and immune function.

PureTech Health subsidiary resTORbio (which went public in 2018) is working on a rapamycin-based drug intended to enhance immunity and reduce infection. Their clinical-stage RTB101 drug works by inhibiting part of the mTOR pathway.

Results of the drug’s recent clinical trial include decreased incidence of infection, improved influenza vaccination response, and a 30.6 percent decrease in respiratory tract infection.

Impressive, to say the least.

(2) Metformin

Metformin is a widely-used generic drug for mitigating liver sugar production in Type 2 diabetes patients. Researchers have found that metformin also reduces oxidative stress and inflammation, which otherwise increase as we age. There is strong evidence that metformin can augment cellular regeneration and dramatically mitigate cellular senescence by reducing both oxidative stress and inflammation.

Over 100 studies registered on ClinicalTrials.gov are currently following up on strong evidence of metformin’s protective effect against cancer.

(3) Nutraceuticals and NAD+

Beyond cellular senescence, certain critical nutrients and proteins tend to decline as a function of age. Nutraceuticals combat aging by supplementing and replenishing these declining nutrient levels.

NAD+ exists in every cell, participating in every process from DNA repair to creating the energy vital for cellular processes. It’s been shown that NAD+ levels decline as we age.

The Elysium Health Basis supplement aims to elevate NAD+ levels in the body to extend one’s lifespan. Elysium’s first clinical study reports that Basis increases NAD+ levels consistently by a sustained 40 percent.

Conclusion

These are just a taste of the tremendous momentum that longevity and aging technology has right now. As artificial intelligence and quantum computing transform how we decode our DNA and how we discover drugs, genetics and pharmaceuticals will become truly personalized.

The next article in this series will demonstrate how artificial intelligence is converging with genetics and pharmaceuticals to transform how we approach longevity, aging, and vitality.

We are edging closer toward a dramatically extended healthspan—where 100 is the new 60. What will you create, where will you explore, and how will you spend your time if you are able to add an additional 40 healthy years to your life?

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Arek Socha from Pixabay

To build today’s smartphone in the 1980s, it would cost about $110 million, require nearly 200 kilowatts of energy (compared to 2kW per year today), and the device would be 14 meters tall, according to Applied Materials CTO Omkaram Nalamasu.

That’s the power of materials advances. Materials science has democratized smartphones, bringing the technology to the pockets of over 3.5 billion people. But far beyond devices and circuitry, materials science stands at the center of innumerable breakthroughs across energy, future cities, transit, and medicine. And at the forefront of Covid-19, materials scientists are forging ahead with biomaterials, nanotechnology, and other materials research to accelerate a solution.

As the name suggests, materials science is the branch devoted to the discovery and development of new materials. It’s an outgrowth of both physics and chemistry, using the periodic table as its grocery store and the laws of physics as its cookbook.

And today, we are in the middle of a materials science revolution. In this article, we’ll unpack the most important materials advancements happening now.

Let’s dive in.

The Materials Genome Initiative

In June 2011 at Carnegie Mellon University, President Obama announced the Materials Genome Initiative, a nationwide effort to use open source methods and AI to double the pace of innovation in materials science. Obama felt this acceleration was critical to the US’s global competitiveness, and held the key to solving significant challenges in clean energy, national security, and human welfare. And it worked.

By using AI to map the hundreds of millions of different possible combinations of elements—hydrogen, boron, lithium, carbon, etc.—the initiative created an enormous database that allows scientists to play a kind of improv jazz with the periodic table.

This new map of the physical world lets scientists combine elements faster than ever before and is helping them create all sorts of novel elements. And an array of new fabrication tools are further amplifying this process, allowing us to work at altogether new scales and sizes, including the atomic scale, where we’re now building materials one atom at a time.

Biggest Materials Science Breakthroughs

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. We’re also seeing breakthroughs in energy storage and quantum computing. In robotics, new materials are helping us create the artificial muscles needed for humanoid, soft robots—think Westworld in your world.

Let’s unpack some of the leading materials science breakthroughs of the past decade.

(1) Lithium-ion batteries

The lithium-ion battery, which today powers everything from our smartphones to our autonomous cars, was first proposed in the 1970s. It couldn’t make it to market until the 1990s, and didn’t begin to reach maturity until the past few years.

An exponential technology, these batteries have been dropping in price for three decades, plummeting 90 percent between 1990 and 2010, and 80 percent since. Concurrently, they’ve seen an eleven-fold increase in capacity.

But producing enough of them to meet demand has been an ongoing problem. Tesla has stepped up to the challenge: one of the company’s Gigafactories in Nevada churns out 20 gigawatts of energy storage per year, marking the first time we’ve seen lithium-ion batteries produced at scale.

Musk predicts 100 Gigafactories could store the energy needs of the entire globe. Other companies are moving quickly to integrate this technology as well: Renault is building a home energy storage based on their Zoe batteries, BMW’s 500 i3 battery packs are being integrated into the UK’s national energy grid, and Toyota, Nissan, and Audi have all announced pilot projects.

Lithium-ion batteries will continue to play a major role in renewable energy storage, helping bring down solar and wind energy prices to compete with those of coal and gasoline.

(2) Graphene

Derived from the same graphite found in everyday pencils, graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. It is nearly weightless, but 200 times stronger than steel. Conducting electricity and dissipating heat faster than any other known substance, this super-material has transformative applications.

Graphene enables sensors, high-performance transistors, and even gel that helps neurons communicate in the spinal cord. Many flexible device screens, drug delivery systems, 3D printers, solar panels, and protective fabric use graphene.

As manufacturing costs decrease, this material has the power to accelerate advancements of all kinds.

(3) Perovskite

Right now, the “conversion efficiency” of the average solar panel—a measure of how much captured sunlight can be turned into electricity—hovers around 16 percent, at a cost of roughly $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, which would double what silicon panels can muster.

Perovskite’s ingredients are widely available and inexpensive to combine. What do all these factors add up to? Affordable solar energy for everyone.

Materials of the Nano-World

Nanotechnology is the outer edge of materials science, the point where matter manipulation gets nano-small—that’s a million times smaller than an ant, 8,000 times smaller than a red blood cell, and 2.5 times smaller than a strand of DNA.

Nanobots are machines that can be directed to produce more of themselves, or more of whatever else you’d like. And because this takes place at an atomic scale, these nanobots can pull apart any kind of material—soil, water, air—atom by atom, and use these now raw materials to construct just about anything.

Progress has been surprisingly swift in the nano-world, with a bevy of nano-products now on the market. Never want to fold clothes again? Nanoscale additives to fabrics help them resist wrinkling and staining. Don’t do windows? Not a problem! Nano-films make windows self-cleaning, anti-reflective, and capable of conducting electricity. Want to add solar to your house? We’ve got nano-coatings that capture the sun’s energy.

Nanomaterials make lighter automobiles, airplanes, baseball bats, helmets, bicycles, luggage, power tools—the list goes on. Researchers at Harvard built a nanoscale 3D printer capable of producing miniature batteries less than one millimeter wide. And if you don’t like those bulky VR goggles, researchers are now using nanotech to create smart contact lenses with a resolution six times greater than that of today’s smartphones.

And even more is coming. Right now, in medicine, drug delivery nanobots are proving especially useful in fighting cancer. Computing is a stranger story, as a bioengineer at Harvard recently stored 700 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. If we can do this at scale—powered by solar—a system one-tenth the size of the Sahara Desert could reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels in about a decade.

The applications are endless. And coming fast. Over the next decade, the impact of the very, very small is about to get very, very large.

Final Thoughts

With the help of artificial intelligence and quantum computing over the next decade, the discovery of new materials will accelerate exponentially.

And with these new discoveries, customized materials will grow commonplace. Future knee implants will be personalized to meet the exact needs of each body, both in terms of structure and composition.

Though invisible to the naked eye, nanoscale materials will integrate into our everyday lives, seamlessly improving medicine, energy, smartphones, and more.

Ultimately, the path to demonetization and democratization of advanced technologies starts with re-designing materials— the invisible enabler and catalyst. Our future depends on the materials we create.

(Note: This article is an excerpt from The Future Is Faster Than You Think—my new book, just released on January 28th! To get your own copy, click here!)

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Anand Kumar from Pixabay

The combination of climate change, deforestation, pollution, overfishing, and more have produced a biodiversity crisis. On a bad day, 200 species go extinct. If we project current rates, by century’s end, 50 percent of all large mammals and marine life will disappear. And by 2050, 90 percent of coral reefs—which are home to 25 percent of the world’s biodiversity—could be gone.

But all is not lost yet, as some of today’s best minds work tirelessly to halt and (in some cases) reverse these trends. This blog highlights five key developments helping turn the tide.

Let’s dive in.

Drone Reforestation

On land, forests are biodiversity hotspots, which is also why deforestation is one the largest drivers of extinction. And the scale of destruction is vast. Every year, we lose 18.7 million acres of forest, or a swath as big as Panama. Since trees are a major carbon sink, deforestation also accounts for 15 percent of total annual greenhouse gas emissions.

So how do we combat industrial-scale deforestation? With industrial-scale reforestation.

Enter BioCarbon Engineering, a British company founded by ex-NASA employees that has developed AI-guided tree-planting drones. These drones first map an area to identify prime planting locations, then fire seed pods tucked inside of biodegradable missiles into the ground. The pods contain a custom-designed gelatinous growth medium that acts as a shock absorber to cushion impact, then a nutrient-dispenser to speed plant growth.

A single pilot can fly 6 drones at once, planting a staggering 100,000 trees a day. A global army of 10,000 drones, which is what BioCarbon intends to build, could replant a billion trees a year.

Reef Restoration

Coral reefs are the forests of the ocean, so if we want to restore ocean health, we have to fix our reefs. There are around a half-dozen coral-regrowth technologies under development, but Dr. David Vaughan, a marine biologist with the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory, is pioneering some of the most exciting work.

Borrowing tissue engineering techniques, Vaughan has figured out how to regrow 100 years’ worth of coral in under 2 years.

And while normal coral will only spawn once it reaches maturity—something that can take 25 to 100 years—Vaughan’s corals reproduce at age 2, giving us, for the first time, a way to radically replenish our reefs.

Aquaculture Reinvention

Fishing is one of the severe drivers of ocean wildlife decline. Right now, one-third of all global fisheries are stretched beyond their limits. Better fishery management is critical—but why manage when you can grow?

The same tissue engineering techniques that allow us to produce steak from stem cells also allow us to grow mahi-mahi, bluefin tuna, etc.

In fact, there are now six different companies pursuing exactly this goal, producing everything from cultured salmon to lab-grown shrimp, now heading for our menus.

Agricultural Reinvention

Plants and animals need room to roam—enormous stretches of pristine, uninterrupted habitat, both terrestrial and aquatic.

Right now, 15 percent of the Earth’s surface consists of protected wildlands. To stave off what’s now known as “the Sixth Great Extinction,” Harvard’s E.O. Wilson and other experts believe that half the planet might be required. Which raises a critical question: Where do we find that land?

In a nutshell, by coupling reforestation and restoration with the reinvention of agriculture. 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.

However, these totals are shrinking. Not only are farmers abandoning their land in record numbers, but all of the new farming innovations—cultured beef, vertical farming, genetically engineered crops, etc.—allow us to harvest much more from far less. So, simple idea, let’s give this extra land back to nature.

Closed-Loop Economies

Another top-five threat we now face is pollution. A 2017 study conducted by the medical journal The Lancet estimated that pollution kills 9 million people a year, further costing us almost US$5 trillion.

And the impact might be worse on nature. Obviously, greenhouse gas pollution is the biggest danger, but chemicals in our rivers, plastics in our ocean, and particulates in our air are choking the life out of our planet. So what can be done?

Shifting from a petroleum-based economy to one powered by renewables will help, but more is needed. Arguably the biggest bat is zero-to-zero manufacturing.

This process allows companies to completely remove waste rather than managing it via landfill. The list of companies now going this route is growing: Toyota, Google, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and more.

Not only is this good for the environment, it’s good for the bottom line. GM recently reported they’ve saved $1 billion over the past few years with their 152 zero-waste facilities.

Interconnected Problems Call for Interconnected Solutions

In 2018, the World Economic Forum released their Global Risks Report, a periodic issuance designed to highlight the top five threats humanity will face over the next decade. While the WEF’s concerns are traditionally economic (oil crises, financial crashes, etc.), 2018 marked the first time that fiscal fears didn’t make the cut. Instead, today’s biggest dangers are all ecological in nature: water crises, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, climate change, and pollution.

In this blog, we’ll examine how technology is helping us tackle the WEF’s heavily featured specter of water shortages. But ours is not a techno-utopian argument. Solving our planet’s ecological woes requires technology, for certain, but it also demands one of the largest cooperative efforts in history.

If we can learn to work together like never before, we like our chances. And in light of these recent reports, sooner rather than later.

Let’s dive in.

A Moonshot via Slingshot

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 resume includes over 440 different patents, including insulin pumps, robotic prosthetics, and all-terrain wheelchairs.

Because so many of his inventions have had such an impact, in 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Kamen the highest honor awarded to inventors, the National Medal of Technology.

To turn the tide of water scarcity, however, 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 source, 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. One machine provides clean drinking water for three hundred people a day; a hundred thousand machines—now that’s the kind of cooperative effort we’re talking about.

Back in 2012, the Slingshot had just completed a round of beta testing, successfully providing a couple months of clean drinking water to a number of remote African villages.

Simultaneously, Kamen had just made a handshake deal with Coca-Cola. The inventor agreed to build the soft drink behemoth a better soda fountain, and in return, Coke agreed to use their global distribution network to get the Slingshot into water-starved countries.

Both kept their word. Kamen helped design the “Freestyle Fountain Beverage Dispenser,” which uses “micro-dose technology” to mix over 150 different beverages on demand (talk about choice paralysis).

Coca-Cola, meanwhile, teamed up with ten other international organizations and began distributing the Slingshot in 2013, a core feature of their “Ekocenter” kiosks.

Part general store and part community center, Ekocenters are solar-powered shipping containers that provide remote, low-income communities with safe drinking water, internet access, nonperishables (like mosquito repellent), first-aid supplies, and, of course, Coca-Cola products for sale.

By 2017, there were 150 Ekocenters operating in 8 countries, most of them run sustainably, by local female entrepreneurs, distributing 78.1 million liters of safe drinking water a year—not bad for a handshake deal.

Yet the Slingshot is not the only deal in town.

A New Ballgame

Technology has begun converging on our water woes, with thousands of players working on an enormous range of approaches. There are high-tech nanotechnology-infused desalination plants and medium-tech solar-powered groundwater pumps and low-tech fog capture methods.

To offer another example, Kamen’s Slingshot even has competition from the Bill Gates-backed Omni Processor, which turns human feces into potable drinking water, while simultaneously producing electricity for power and ash for fertilizer.

There’s also California-based Skysource, winner of the $1.5 million Water Abundance XPRIZE, whose technology extracts 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere—or enough for 200 people. Relying on renewable energy for its drinkable water output, Skysource achieves its daily production at a cost of no more than two cents per liter.

As daily water needs for a planet of 7 billion stand 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.

Or consider the “smart grid for water,” which is what happens when exponential technologies converge on the farm. The smart grid allows for everything from precise soil monitoring and crop watering to the early detection of insects and disease. Estimates vary, but most studies find the smart grid capable of saving us trillions of gallons a year—which is the point.

We’re not lacking in technological know-how. We are water-wise, but execution-dumb, attacking a biosphere-wide problem with a piecemeal approach.

Conclusion

Yet this is also the typical developmental curve for exponentials. Water technologies are moving out of the deceptive and into the disruptive phase, stitching these piecemeal efforts together into the global solutions we actually need.

One reason we can say this with confidence is that water technologies appear to be about five years behind energy technologies, which—as we’ll soon see—are scaling up into a worldwide force for tackling the range of our ecological woes.

(Note: This article is an excerpt from The Future Is Faster Than You Think—my new book, just released on January 28th! To get your own copy, click here!)

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Rajesh Balouria from Pixabay

• Unemployment is under four percent;
• There are 6.4 million job openings, but only 6 million people looking for work;
• The average minimum wage set by states and localities is close to $12/hour—likely the highest in American history after adjusting for inflation;
• And wages are growing more at the bottom than at the top.

Wage increases are rising faster than inflation and faster than productivity. That’s something that wouldn’t happen if human workers were on the fast track to obsolescence.

Today, we’ll uncover the real future of our job market. Let’s dive in.

A Quick Look Back

Theoretically, workers have been on the fast track to obsolescence since the Luddites took sledgehammers to industrial looms in the early 1800s.

In 1790, 90 percent of all Americans made their living as farmers; today it’s less than 2 percent. Did those jobs disappear? Not exactly. The agrarian economy morphed, first into the industrial economy, next into the service economy, now into the information economy.

Automation produces job substitution far more than it does job obliteration. And even when automation takes hold of a range of professional roles, this doesn’t always create the dire results we expect.

Consider ATMs: when they were first rolled out in the 1970s, there were serious concerns about bank teller layoffs. Between 1995 and 2010, the number of ATMs in the US jumped from 100,000 to 400,000, but mass teller unemployment did not follow.

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, and bank teller employment actually rose during this period.

The same thing is true for textiles. Even though 98 percent of material-making is automated today, the number of weaving jobs has increased since the 1800s. Lower fabric costs have increased clothing sales, in turn producing more textile jobs.

And this pattern even applies to paralegals and law clerks, two professions predicted to suffer job loss as a result of AI. Yet discovery software, introduced into law firms in the 1990s, has actually led to the inverse. Turns out, AI is so good at discovery that lawyers now need more humans to sift through the deluge. The result? An increase in paralegal employment.

Human and Machine Collaborations

Productivity is the main reason companies want to automate workforces. Yet, time and again, the largest increases in productivity don’t result from replacing humans with machines, but rather from augmenting machines with humans. It’s all about collaboration.

BMW, for instance, saw an 85 percent increase in productivity when it replaced its traditional—that is, automated—assembly line process with human-robot teams.

Also worth pointing out is that every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Taking advantage of these opportunities requires adaptation, which demands workforce retraining, yet the end result is a net gain in jobs.

Look at the internet itself. According to research done by McKinsey, in 13 countries stretching from China and Russia to the US, the internet created 2.6 new jobs for every 1 it eliminated. Overall, in each of these 13 countries, the Web’s rise contributed ten percent to GDP growth, and that number is still increasing.

Yes, Some Will Go Extinct

Make no mistake, certain jobs are heading for extinction. While experts predict technological unemployment will have a greater impact in the 2030s, this next decade could see whole categories of professional work fade to memory.

Robots are encroaching upon the professional territory of everyone from truckers and taxi drivers to warehouse workers and retail employees. Amazon Go might not spell the end of all cashiers, but in grocery stores, convenience stores, and gas stations, people will be absent more than present.

The real question is: will there be enough time to retrain our workforce before these effects take hold?

The answer appears to be yes. Goldman Sachs, for instance, recently made headlines with a study projecting that autonomous vehicles will take 300,000 driving jobs a year. Yet the firm claims we have 25 years to make this transition.

Amazon has already announced plans to invest $700 million over the next 6 years in retraining a third of its US workforce to adapt to economic disruptions caused by automation and technology.

Equally important in this transition, every educational advance—from VR-accelerated learning environments to AI-directed learning curricula—will make retraining easier, quicker, and more effective.

Finally, as AI becomes our user-friendly interface with technology, we’re going to see a shift in the skills required for retraining. For a host of jobs, technological fluency and agility will replace deep skills mastery.

Final Thoughts

The future of technological (un)employment comes down to a key challenge of human-machine collaboration.

Humans have long demonstrated a remarkable ability to incorporate technological aids into new opportunities for growth. History already paints a clear picture. And convergence is only accelerating AI’s transition from a cognitive prosthetic to a smart collaborator.

In recent years, labor shortages have reached record highs. Yet the ability to rapidly retrain our workforce to fill the millions of new and latent jobs out there, to build partnerships between humans and the tools that augment us— that’s the challenge we have yet to meet.

(Note: This article is an excerpt from The Future Is Faster Than You Think—my new book, just released on January 28th! To get your own copy, click here!)

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

In 2017, Google’s ad campaign revenue totaled over $95 billion, while Facebook’s reached more than 39 billion. Taken together, this is roughly 25 percent of all global advertising expenditure.

Fueled by open source e-commerce platforms, mobile devices, and advances in online payment infrastructure, social media marketing has replaced virtually the entire traditional advertising industry. That took fewer than fifteen years.

And the numbers are huge. In 2018, the global advertising industry surpassed $550 billion, driving Google’s valuation north of $700 billion and Facebook’s above $500 billion. All this value is fueled by our searches: our likes and dislikes, what we desire, who our friends are, and what we (and they) are clicking on these days.

But with a blitzkrieg of technologies converging on the industry, advertising will continue to change. First, it’s likely to get a little more invasive and a lot more personal. Yet this won’t last. Not long after, the entire social media marketing market will vanish. How long will that take? We give it 10 to 12 years.

Let’s dive in.

Advertising in Our Virtually Enhanced World

Because of the convergence of high-bandwidth 5G connectivity, augmented reality eyewear, our emerging trillion-sensor economy, and powerful AI, we have gained the ability to superimpose digital information atop physical environments—freeing advertising from the tyranny of the screen.

Imagine stepping into a future Apple Store. When you approach the iPhone display, a full-sized AR avatar of Steve Jobs materializes to give you a tour of the product’s latest features. Avatar Jobs is a little too much, so with nothing more than a voice command, he’s replaced with floating text—and a list of phone features hovers in the air in front of you. After you’ve made your selection, eschewing the iPhone for a new pair of AR iGlasses, another voice command is all it takes to execute a smart contract.

Next, glasses on, you head over to a friend’s house. While chatting in her kitchen, you gaze at her new cabinets. Sensors in the glasses track eye motion, so your AI knows your focus has been lingering.

Via your search history, it also knows you’ve been considering remodeling your kitchen. Because your smart recommendation preferences are turned on, cabinet prices, design, and color choices fill your field of vision. It’s a new form of advertising: either an extension of frictionless shopping, or a novel type of spam.

The early version of this reality is already here. Known as “visual search,” the feature is currently available from an assortment of companies. For example, a partnership between Snapchat and Amazon allows you to point their app-camera at an object, then get a link showing either the product itself or something similar, available for purchase.

Pinterest, meanwhile, has a multitude of visual search tools, such as Shop the Look, which dots every object in a photo. Like the couch? Click the dot. The site will find you similar products for sale. Or take Lens, their real-time visual search tool. Point the app-camera at a scene and the app will generate links to all the products in that scene.

Google takes this one step further. Released in 2017, their Google Lens app is a general visual search engine. It does more than just identify products for sale; it decodes an entire landscape. You can learn anything you want: the botanical breakdown of the plants in a flowerbed, the breeds of dogs romping through a park, the history of the buildings lining a city street.

And Ikea has taken things the farthest. By using their AR app via smartphone, you can map your living room into a digital version with exact dimensions. Need a new coffee table? Their technology lets you try out different styles and sizes. Your choice triggers a smart payment, and just like that, an Ikea customized coffee table is delivered at your doorstep. Need help assembling it? Their AR app can walk you through it step-by-step.

All this visual search competition has kicked development into overdrive, spiking consumer adoption rates as well. As more people use these systems, more data is fed back to the AI running them. By fall of 2018, this feedback loop had pushed visual searches above a billion queries a month.

Pretty much every global brand is preparing for a world of “point, shoot, and shop.” But it could get even creepier.

Hyper-Personalized Advertising

You’ve been spotted. You’re just out for a casual stroll through a department store, and their facial recognition system has you in its sights. Your AR glasses light up: “Hi Sarah, great to see you…”

You forgot to change your preferences to “Do Not Disturb.” A microsecond later, the store’s TV monitors continue the assault. Maybe it’s a hologram or the president of the United States calling out your name, “Sarah, just one second. Your pores are a matter of national security. I want to tell you that your genome sequence matches a new line of L’Oréal skincare products.”

When you don’t respond to POTUS, the AI switches tactics. Now it’s Mom. You flinch, involuntarily. Her voice is deeply imprinted on your brain. But you know better, and just keep walking.

Sometimes it’s your favorite movie stars (based on data from your Netflix account), or your favorite sports star (based on internet searches).

Does this sound like a far-off fantasy? Guess again.

The Age of Jarvis and the End of Advertising Itself

From the Mad Men of old to the Madder Men of today, the purpose of advertising hasn’t changed: to sell you stuff. So ads extol benefits: Buy X because it’ll make you Y—sexy, successful, shiny, whatever.

But what happens when you are no longer the one making the buying decisions? That’s when Shopping JARVIS comes to the rescue.

Imagine a future when you simply say: “Hey JARVIS, buy me some toothpaste.” Does JARVIS watch TV? Did he happen to catch those late-night ads filled with bright-white smiles? Of course not.

In a nanosecond, JARVIS considers the molecular formulations of all available options, their cost, the research that supports their teeth-whitening claims, published client-satisfaction reports, and evaluates your genome to determine the flavor formulation most likely to tingle your taste buds. Then it makes a purchase.

Taking it a step further, in the future, you’ll never actually have to order toothpaste. JARVIS will be monitoring your supply of regularly consumed items—from coffee, tea, and almond milk to toothpaste, deodorant, and all the rest—and will order supplies before you realize what needs restocking.

How about purchasing something new? That drone your son wants for his birthday? Just specify functionality. “Hey JARVIS, could you buy me a drone for under $100 that is easy to fly and takes great photos?”

What about fashion decisions? Will we trust our AIs to choose our clothes? Seems unlikely, until you consider that AIs can track eye movement as we window-shop, listen to our daily conversations to understand likes and dislikes, and scan our social feeds to understand our fashion preferences as well as those of our friends. With that level of detail, Fashion JARVIS will do a pretty accurate job of selecting our clothing—no advertising required.

Final Thoughts

In the next decade, expect advertising to get far more personalized—learning from an explosion of layered data and expanding into new surfaces of our digitally superimposed world.

Next, we’ll be heading toward a future in which AI will take over the majority of our buying decisions, continually surprising us with products and 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.

(Note: This article is an excerpt from The Future Is Faster Than You Think—my new book, just released on January 28th! To get your own copy, click here!)

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

This blog will look at the future of work during the age of Web 3.0, examining scenarios in which artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the spatial web converge to transform every element of our careers, from training, to execution, to free time.

To offer a quick recap on what the Spatial Web is and how it works, let’s cover some brief history.

A Quick Recap on Web 3.0

While Web 1.0 consisted of static documents and read-only data (static web pages), Web 2.0 introduced multimedia content, interactive web applications, and participatory social media, all of these mediated by two-dimensional screens.

But over the next two to five years, the convergence of 5G, artificial intelligence, VR/AR, and a trillion-sensor economy will enable us to both map our physical world into virtual space and superimpose a digital data layer onto our physical environments. Suddenly, all our information will be manipulated, stored, understood and experienced in spatial ways.

In this blog, I’ll be discussing the Spatial Web’s vast implications for:

1. Professional Training
2. Delocalized Business & the Virtual Workplace
3. Smart Permissions & Data Security

Let’s dive in.

Virtual Training, Real-World Results

Virtual and augmented reality have already begun disrupting the professional training market. As projected by ABI Research, the enterprise VR training market is on track to exceed $6.3 billion in value by 2022.

Leading the charge, Walmart has already implemented VR across 200 Academy training centers, running over 45 modules and simulating everything from unusual customer requests to a Black Friday shopping rush.

Then in September 2018, Walmart committed to a 17,000-headset order of the Oculus Go to equip every US Supercenter, neighborhood market, and discount store with VR-based employee training. By mid-2019, Walmart had tracked a 10-15 percent boost in employee confidence as a result of newly implemented VR training.

In the engineering world, Bell Helicopter is using VR to massively expedite development and testing of its latest aircraft, FCX-001. Partnering with Sector 5 Digital and HTC VIVE, Bell found it could concentrate a typical 6-year aircraft design process into the course of 6 months, turning physical mock-ups into CAD-designed virtual replicas.

But beyond the design process itself, Bell is now one of a slew of companies pioneering VR pilot tests and simulations with real-world accuracy. Seated in a true-to-life virtual cockpit, pilots have now tested countless iterations of the FCX-001 in virtual flight, drawing directly onto the 3D model and enacting aircraft modifications in real-time.

And in an expansion of our virtual senses, several key players are already working on haptic feedback. In the case of VR flight, French company Go Touch VR is now partnering with software developer FlyInside on fingertip-mounted haptic tech for aviation.

Dramatically reducing time and trouble required for VR-testing pilots, they aim to give touch-based confirmation of every switch and dial activated on virtual flights, just as one would experience in a full-sized cockpit mockup. Replicating texture, stiffness, and even the sensation of holding an object, these piloted devices contain a suite of actuators to simulate everything from a light touch to higher-pressured contact, all controlled by gaze and finger movements.

When it comes to other high-risk simulations, virtual and augmented reality have barely scratched the surface.

Firefighters can now combat virtual wildfires with new platforms like FLAIM Trainer or TargetSolutions. And thanks to the expansion of medical AR/VR services like 3D4Medical or Echopixel, surgeons might soon perform operations on annotated organs and magnified incision sites, speeding up reaction times and vastly improving precision.

But perhaps most urgent, Web 3.0 and its VR interface will offer an immediate solution for today’s constant industry turnover and large-scale re-education demands. VR educational facilities with exact replicas of anything from large industrial equipment to minute circuitry will soon give anyone a second chance at the 21st-century job market.

Want to be an electric, autonomous vehicle mechanic at age 15? Throw on a demonetized VR module and learn by doing, testing your prototype iterations at almost zero cost and with no risk of harming others.

Want to be a plasma physicist and play around with a virtual nuclear fusion reactor? Now you’ll be able to simulate results and test out different tweaks, logging Smart Educational Record credits in the process.

As tomorrow’s career model shifts from a “one-and-done graduate degree” to continuous lifelong education, professional VR-based re-education will allow for a continuous education loop, reducing the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to enter a new industry.

But beyond professional training and virtually enriched, real-world work scenarios, Web 3.0 promises entirely virtual workplaces and blockchain-secured authorization systems.

Rise of the Virtual Workplace & Digital Data Integrity

In addition to enabling a virtual goods marketplace, the Spatial Web is also giving way to “virtual company headquarters” and completely virtualized companies, where employees can work from home or any place on the planet.

Too good to be true? Check out an incredible publicly listed company called eXp Realty.

Launched on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, eXp Realty beat the odds, going public this past May and surpassing a $1B market cap on day one of trading. But how? Opting for a demonetized virtual model, eXp’s founder Glenn Sanford decided to ditch brick and mortar from the get-go, instead building out an online virtual campus for employees, contractors, and thousands of agents.

And after years of hosting team meetings, training seminars, and even agent discussions with potential buyers through 2D digital interfaces, eXp’s virtual headquarters went spatial. What is eXp’s primary corporate value? FUN! And Glenn Sanford’s employees love their jobs.

In a bid to transition from 2D interfaces to immersive, 3D work experiences, virtual platform VirBELA built out the company’s office space in VR, unlocking indefinite scaling potential and an extraordinary new precedent. Foregoing any physical locations for a centralized VR campus, eXp Realty has essentially thrown out all overhead and entered a lucrative market with barely any upfront costs.

Delocalize with VR, and you can now hire anyone with Internet access (right next door or on the other side of the planet), redesign your corporate office every month, throw in an ocean-view office or impromptu conference room for client meetings, and forget about guzzled-up hours in traffic.

Throw in the Spatial Web’s fundamental blockchain-based data layer, and now cryptographically secured virtual IDs will let you validate colleagues’ identities or any of the virtual avatars we will soon inhabit.

This becomes critically important for spatial information logs—keeping incorruptible records of who’s present at a meeting, which data each person has access to, and AI-translated reports of everything discussed and contracts agreed to.

But as I discussed in a previous Spatial Web blog, not only will Web 3.0 and VR advancements allow us to build out virtual worlds, but we’ll soon be able to digitally map our real-world physical offices or entire commercial high rises too.

As data gets added and linked to any given employee’s office, conference room, or security system, we might then access online-merge-offline environments and information through augmented reality.

Imagine showing up at your building’s concierge and your AR glasses automatically check you into the building, authenticating your identity and pulling up any reminders you’ve linked to that specific location.

You stop by a friend’s office, and his smart security system lets you know he’ll arrive in an hour. Need to book a public conference room that’s already been scheduled by another firm’s marketing team? Offer to pay them a fee and, once accepted, a smart transaction will automatically deliver a payment to their company account.

With blockchain-verified digital identities, spatially logged data, and virtually manifest information, business logistics take a fraction of the time, operations grow seamless, and corporate data will be safer than ever.

Final Thoughts

While converging technologies slash the lifespan of Fortune 500 companies, bring on the rise of vast new industries, and transform the job market, Web 3.0 is changing the way we work, where we work, and who we work with.

Life-like virtual modules are already unlocking countless professional training camps, modifiable in real time and easily updated. Virtual programming and blockchain-based authentication are enabling smart data logging, identity protection, and on-demand smart asset trading. And VR/AR-accessible worlds (and corporate campuses) not only demonetize, dematerialize, and delocalize our everyday workplaces, but enrich our physical worlds with AI-driven, context-specific data.

Welcome to the Spatial Web workplace.

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In the 1920s, it was the “bait and hook” models, where customers are lured in with a low-cost initial product (the bait: a free razor) and then forced to buy endless refills (the hook: blade refills).

In the 1950s, it was the “franchise models” pioneered by McDonald’s. Or take the 1960s, where we got “hypermarkets” like Walmart.

But with the internet’s arrival in the 1990s, business model reinvention entered a period of radical growth. In less than two decades, we’ve seen network effects birth new platforms in record time, bitcoin and blockchain undercut existing “trusted third party” financial models, and crowdfunding and ICOs upend the traditional ways capital is raised.

We are now witnessing seven emerging models slated to redefine business over the next few decades. And today, while countless businesses are anchored by a mentality of maintaining—competing solely on operational execution—it is more vital than ever to leverage these business models for success in the 2020s.

Each is a revolutionary new way of creating value; each is a force for acceleration. Let’s dive in.

7 Business Models to Rule the Decade

(1) The Crowd Economy: Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, ICOs, leveraged assets, and staff-on-demand—essentially, all the developments that leverage the billions of people already online and the billions coming online.

All have revolutionized the way we do business. Just consider leveraged assets, like Uber’s vehicles and Airbnb’s rooms, which have allowed companies to scale at speed. These crowd economy models also lean on staff-on-demand, which provide a company with the agility needed to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. And it’s everything from micro-task laborers behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk on the low end, to Kaggle’s data scientist-on-demand services on the high end.

Example: Airbnb has become the largest “hotel chain” in the world, yet it doesn’t own a single hotel room. Instead, it leverages (that is, rents out) the assets (spare bedrooms) of the crowd, with more than 6 million rooms, flats, and houses in over 81,000 cities across the globe.

(2) The Free/Data Economy: This is the platform version of the “bait and hook” model, essentially baiting the customer with free access to a cool service and then making money off the data gathered about that customer. It also includes all the developments spurred by the big data revolution, which is allowing us to exploit micro-demographics like never before.

Example: Facebook, Google, Twitter—there’s a reason this model has transformed dorm room startups into global superpowers. Google’s search queries per day have risen from 500,000 in 1999, to 200 million in 2004, to 3 billion in 2011, to 5.6 billion today. While more users are becoming aware of the valuable data they exchange in return for Google’s “free” search service, this tried-and-true model will likely continue to succeed in the 2020s.

(3) The Smartness Economy: In the late 1800s, if you wanted a good idea for a new business, all you needed was to take an existing tool, say a drill or a washboard, and add electricity to it—thus creating a power drill or a washing machine.

In the 2020s, AI will be the electricity. In other words, take any existing tool, and add a layer of smartness. So cell phones became smartphones and stereo speakers became smart speakers and cars become autonomous vehicles.

Example: We all know the big names incorporating AI into their business models—from Amazon to Salesforce. But more AI startups arise each day: 965 AI-related companies in the US raised $13.5 billion in venture capital through the first 9 months of last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The most highly valued of them all is Nuro, a driverless grocery delivery service valued at $2.7 billion. Expect AI to continue transforming most businesses in the 2020s.

(4) Closed-Loop Economies: In nature, nothing is ever wasted. The detritus of one species always becomes the foundation for the survival of another species. Human attempts to mimic these entirely waste-free systems have been dubbed “biomimicry” (if you’re talking about designing a new kind of product) or “cradle-to-cradle” (if you’re talking about designing a new kind of city) or, more simply, “closed-loop economies.” These models will grow increasingly prevalent with the rise of environmentally-conscious consumers and the cost benefits of closed-loop systems.

Example: The Plastic Bank, founded in 2013, allows anyone to pick up waste plastic and drop it off at a “plastic bank.” The collector is then paid for the “trash” in anything from cash to WiFi time, while the plastic bank sorts the material and sells it to the appropriate recycler—thus closing an open loop in the life cycle of plastic.

(5) Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): At the convergence of blockchain and AI sits a radically new kind of company—one with no employees, no bosses, and nonstop production. A set of pre-programmed rules determines how the company operates, and computers do the rest. A fleet of autonomous taxis, for instance, with a blockchain-backed smart contracts layer, could run itself 24-7, including driving to the repair shop for maintenance, without any human involvement.

Example: While DAOs are just beginning to emerge, the platform DAOstack is working to provide these businesses with tools for success, including reliable crypto-economic incentives and decentralized governance protocols. DAOstack aims to create businesses where the only external influence is the customer.

(6) Multiple World Models: We no longer live in only one place. We have real-world personae and online personae, and this delocalized existence is only going to expand. With the rise of augmented reality and virtual reality, we’re introducing more layers to this equation. You’ll have avatars for work and avatars for play, and all of these versions of ourselves are opportunities for new businesses.

Example: Second Life, the very first virtual world created in 2003, gave rise to a multimillion-dollar economy. People were paying other people to design digital clothes and digital houses for their digital avatars. Every time we add a new layer to the digital strata, we’re also adding an entire economy built upon that layer, meaning we are now conducting our business in multiple worlds at once.

(7) 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.

Example: Early versions of this model can be seen in the rise of “transformational festivals” like Burning Man, or fitness companies like CrossFit, where the experience is generally bad (you work out in old warehouses), but the transformation is great (the person you become after three months of working out in those warehouses). Consumers are no longer searching for merely pleasurable experiences—they are looking for challenges that transform.

Final Thoughts

What all this tells us is that business as usual is becoming business unusual. And for existing companies, as Harvard’s Clayton Christensen explained, this is no longer optional: “Most [organizations] think the key to growth is developing new technologies and products. But often this is not so. To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.”

And for those of us on the outside of these disruptive models, our experience will be better, cheaper, faster.

Better meaning new business models do what all business models do—solve problems for people in the real world better than anyone else.

Cheaper is obvious. With demonetization running rampant, customers—and that means all of us—are expecting more for less.

But the real shift is the final shift: faster. New business models are no longer forces for stability and security. To compete in today’s accelerated climate, these models are designed for speed and agility.

Most importantly, none of this is in any danger of slowing down.

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2021 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs—those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

With humans no longer in the transaction chain, fees are slashed. Undercutting the typical 2 percent cut of profits (not to mention 20 percent incentives) charged by a wealth manager, most robo-advisors take around 0.25 percent. And AI is inserting itself into almost every aspect of the financial world.

“Fintech” describes the convergence of technology and financial services. First colonized by networks and apps, it was then radicalized by AI and blockchain, and now underpins a global wealth redistribution mechanism.

Today, we’ll discuss the ways in which AI algorithms are already massively disrupting financial systems across the globe.

Let’s dive in.

Crowdlending

Wherever large amounts of customer frustration encounter large piles of money, opportunity lurks.

This gave rise to a company called TransferWise. By matching customers who have, say, pesos that 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, the company reached a $3.5 billion valuation in under five years.

Built on networks and apps, TransferWise is also an example of fintech’s colonization wave. The radicalized wave arose when AI entered the picture.

Consider the age-old practice of “Buddy, can I borrow a dollar,” otherwise known as peer-to-peer lending. Traditionally, this is a high-risk practice—which is to say, Buddy rarely gets his dollar back.

This problem only gets worse with scale. 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.

But who needs trust when there’s data?

With AI, huge groups of people can come together, share financial information, and pool risk, becoming the peer-to-peer market now known as “crowdlending.”

Prosper, Funding Circle, and LendingTree are three example players in the market, a market expected to surge from $26.16 billion in 2015 to $897.85 billion by 2024.

A different example is the Smart Finance Group. Created in 2013 to serve China’s massive unbanked and underbanked population, Smart Finance uses an AI to comb a user’s personal data—social media data, smartphone data, educational and employment history, etc.—to generate a reliable credit score nearly instantly.

With this method, they can approve a peer-to-peer loan in under eight seconds, including micro-loans to the unbanked.

And the results speak for themselves. Roughly 1.5 to 2 million loans are taken out every month via Smart Finance.

Investing with AI

AI is also making an impact on investing.

Traditionally, this game was played by the wealthy as it is a game of data. Financial advisors had the best data, but you needed to be wealthy enough to afford a financial advisor to access it.

And advisors are picky. Since it can take more time to manage small investors than large investors, many wealth managers have investment minimums in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But AI has leveled the playing field.

Today, robo-advisors like Wealthfront and Betterment are bringing wealth management to the masses. Via an app, clients answer a series of initial questions about risk tolerances, investment goals, and retirement aims, and then algorithms take over.

Actually, algorithms have already taken over.

As mentioned earlier, up to 90 percent of market trades are made by computer. All robo-advisors have done is make the process available directly to customers, saving them money in the process. Instead of the typical 2 percent of profits (and 20 percent incentives) charged by a wealth manager, most robo-advisors take around a quarter of a percent.

And investors are responding.

As of January 2019, Wealthfront had $11 billion under management, while Betterment stood at $14 billion. While robo-advisors still account for only roughly 1 percent of total US investment, Business Insider Intelligence estimates that number will climb to $4.6 trillion by 2022.

The Death of Cash

Finally we come to our last category, using money to pay for things.

But we already know this story. When was the last time you dropped coins into a toll booth? Or paid cash for a cab ride? In fact, Uber and Lyft allow us to get around a city without a wallet. Cashier-less stores with services like Amazon Go and Uber Eats and wallet-less pay mechanisms are about to become the new normal.

Denmark stopped printing money in 2017. The year prior, in an attempt to expand mobile banking and demonetize the country’s gray-market economy, India recalled 86 percent of its cash. Vietnam aims to make retail 90 percent cashless by 2020. And Sweden, where over 80 percent of all transactions are already digital, is almost there.

Economists often point out that two of the main factors driving economic growth are the availability of money—the stockpiles we can draw upon—and the velocity of money, or the speed and ease with which we can move that money around. Both of these factors are being amplified by exponential technologies.

As our transactions shift to the digital realm, more data on spending habits can be collected and fed to AI algorithms that continue to learn based on real-time input. This information will educate marketing campaigns, credit records, and investment goals.

Final Thoughts

What, exactly, do we do with our money?

We store it, of course. Mostly in banks. We also move it around, sometimes transferring cash between companies, other times borrowing or lending among individuals. Next, we invest it, attempting to use our money to grow more money. Finally, since the time coins were conch shells, we trade it for the stuff we want.

Thanks to converging exponentials, each of these areas is being reimagined, with bits and bytes replacing dollars and cents. And neither contemporary economics nor the way we live our lives will ever be the same.

Join Me

(1) A360 Executive Mastermind: If you’re an exponentially and abundance-minded entrepreneur who would like coaching directly from me, consider joining my Abundance 360 Mastermind, a highly selective community of 360 CEOs and entrepreneurs who I coach for 3 days every January in Beverly Hills, Ca. Through A360, I provide my members with context and clarity about how converging exponential technologies will transform every industry. I’m committed to running A360 for the course of an ongoing 25-year journey as a “countdown to the Singularity.”

If you’d like to learn more and consider joining our 2020 membership, apply here.

(2) Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital. Abundance-Digital is Singularity University’s ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs — those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University — your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: Image by Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay