Vanessa Bates Ramirez is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics.

It’s common consensus in the tech industry that the days of cars as we know them—powered by gas, driven by humans, and individually owned by all who want and can afford one—are numbered. Imminent is the age of autonomous, electric, and shared transportation, and we’re continuously taking small steps towards making it a reality. Self-driving software is getting better at avoiding accidents. Battery storage capacity is climbing. Solar energy is getting cheaper. This all points to a bright automotive future.

But not everyone is on board—in fact, some cities are taking the opposite approach, phasing out gas-powered cars altogether, limiting use of hybrid and electric cars, and making urban centers car-free. Will they be left in the dust as the rest of us are autonomously driven into the (energy-producing) sunset? Or do the anti-car folks have it right—is the brighter future one that forgoes cars in favor of even more sustainable and healthy modes of transportation?

Too Much of a Good Thing

What might Henry Ford think if he saw what’s become of his invention? Highways clogged with traffic, accidents a leading cause of death, commuters sealed alone and sedentary in their vehicles for hours.

Ford may have never expected cars to become cheap and accessible enough for us to use them to the extent we do today. And as the global middle class grows, cars are likely to proliferate even more; as people make more money, they want cars not just for transportation and convenience, but as status symbols.

The countries where the middle class has the most potential to grow—that is, countries where poverty rates are still relatively high—are also seeing people flock to cities in search of work and security. The UN predicts that 90 percent of the global shift to urban areas will take place in Asia and Africa, with Delhi, Dhaka, Bombay, and Kinshasa among the top 10 most populated future mega-cities.

It would be messy enough to add millions more cars to cities that have an existing infrastructure for them—and far messier to add them to cities like these that don’t. Plus, even if the cars are electric, the electricity has to come from somewhere, and even the world’s wealthiest countries aren’t likely to get to 100 percent renewables until 2050 at the soonest. And you can only have so much congestion before a city’s quality of life and economy are impacted.

Mexico City was the first in the world to take serious action against traffic congestion, implementing daily “no drive restrictions” based on license plate numbers. London, Singapore, and Stockholm all use congestion pricing, where drivers have to pay to enter city centers or crowded streets.

These are minor measures compared to the steps other cities are taking to discourage people from driving.

Auf Wiedersehen, Don’t Drive

Ready? Here are some rapid-fire stats on cities taking steps to limit cars.

Madrid made its city center a designated low-emission zone, restricting access by older diesel and gas cars and planning to ban these vehicles from the zone completely by 2020. Hybrid cars can get an “eco label” and circulate freely.

The whole of Denmark is planning to ban the sale of new gas and diesel cars starting in 2030, and the sale of hybrid cars starting in 2035. Copenhagen already has one of the lowest rates of car ownership and highest rates of bike commuting in Europe.

In Paris, no cars are allowed in the city center between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m on the first Sunday of every month. Cars made before 1997 aren’t allowed in the city on weekdays, and the city is doubling its number of bike lanes.

Athens will ban diesel cars by 2025 and already restricts the days of the week they can drive in the city center, based on license plate numbers.

Oslo has set a target to become carbon neutral by 2030, and doing away with non-electric cars will be key to its success. The city has restricted access for private vehicles, turned road space into pedestrian space, and eliminated almost all of the parking spots in the city center.

While Hamburg will still allow cars in its city center, it’s laying down plans that will make it far easier for people not to have to drive, including a “green network” that will connect parks and cover 40 percent of the city’s space.

Brussels will ban all diesel vehicles by 2030 and is heavily promoting public and shared transportation. It’s even making its trains, buses, and shared bikes free to use on days with excessively high air pollution.

The Netherlands will only allow emissions-free vehicles by 2030, and is pumping €345 million into its already robust bicycle infrastructure.

Helsinki is redesigning its suburbs, which people primarily reach by driving, into walkable communities linked to the city by public transit, in hopes that Finns won’t need to own cars at all within 10 years.

Why All the Goodbyes?

Cutting out cars has the obvious benefit of reducing pollution—again, even if the cars are electric, we’re not yet to the point of 100 percent clean energy. And in fact, higher temperatures and less rain in many parts of the world mean pollution from cars is even more potent, and gets washed away less frequently.

Going auto-free is good for people, too; it encourages more exercise (by walking and biking more), less isolation (by taking public or shared transportation), more time saved (no sitting still in clogged traffic) with less stress (I repeat—no sitting still in clogged traffic), and improved safety (car accidents definitely kill more people than bike or train accidents do). Greening city centers will also make those cities more pleasant to live in and visit.

It’s worth noting that the cities reducing car usage are almost all in Europe, where such measures are far more feasible than, say, the US, where outside of major urban areas, it’s hard to go anywhere without a car. American cities expanded into now-sprawling suburbs largely thanks to the invention of the car, and have a degree of dependence on driving that will be hard to scale back from.

European cities, in contrast, were further developed by the time cars proliferated; they’d already largely been built around public transportation, and continued to expand train systems even as cars became more popular. Plus, European countries’ comparatively small size makes it much more practical to rely on public transit than in the US; many US states are larger than European countries.

The cities in developing countries that are set for population booms in the next two to three decades would be wise to follow Europe’s example rather than that of the US.

A Habit We’ll Never Fully Kick

Cars will, of course, continue to be widely used, including right at the edges of the cities that are banning them. The measures to discourage car usage and ownership are a start, but major shifts in urban planning and in peoples’ behavior aren’t as straightforward, and will take much longer to change.

If big tech’s vision plays out, though, people will be able to use cars and reduce the danger, time, and stress associated with them; autonomous cars will pick us up, deftly navigate city streets, drop us at our destinations, then go pick up their next passenger.

It does seem, then, that the days of cars as we know them are numbered, whether they’re replaced by high-tech versions of their former selves or switched out for bikes and trains.

But fear not—the transition will happen slowly. There’s plenty of time left to sing at the top of your lungs (in between honking at bad drivers and checking a maps app to see how traffic looks) while sealed inside your good old reliable, private, gas-powered, human-driven chariot.

Vanessa Bates Ramirez is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Thomas Hornigold is a physics student at the University of Oxford.

Even if the world manages to keep to the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global mean temperatures to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, climate change is coming. The best way to protect ourselves from its effects is to drastically cut our emissions by deploying renewables, electrification, and energy-efficiency measures. But we’ll also need to adapt to the changes that are coming.

Doing so will save money, and it will save lives. That’s the message from a new report from the Global Commission on Adaptation, led by Ban Ki-Moon, Bill Gates, and World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva. The report estimates that investing $1.8 trillion worldwide in five areas of climate adaptation during the next decade—for scale, this is what humans spend on efforts to kill each other every year—will yield $7.1 trillion in benefits.

Beyond cold, hard economics, though, the number of lives that could be improved or saved by adaptation is immense. Over this century, sea level rise and storm surges could force millions from coastal homes; another hundred million people in the developing world could be pushed into poverty as crop yields stall; water security will be threatened for more than a billion people across the world; and extreme weather events will disproportionately impact the poorest and most vulnerable.

Here are the ways we can alleviate that impact.

1. Early Warning Systems

Early warning systems for extreme weather events such as cyclones, droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires need to be improved.

A striking example of the effectiveness of these systems is found in Bangladesh. In 1970, the Bhola cyclone struck the low-lying nation with devastating results: at least 300,000 were killed. Since then, Bangladesh has launched a Cyclone Preparedness Program, constructed thousands of shelters, and invested in an early warning system. When Cyclone Mora hit in 2017, the Bangladeshi authorities evacuated hundreds of thousands of people, resulting in a death toll of around 10.

While funding emergency services and having rapid response available for natural disasters is crucial, planning for disasters in advance is also important. Advances in climate and weather models allow for scenario planning; finance, information, and other resources can be directed to the communities that are most likely to be hit.

2. Build Infrastructure for a Warmer World

Infrastructure requires investment. In the US alone, trillions of dollars may need to be spent just in order to preserve existing infrastructure. In developing nations, vast building projects and rapid urbanization are constantly accelerating.

If we want to tackle the causes and effects of climate change, this needs to be done well. Building houses to high energy-efficiency standards can prevent billions of tons of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. Similarly, building infrastructure that takes into account the likely effects of climate change—warmer temperatures and more extreme weather events—reduces the probability of large-scale failures.

Bridges, coastal airports, and ports must be resilient to flooding and sea level rise. As the world electrifies, power lines and power plants, often forced to close by heatwaves, must be ready. When infrastructure fails, particularly after natural disasters, food or medical shortages can follow; much of the economic damage arises from these knock-on effects. The report estimates that $4 trillion in savings and benefits could arise from careful infrastructure planning. Yet only 5 out of the 35 OECD developed nations have changed their regulatory standards to account for these climate risks.

We have a choice: lock in infrastructure that’s vulnerable to a changing climate and that contributes to the problem by wasting energy, or build and repair our infrastructure with climate in mind.

3. Invest in Food Security

Climate change is already reducing crop yields in vulnerable regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Higher temperatures reduce water availability and allow pests and diseases to spread across new regions. Extreme weather events can destroy crops and prevent food from being distributed properly. All of this occurs against the backdrop of ever-increasing population and demand for food—as much as 50 percent by 2050.

The scientific innovations of the first Green Revolution headed off the most dire predictions about food availability in the 1950s and 60s, boosting agricultural productivity. Now investment needs to take place in new strains of climate-resistant crops. Diversifying strains and diets will help improve resilience to pests, diseases, and changing climates—and farms with more diverse sources of income are less likely to experience extreme poverty when climate shocks hit. Better agricultural technology and training needs to be shared with the small farmers in developing nations who live off the land.

Agriculture is at the forefront of climate vulnerability, and also plays its part in contributing to emissions, as rainforests are cleared for cattle and rice paddies emit methane. It’s crucial that better land management, informed by scientific and technological developments, form part of the solution to climate change. Engagement and investment in this now will save lives.

4. Invest in Water Security

In vulnerable regions, the length and severity of droughts are expected to grow under climate change. At the same time, flooding can jeopardize supplies of clean water. Competition for water between regions can fuel conflicts.

Rejuvenating the drainage basins that supply rivers and cities through restoration of wetlands and forests that are crucial to preventing runoff is important, as are planning for droughts and ensuring that reserves exist. But as with energy, so much can be achieved if we are smarter in the way we use our resources. Wastewater treatment and desalination can reclaim water that’s not usable today. Authorities in large cities should allocate water for the most urgent uses, and repair leaky infrastructure to preserve the supply. Since 70 percent of freshwater is used in agriculture, improving irrigation techniques and using crop varieties that require less water can both help in this.

5. Restore Crucial Ecosystems

We might like to think that our technological prowess has made us masters of the natural world, and when you live in a large city, it can often feel like this is the case. But natural processes evolve on huge scales and often provide critical services to people.

Mangrove forests, which thrive in coastal regions, are an excellent example. They protect low-lying coastal communities from storm surges, acting as natural flood defenses. They lock in carbon dioxide—up to ten times more than other terrestrial ecosystems. They provide natural habitats for many rare species. But 35 percent of the world’s mangroves have already been destroyed. Careful management of these and other vital ecosystems is necessary to help us adapt to climate change.

We have many of the tools we need to adapt to a changing climate. But what’s worth emphasizing is that all of these adaptation tasks are worth completing anyway. Billions of lives could be improved by taking action that preserves natural ecosystems, enhances food and water security, protects us from natural disasters, and ensures resilient infrastructure for the coming decades.

In an increasingly interconnected world, these are everyone’s problems. There are few better ways to spend money—but, as the report makes clear, investing now will save trillions in the future. What are we waiting for?

Thomas Hornigold is a physics student at the University of Oxford.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Peter H. Diamandis, MD is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder and director of Singularity University.

Tomorrow’s cities are reshaping almost every industry imaginable, and birthing those we’ve never heard of.

Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains’, high-speed networks, new materials and breakthrough green solutions, cities are quickly becoming versatile organisms, sustaining and responding to the livelihood patterns of millions.

Over the next decade, cities will revolutionize everything about the way we live, travel, eat, work, learn, stay healthy, and even hydrate.

And countless urban centers, companies, and visionaries are already building out decades-long visions of the future.

Setting its sights on self-sustaining green cities, the UAE has invested record sums in its Vision 2021 plan, while sub-initiatives like Smart Dubai 2021 charge ahead with AI-geared government services, driverless car networks, and desalination plants.

A trailblazer of smart governance, Estonia has leveraged blockchain, AI, and ultra-high connection speeds to build a new generation of technological statecraft. And city states like Singapore have used complex computational models to optimize everything from rainwater capture networks to urban planning, down to the routing of its ocean breeze.

Last week, I explored responsive urban networks, self-charging infrastructure, and new materials for construction.

Today, I’d like to take a creative tour through some of the most whimsical visions of how we might live in 2050. We’ll discuss smart city services and responsive urban governance, as well as the implications of driverless vehicles for sprawling megacities.

Let’s dive in.

Automated Megacities and Networked Vehicles

While not given nearly enough credit, the personal vehicle and urban transportation stand at the core of shaping our future cities. Yet today, your car remains an unused asset about 95 percent of the time.

In highly dense cities like Los Angeles, parking gobbles up almost 15 percent of all urban land area. And with a whopping economic footprint, today’s global auto insurance market stands at over $200 billion.

But the personal vehicle model is on the verge of sweeping disruptions, and tomorrow’s cities will transform right along with it. Already, driverless cars pose game-changing second-order implications for the next decade.

Take land use, for instance. By 2035, parking spaces are expected to decline by 5.7 million square meters, a boon for densely-packed cities where real estate is worth its area in gold.

Beyond sheer land, a 90 percent driverless car penetration rate could result in $447 billion of projected savings and productivity gains.

But what do autonomous vehicles mean for city planning?

As I often like to do in brainstorming workshops, we can usually identify second-order implications of a technology by extrapolating from its immediate effects.

Let’s imagine a 100 percent autonomous vehicle (AV) penetration rate. Cars have reached Level-5 automation, are 100 percent self-driving, and can now communicate seamlessly with each other.

With a packing density 8X what it is today in most cities, commutes now take a fraction of the time. But time savings aside, cars can now be entirely reimagined, serving a dual purpose for sleep, office work, morning calls, time with your kids, you name it.

With plummeting commute times and functional vehicles (think: a mobile office, bed, or social space), cities need no longer be geographically concentrated, allowing you to live well outside the bounds of a business district.

And as AVs give rise to an on-demand, Cars-as-a-Service (CaaS) business model, urban sprawl will enable the flourishing of megacities on an unprecedented scale.

While architects and civil engineers leap to the scene, others are already building out smart network precursors for a future of decentralized vehicles.

Using Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) for low power consumption, Huawei has recently launched a smart parking network in Shanghai that finds nearby parking spots for users on the go, allowing passengers to book and pay via smartphone in record time.

In the near future, however, vehicles—not drivers—will book vertically stacked parking spots and charge CaaS suppliers on their own (for storage).

This is where 5G networks come in, driving down latencies between driverless cars, as well as between AVs and their CaaS providers. Using sensor suites and advanced AI, vehicles will make smart transactions in real time, charging consumers by the minute or mile, notifying manufacturers of wear and tear or suboptimal conditions, and even billing for insurance dollars in the now highly unlikely case of a fender-bender.

With an eye to the future, Huawei is building out critical infrastructure for these and similar capabilities, embedding chip-sets under parking spaces across Shanghai, each collating and transmitting real-time data on occupancy rates, as the company ramps up its 5G networks.

And Huawei is not alone.

Building out a similar solution is China Unicom, whose smart city projects span the gamut from smart rivers that communicate details of environmental pollution, to IoT and AI-geared drones in agriculture.

Already, China Unicom has established critical communications infrastructure with an NB-IoT network that spans over 300 Chinese cities, additionally deploying eMTC, a lower power wide-area technology that leverages existing LTE base stations for IoT support.

Beyond its mobile carriers, however, China has brought together four key private sector players to drive the world’s largest coordinated smart city initiative yet. Announced just last August at China’s Smart City International Expo, the official partnership knights a true power team, composed of Ping An, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei (PATH).

With 500 cities under their purview, these tech giants are each tackling a piece of the puzzle.

On the heels of over ten years of research and 50 billion RMB (over US$7.4 billion), Chinese insurance giant Ping An released a white paper addressing smart city strategies across blockchain, biometrics, AI, and cloud computing.

Meanwhile, Alibaba plans to embed seamless mobile payments (through AliPay) into the fabric of daily life, as Tencent takes charge of communications and Huawei works on hardware and 5G buildout (not to mention its signature smartphones).

But it isn’t just driverless vehicles that are changing the game for smart cities.

One of the most advanced city states on the planet, Singapore joins Dubai in envisioning a future of flying vehicles and optimized airway traffic flow.

As imagined by award-winning architect of Singapore’s first zero-carbon house, Jason Pomeroy, Singapore could in the not-too-distant future explore everything from air rights to flying car structures built above motorways and skyscrapers.

“Fast-forward 50 years from now. You already see drone technology getting so advanced, [so] why are we not sticking people into those drones. All of a sudden, your sky courts, your sky gardens, even your private terraces to your condo [become] landing platform[s] for your own personalized drone.”

Already, Singapore’s government is bolstering advanced programs to test drone capacity limits, with automated routing and private sector innovation. Most notably, Airbus’ ‘Skyways’ venture has begun building out its vision for urban air mobility in Singapore, where much of the company’s testing has taken place.

Yet, as megacities attract millions of new residents from across the planet, building out smart networks for autonomous and flying vehicles, one of our greatest priorities becomes smart city governance.

Smart Public Services and Optimized Urban Planning

With the rise of urbanization, I’m led to the conclusion that megacities will become the primary nodes of data acquisition, data integration, and thereby the primary mechanism of governance.

In just over 10 years, the UN forecasts that around 43 cities will house over 10 million residents each. Autonomous and flying cars, de-localized work and education, and growing urban populations are all beginning to transform cities into interconnected, automated ecosystems, sprawled over vast swaths of geography.

Now more than ever, smart public services and automated security will be needed to serve as the glue that holds these megacities together. Public sector infrastructure and services will soon be hosted on servers, detached from land and physical form. And municipal governments will face the scale of city states, propelled by an upward trend in sovereign urban hubs that run almost entirely on their own.

Take e-Estonia.

Perhaps the least expected on a list of innovative nations, this former Soviet Republic-turned digital society is ushering in an age of technological statecraft. Hosting every digitizable government function on the cloud, Estonia could run its government almost entirely on a server.

Starting in the 1990s, Estonia’s government has covered the nation with ultra-high-speed data connectivity, laying down tremendous amounts of fiber-optic cable. By 2007, citizens could vote from their living rooms.

With digitized law, Estonia signs policies into effect using cryptographically secure digital signatures, and every stage of the legislative process is available to citizens online, including plans for civil engineering projects.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Citizens’ healthcare registry is run on the blockchain, allowing patients to own and access their own health data from anywhere in the world—X-rays, digital prescriptions, medical case notes—all the while tracking who has access.

And i-Voting, civil courts, land registries, banking, taxes, and countless e-facilities allow citizens to access almost any government service with an electronic ID and personal PIN online.

But perhaps Estonia’s most revolutionary breakthrough is its recently introduced e-citizenship.

With over 50,000 e-residents from across 157 countries, Estonia issues electronic IDs to remote ‘inhabitants’ anywhere in the world, changing the nature of city borders themselves. While e-residency doesn’t grant territorial rights, over 6,000 e-residents have already established companies within Estonia’s jurisdiction.

From start to finish, the process takes roughly three hours, and 98 percent of businesses are all established online, offering data security, offshore benefits, and some of the most efficient taxes on the planet.

After companies are registered online, taxes are near-entirely automated—calculated in minutes and transmitted to the Estonian government with unprecedented ease.

The implications of e-residency and digital governance are huge. As with any software, open-source code for digital governance could be copied perfectly at almost zero cost, lowering the barrier to entry for any megacity or village alike seeking its own urban e-services.

As my good friend David Li often advocates, we’ve seen thriving village startup ecosystems and e-commerce hotbeds take off throughout China’s countryside, resulting in the mass movement and meteoric rise of ‘Taobao Villages.’

As smart city governance becomes democratized, what’s to stop these or any other town from building out or even duplicating e-services?

But Estonia is not the only one pioneering rapid-fire government uses of blockchain technology.

Within the next year, Dubai aims to become the first city powered entirely by the blockchain, a long-standing goal of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

Posing massive savings, government adoption of blockchain not only stands to save Dubai over 5.5 billion dirham (or nearly US$1.5 billion), but is intended to roll out everything from a citywide cryptocurrency emCash, to an RTA-announced blockchain-based vehicle monitoring system.

Possibly a major future smart city staple, systems similar to this latter blockchain-based network could one day underpin AVs, flying taxis, and on-demand Fly-as-a-Service personal drones.

With a similar mind to Dubai, multiple Chinese smart city pilots are quickly following suit.

Almost two years ago, China’s central government and President Xi Jinping designated a new megalopolis spanning three counties and rivaling almost every other Chinese special economic zone: Xiong’an New Area.

Deemed a “crucial [strategy] for the millennium to come,” Xiong’an is slated to bring in over 2.4 trillion RMB (a little over US$357 billion) in investment over the next decade, redirecting up to 6.7 million people and concentrating supercharged private sector innovation.

And forging a new partnership, Xiong’an plans to work in direct consultation with ConsenSys on ethereum-based platforms for infrastructure and any number of smart city use cases. Beyond blockchain, Xiong’an will rely heavily on AI and has even posited plans for citywide cognitive computing.

But any discussion of smart government services would be remiss without mention of Singapore.

One of the most resourceful, visionary megacities on the planet, Singapore has embedded advanced computational models and high-tech solutions in everything from urban planning to construction of its housing units.

Responsible for creating living spaces for nearly 80 percent of its residents (through government-provided housing), the nation’s Housing and Development Board (HBD) stands as an exemplar of disruptive government.

Singapore uses sophisticated computer models, enabling architects across the board to build environmentally optimized living and city spaces. Take Singapore’s simulated ocean breeze for optimized urban construction patterns.

As explained by HBD’s CEO Dr. Cheong Koon Hean, “Singapore is in the tropics, so we want to encourage the breezes to come through. Through computer simulation, you can actually position the blocks[,] public spaces [and] parks in such a way that help[s] you achieve this.”

And beyond its buildings, Singapore uses intricate, precision-layered infrastructure for essential services, down to water and electrical tunnels, commercial spaces underground, and complex transportation networks all beneath the city surface.

Even in the realm of feeding its citizens, Singapore is fast becoming a champion of vertical farming. It opened the world’s first commercial vertical farm over six years ago, aiming to feed the entire island nation with a fraction of the land use.

Whether giving citizens a vote on urban planning with the click of a button, or optimizing environmental conditions through public housing and commercial skyscrapers, smart city governance is a key pillar of the future.

Visions of the Future

Bringing together mega-economies, green city infrastructure, and e-services that decimate inefficiency, future transportation and web-based urban services will shape how and where we live, on unthinkable dimensions.

Networked drones, whether personal or parcel deliveries, will circle layered airways, all operated using AI city brains and blockchain-based data infrastructures. Far below, driverless vehicles will give rise to on-demand Cars-as-a-Service, sprawling cities, and newly unlocked real estate.

And as growing megacities across the world begin grappling with next-gen technologies, who knows how many whimsical city visions and architectural plans will populate Earth— and one day, even space.

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.)

Peter H. Diamandis, MD is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder and director of Singularity University.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Peter H. Diamandis, MD is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder and director of Singularity University.

In the decade ahead, waves of exponential technological advancements are stacking atop one another, eclipsing decades of breakthroughs in scale and impact.

Emerging from these waves are 20 “metatrends” likely to revolutionize entire industries (old and new), redefine tomorrow’s generation of businesses and contemporary challenges, and transform our livelihoods from the bottom up.

Among these metatrends are augmented human longevity, the surging smart economy, AI-human collaboration, urbanized cellular agriculture, and high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces, just to name a few.

It is here that master entrepreneurs and their teams must see beyond the immediate implications of a given technology, capturing second-order, Google-sized business opportunities on the horizon.

Welcome to a new decade of runaway technological booms, historic watershed moments, and extraordinary abundance.

Let’s dive in.

20 Metatrends for the 2020s

(1) Continued increase in global abundance: The number of individuals in extreme poverty continues to drop, as the middle-income population continues to rise. This metatrend is driven by the convergence of high-bandwidth and low-cost communication, ubiquitous AI on the cloud, and growing access to AI-aided education and AI-driven healthcare. Everyday goods and services (finance, insurance, education, and entertainment) are being digitized and becoming fully demonetized, available to the rising billion on mobile devices.

(2) Global gigabit connectivity will connect everyone and everything, everywhere, at ultra-low cost: The deployment of both licensed and unlicensed 5G, plus the launch of a multitude of global satellite networks (OneWeb, Starlink, etc.), allow for ubiquitous, low-cost communications for everyone, everywhere, not to mention the connection of trillions of devices. And today’s skyrocketing connectivity is bringing online an additional three billion individuals, driving tens of trillions of dollars into the global economy. This metatrend is driven by the convergence of low-cost space launches, hardware advancements, 5G networks, artificial intelligence, materials science, and surging computing power.

(3) The average human healthspan will increase by 10+ years: A dozen game-changing biotech and pharmaceutical solutions (currently in Phase 1, 2, or 3 clinical trials) will reach consumers this decade, adding an additional decade to the human healthspan. Technologies include stem cell supply restoration, wnt pathway manipulation, senolytic medicines, a new generation of endo-vaccines, GDF-11, and supplementation of NMD/NAD+, among several others. And as machine learning continues to mature, AI is set to unleash countless new drug candidates, ready for clinical trials. This metatrend is driven by the convergence of genome sequencing, CRISPR technologies, AI, quantum computing, and cellular medicine.

(4) An age of capital abundance will see increasing access to capital everywhere: From 2016 – 2018 (and likely in 2019), humanity hit all-time highs in the global flow of seed capital, venture capital, and sovereign wealth fund investments. While this trend will witness some ups and downs in the wake of future recessions, it is expected to continue its overall upward trajectory. Capital abundance leads to the funding and testing of ‘crazy’ entrepreneurial ideas, which in turn accelerate innovation. Already, $300 billion in crowdfunding is anticipated by 2025, democratizing capital access for entrepreneurs worldwide. This metatrend is driven by the convergence of global connectivity, dematerialization, demonetization, and democratization.

(5) Augmented reality and the spatial web will achieve ubiquitous deployment: The combination of augmented reality (yielding Web 3.0, or the spatial web) and 5G networks (offering 100Mb/s – 10Gb/s connection speeds) will transform how we live our everyday lives, impacting every industry from retail and advertising to education and entertainment. Consumers will play, learn, and shop throughout the day in a newly intelligent, virtually overlaid world. This metatrend will be driven by the convergence of hardware advancements, 5G networks, artificial intelligence, materials science, and surging computing power.

(6) Everything is smart, embedded with intelligence: The price of specialized machine learning chips is dropping rapidly with a rise in global demand. Combined with the explosion of low-cost microscopic sensors and the deployment of high-bandwidth networks, we’re heading into a decade wherein every device becomes intelligent. Your child’s toy remembers her face and name. Your kids’ drone safely and diligently follows and videos all the children at the birthday party. Appliances respond to voice commands and anticipate your needs.

(7) AI will achieve human-level intelligence: As predicted by technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence will reach human-level performance this decade (by 2030). Through the 2020s, AI algorithms and machine learning tools will be increasingly made open source, available on the cloud, allowing any individual with an internet connection to supplement their cognitive ability, augment their problem-solving capacity, and build new ventures at a fraction of the current cost. This metatrend will be driven by the convergence of global high-bandwidth connectivity, neural networks, and cloud computing. Every industry, spanning industrial design, healthcare, education, and entertainment, will be impacted.

(8) AI-human collaboration will skyrocket across all professions: The rise of “AI as a Service” (AIaaS) platforms will enable humans to partner with AI in every aspect of their work, at every level, in every industry. AIs will become entrenched in everyday business operations, serving as cognitive collaborators to employees—supporting creative tasks, generating new ideas, and tackling previously unattainable innovations. In some fields, partnership with AI will even become a requirement. For example: in the future, making certain diagnoses without the consultation of AI may be deemed malpractice.

(9) Most individuals adapt a JARVIS-like “software shell” to improve their quality of life: As services like Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Homepod expand in functionality, such services will eventually travel beyond the home and become your cognitive prosthetic 24/7. Imagine a secure JARVIS-like software shell that you give permission to listen to all your conversations, read your email, monitor your blood chemistry, etc. With access to such data, these AI-enabled software shells will learn your preferences, anticipate your needs and behavior, shop for you, monitor your health, and help you problem-solve in support of your mid- and long-term goals.

(10) Globally abundant, cheap renewable energy: Continued advancements in solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, nuclear, and localized grids will drive humanity towards cheap, abundant, and ubiquitous renewable energy. The price per kilowatt-hour will drop below one cent per kilowatt-hour for renewables, just as storage drops below a mere three cents per kilowatt-hour, resulting in the majority displacement of fossil fuels globally. And as the world’s poorest countries are also the world’s sunniest, the democratization of both new and traditional storage technologies will grant energy abundance to those already bathed in sunlight.

(11) The insurance industry transforms from “recovery after risk” to “prevention of risk”: Today, fire insurance pays you after your house burns down; life insurance pays your next-of-kin after you die; and health insurance (which is really sick insurance) pays only after you get sick. This next decade, a new generation of insurance providers will leverage the convergence of machine learning, ubiquitous sensors, low-cost genome sequencing, and robotics to detect risk, prevent disaster, and guarantee safety before any costs are incurred.

(12) Autonomous vehicles and flying cars will redefine human travel (soon to be far faster and cheaper): Fully autonomous vehicles, car-as-a-service fleets, and aerial ride-sharing (flying cars) will be fully operational in most major metropolitan cities in the coming decade. The cost of transportation will plummet 3-4X, transforming real estate, finance, insurance, the materials economy, and urban planning. Where you live and work, and how you spend your time, will all be fundamentally reshaped by this future of human travel. Your kids and elderly parents will never drive. This metatrend will be driven by the convergence of machine learning, sensors, materials science, battery storage improvements, and ubiquitous gigabit connections.

(13) On-demand production and on-demand delivery will birth an “instant economy of things”: Urban dwellers will learn to expect “instant fulfillment” of their retail orders as drone and robotic last-mile delivery services carry products from local supply depots directly to your doorstep. Further riding the deployment of regional on-demand digital manufacturing (3D printing farms), individualized products can be obtained within hours, anywhere, anytime. This metatrend is driven by the convergence of networks, 3D printing, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

(14) Ability to sense and know anything, anytime, anywhere: We’re rapidly approaching the era wherein 100 billion sensors (the Internet of Everything) is monitoring and sensing (imaging, listening, measuring) every facet of our environments, all the time. Global imaging satellites, drones, autonomous car LIDARs, and forward-looking augmented reality (AR) headset cameras are all part of a global sensor matrix, together allowing us to know anything, anytime, anywhere. This metatrend is driven by the convergence of terrestrial, atmospheric and space-based sensors, vast data networks, and machine learning. In this future, it’s not “what you know,” but rather “the quality of the questions you ask” that will be most important.

(15) Disruption of advertising: As AI becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, your custom AI will soon understand what you want better than you do. In turn, we will begin to both trust and rely upon our AIs to make most of our buying decisions, turning over shopping to AI-enabled personal assistants. Your AI might make purchases based upon your past desires, current shortages, conversations you’ve allowed your AI to listen to, or by tracking where your pupils focus on a virtual interface (i.e. what catches your attention). As a result, the advertising industry—which normally competes for your attention (whether at the Superbowl or through search engines)—will have a hard time influencing your AI. This metatrend is driven by the convergence of machine learning, sensors, augmented reality, and 5G/networks.

(16) Cellular agriculture moves from the lab into inner cities, providing high-quality protein that is cheaper and healthier: This next decade will witness the birth of the most ethical, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable protein production system devised by humankind. Stem cell-based ‘cellular agriculture’ will allow the production of beef, chicken, and fish anywhere, on-demand, with far higher nutritional content, and a vastly lower environmental footprint than traditional livestock options. This metatrend is enabled by the convergence of biotechnology, materials science, machine learning, and AgTech.

(17) High-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) will come online for public use: Technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that in the mid-2030s, we will begin connecting the human neocortex to the cloud. This next decade will see tremendous progress in that direction, first serving those with spinal cord injuries, whereby patients will regain both sensory capacity and motor control. Yet beyond assisting those with motor function loss, several BCI pioneers are now attempting to supplement their baseline cognitive abilities, a pursuit with the potential to increase their sensorium, memory, and even intelligence. This metatrend is fueled by the convergence of materials science, machine learning, and robotics.

(18) High-resolution VR will transform both retail and real estate shopping: High-resolution, lightweight virtual reality headsets will allow individuals at home to shop for everything from clothing to real estate from the convenience of their living room. Need a new outfit? Your AI knows your detailed body measurements and can whip up a fashion show featuring your avatar wearing the latest 20 designs on a runway. Want to see how your furniture might look inside a house you’re viewing online? No problem! Your AI can populate the property with your virtualized inventory and give you a guided tour. This metatrend is enabled by the convergence of: VR, machine learning, and high-bandwidth networks.

(19) Increased focus on sustainability and the environment: An increase in global environmental awareness and concern over global warming will drive companies to invest in sustainability, both from a necessity standpoint and for marketing purposes. Breakthroughs in materials science, enabled by AI, will allow companies to drive tremendous reductions in waste and environmental contamination. One company’s waste will become another company’s profit center. This metatrend is enabled by the convergence of materials science, artificial intelligence, and broadband networks.

(20) CRISPR and gene therapies will minimize disease: A vast range of infectious diseases, ranging from AIDS to Ebola, are now curable. In addition, gene-editing technologies continue to advance in precision and ease of use, allowing families to treat and ultimately cure hundreds of inheritable genetic diseases. This metatrend is driven by the convergence of various biotechnologies (CRISPR, gene therapy), genome sequencing, and artificial intelligence.

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.)

Peter H. Diamandis, MD is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder and director of Singularity University.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Peter H. Diamandis, MD is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder and director of Singularity University.

Some of the most potent innovation taking place today does not involve breakthrough technologies, but rather the creation of fundamentally new business models. For most of history, these models were remarkably stable, dominated by a few key ideas, upgraded by a few major variations on these themes.

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.)

Peter H. Diamandis, MD is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation and executive founder and director of Singularity University.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Manuel Berdoy is a zoologist, born in France, who has had the privilege to work with animals such as primates in Africa, reptiles in America and seals and penguins in Antarctica.

Such is the extent of our dominion on Earth, that the answer to questions around whether we are still part of nature, and whether we even need some of it, rely on an understanding of what we want as Homo sapiens. And to know what we want, we need to grasp what we are.

It is a huge question, but they are the best. And as a biologist, here is my humble suggestion to address it, and a personal conclusion. You may have a different one, but what matters is that we reflect on it.

Perhaps the best place to start is to consider what makes us human in the first place, which is not as obvious as it may seem.

Many years ago, a novel written by Vercors called Les Animaux Dénaturés (“Denatured Animals”) told the story of a group of primitive hominids, the Tropis, found in an unexplored jungle in New Guinea, who seem to constitute a missing link.

However, the prospect that this fictional group may be used as slave labor by an entrepreneurial businessman named Vancruysen forces society to decide whether the Tropis are simply sophisticated animals or whether they should be given human rights. And herein lies the difficulty.

Human status had hitherto seemed so obvious that the book describes how it is soon discovered that there is no definition of what a human actually is. Certainly, the string of experts consulted—anthropologists, primatologists, psychologists, lawyers and clergymen—could not agree. Perhaps prophetically, it is a layperson who suggested a possible way forward.

She asked whether some of the hominids’ habits could be described as the early signs of a spiritual or religious mind. In short, were there signs that, like us, the Tropis were no longer “at one” with nature, but had separated from it, and were now looking at it from the outside—with some fear.

It is a telling perspective. Our status as altered or “denatured” animals—creatures who have arguably separated from the natural world—is perhaps both the source of our humanity and the cause of many of our troubles. In the words of the book’s author: “All man’s troubles arise from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.”

We will probably never know the timing of our gradual separation from nature—although cave paintings perhaps contain some clues. But a key recent event in our relationship with the world around us is as well documented as it was abrupt. It happened on a sunny Monday morning, at 8:15am precisely.

A New Age

The atomic bomb that rocked Hiroshima on August 6 1945, was a wake-up call so loud that it still resonates in our consciousness many decades later.

The day the “sun rose twice” was not only a forceful demonstration of the new era that we had entered, it was a reminder of how paradoxically primitive we remained: differential calculus, advanced electronics, and almost godlike insights into the laws of the universe helped build, well … a very big stick. Modern Homo sapiens seemingly had developed the powers of gods, while keeping the psyche of a stereotypical Stone Age killer.

We were no longer fearful of nature, but of what we would do to it, and ourselves. In short, we still did not know where we came from, but began panicking about where we were going.

We now know a lot more about our origins but we remain unsure about what we want to be in the future—or, increasingly, as the climate crisis accelerates, whether we even have one.

Arguably, the greater choices granted by our technological advances make it even more difficult to decide which of the many paths to take. This is the cost of freedom.

I am not arguing against our dominion over nature nor, even as a biologist, do I feel a need to preserve the status quo. Big changes are part of our evolution. After all, oxygen was first a poison which threatened the very existence of early life, yet it is now the fuel vital to our existence.

Similarly, we may have to accept that what we do, even our unprecedented dominion, is a natural consequence of what we have evolved into, and by a process nothing less natural than natural selection itself. If artificial birth control is unnatural, so is reduced infant mortality.

I am also not convinced by the argument against genetic engineering on the basis that it is “unnatural.” By artificially selecting specific strains of wheat or dogs, we had been tinkering more or less blindly with genomes for centuries before the genetic revolution. Even our choice of romantic partner is a form of genetic engineering. Sex is nature’s way of producing new genetic combinations quickly.

Even nature, it seems, can be impatient with itself.

Changing Our World

Advances in genomics, however, have opened the door to another key turning point. Perhaps we can avoid blowing up the world, and instead change it—and ourselves—slowly, perhaps beyond recognition.

The development of genetically modified crops in the 1980s quickly moved from early aspirations to improve the taste of food to a more efficient way of destroying undesirable weeds or pests.

In what some saw as the genetic equivalent of the atomic bomb, our early forays into a new technology became once again largely about killing, coupled with worries about contamination. Not that everything was rosy before that. Artificial selection, intensive farming, and our exploding population growth were long destroying species quicker than we could record them.

The increasing “silent springs” of the 1950s and 60s caused by the destruction of farmland birds—and, consequently, their song—was only the tip of a deeper and more sinister iceberg. There is, in principle, nothing unnatural about extinction, which has been a recurring pattern (of sometimes massive proportions) in the evolution of our planet long before we came on the scene. But is it really what we want?

The arguments for maintaining biodiversity are usually based on survival, economics, or ethics. In addition to preserving obvious key environments essential to our ecosystem and global survival, the economic argument highlights the possibility that a hitherto insignificant lichen, bacteria, or reptile might hold the key to the cure of a future disease. We simply cannot afford to destroy what we do not know.

But attaching an economic value to life makes it subject to the fluctuation of markets. It is reasonable to expect that, in time, most biological solutions will be able to be synthesized, and as the market worth of many lifeforms falls, we need to scrutinize the significance of the ethical argument. Do we need nature because of its inherent value?

Perhaps the answer may come from peering over the horizon. It is somewhat of an irony that as the third millennium coincided with decrypting the human genome, perhaps the start of the fourth may be about whether it has become redundant.

Just as genetic modification may one day lead to the end of “Homo sapiens naturalis” (that is, humans untouched by genetic engineering), we may one day wave goodbye to the last specimen of Homo sapiens genetica. That is the last fully genetically based human living in a world increasingly less burdened by our biological form—minds in a machine.

If the essence of a human, including our memories, desires, and values, is somehow reflected in the pattern of the delicate neuronal connections of our brain (and why should it not?) our minds may also one day be changeable like never before.

And this brings us to the essential question that surely we must ask ourselves now: if, or rather when, we have the power to change anything, what would we not change?

After all, we may be able to transform ourselves into more rational, more efficient, and stronger individuals. We may venture out further, have greater dominion over greater areas of space, and inject enough insight to bridge the gap between the issues brought about by our cultural evolution and the abilities of a brain evolved to deal with much simpler problems. We might even decide to move into a bodiless intelligence: in the end, even the pleasures of the body are located in the brain.

And then what? When the secrets of the universe are no longer hidden, what makes it worth being part of it? Where is the fun?

“Gossip and sex, of course!” some might say. And in effect, I would agree (although I might put it differently), as it conveys to me the fundamental need that we have to reach out and connect with others. I believe that the attributes that define our worth in this vast and changing universe are simple: empathy and love. Not power or technology, which occupy so many of our thoughts but which are merely (almost boringly) related to the age of a civilization.

True Gods

Like many a traveller, Homo sapiens may need a goal. But from the strengths that come with attaining it, one realizes that one’s worth (whether as an individual or a species) ultimately lies elsewhere. So I believe that the extent of our ability for empathy and love will be the yardstick by which our civilization is judged. It may well be an important benchmark by which we will judge other civilizations that we may encounter, or indeed be judged by them.

There is something of true wonder at the basis of it all. The fact that chemicals can arise from the austere confines of an ancient molecular soup, and through the cold laws of evolution, combine into organisms that care for other lifeforms (that is, other bags of chemicals) is the true miracle.

Some ancients believed that God made us in “his image.” Perhaps they were right in a sense, as empathy and love are truly godlike features, at least among the benevolent gods.

Cherish those traits and use them now, as they hold the solution to our ethical dilemma. It is those very attributes that should compel us to improve the well-being of our fellow humans without lowering the condition of what surrounds us.

Anything less will pervert (our) nature.

Manuel Berdoy is a zoologist, born in France, who has had the privilege to work with animals such as primates in Africa, reptiles in America and seals and penguins in Antarctica.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Vanessa Bates Ramirez is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics.

Life has changed a lot in the past few days, weeks, or months, depending where you live. As efforts to contain the novel coronavirus ramp up, it’s likely going to change even more. But we’re already sick of being at home all the time, we miss our friends and families, everything’s been canceled, the economy is tanking, and we feel anxious and scared about what’s ahead.

We just want this to be over, and we figure it’s only a matter of time. We’re making plans for what we’ll do when things go back to normal—and banking on that happening.

But what if life never fully goes back to how it was pre-coronavirus? What if this epidemic is a turning point, and after it the world is never the same?

More importantly—or, at least, more optimistically—what if the world could come out of this crisis better than it was before?

Jamie Metzl, technology and healthcare futurist, geopolitical expert, entrepreneur, author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity, and Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, thinks this is possible—but it all depends on what we do and how we behave right now. In a talk at Singularity University’s virtual summit on COVID-19 last week, Metzl explained why he believes that we’re never going “back to normal”—and what we should be doing now to make the new normal a good one.

Marks of History

For many of us, the most impactful geopolitical event that’s happened during our lifetime was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The world changed that day, and it’s never returned to how it was before.

A flu-like pandemic with a relatively low mortality rate may seem minor compared to the deliberate murder of thousands of innocent people. But, Metzl said, “It’s my contention that this isn’t a 2001 moment, this is something much bigger. I think of this as a 1941 moment.”

1941 was the thick of World War II. Nobody knew what the outcome of the war was going to be, everybody was terrified, and the US and its allies were losing the war. “But even in the height of those darkest of times,” Metzl said, “people began imagining what the future world would look.”

It was 1941 when President Roosevelt gave his famous Four Freedoms speech, and when American and British leadership issued the Atlantic Charter, which set out their vision for the post-war international order. To this day, our lives exist within that order.

The situation we’re in right now is, of course, different; it’s not a war. It is, in Metzl’s words, “a convergence of the worlds of science and biology and the world of geopolitics.” And as the coronavirus crisis continues to play out, its geopolitical implications are going to become much greater.

The Old World Is Dying

Metzl shared a quote from Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, written in the 1930s: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Oof—that’s a big statement.

Metzl deconstructed it. For starters, he said, the post-WWII order that we’ve all grown up with was dying before this virus appeared.

Post-WWII planners envisioned a world that shared sovereignty and curbed nationalism. But we’re now in a period of dramatic re-nationalization of the world, with populist, extremist, or authoritarian leaders in power from Brazil to the US to China, and many countries in between.

Institutions intended to foster global cooperation (like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization) have been starved in the context of this re-nationalization, and as a result we don’t have effective structures in place to address global crises—and not just coronavirus. Think of climate change, protecting the oceans, preparing for a future of automation and AI; no country can independently take on or solve these massive challenges.

Not all is lost, though. “There are some positive pieces of this globalization story that we also need to be mindful of,” Metzl said.

When the Spanish flu pandemic hit in 1918, there were only 2 billion people on Earth, and of those 2 billion only 30 percent were literate; the “brain pool” for solving problems was about 600 million people.

Now we have a global population of 7.5 billion and an 86 percent literacy rate, which means over 6.5 billion people can be part of the effort to fix what’s broken. Just as crucially, we’re more connected to each other than we’ve ever been. It used to take thousands of years for knowledge to transfer; now it can fly across the world over the internet in minutes. “The pandemic moves at the speed of globalization, but so does the response,” Metzl said. “The tools we’re bringing to this fight are greater than anything our ancestors could have possibly imagined.”

But at the same time we’re experiencing this incredible bottom-up energy and connectivity, we’re also experiencing an abysmal failure of our top-down institutions.

Now Is the Time of Monsters

Have you felt afraid these last few days and weeks? I sure have. The stock market has plummeted, some people are losing their jobs, others are getting sick, and we don’t know the way out or how how long it’s going to last. In the meantime, a lot of unexpected things will happen.

There will be an economic slowdown or recession, and there will be issues with our healthcare systems—and these are just the predictable things. Metzl believes we’ll also see significant second and third-order effects. If the poorer parts of the world get hit hard by the virus, we may see fragile states collapsing, and multi-lateral states like the European Union unable to support the strain. “Our democracies are going to be challenged, and there may be soft coups even here in the US,” Metzl said. Speaking of challenges to democracy, there are actors whose desires and aspirations are very different from our own, and this could be a moment of opportunity for them.

“The world is not going to snap back to being exactly like it was before this crisis happened,” Metzl said. “We’re going to come out of this into a different world.”

The New World Struggles to Be Born

We don’t know exactly what that world will look like, but we can imagine some of it. Basically, take the trends that were already in motion and hit the fast-forward button. Virtualization of events, activities, and interactions. Automation of processes and services. Political and economic decentralization.

But for the pieces of the future that we’re unsure of, now is 1941. “Now is the time when we need to think about what we would like the new world to look like, and start planning for it and building it,” Metzl said.

In hindsight, it’s easy to picture a far better response and outcome to the COVID-19 outbreak. What if, three months ago, there’d been a global surveillance system in place, and at the first signs of the outbreak, an international emergency team led by the World Health Organization had immediately gone to Wuhan?

“We—all of us—need to re-invigorate a global system that can engage people inclusively across differences and across countries,” Metzl said. “We need to be articulating our long-term vision now so that we can evaluate everything against that standard.”

There’s not a total lack of a positive long-term vision now; the UN sustainable development goals, for example, call for gender equality, no poverty, no hunger, decent work, climate action, and justice (among other goals) around the world.

The problem is that we don’t have institutions meaningful enough or strong enough to effect realization of these principles; there’s a mismatch between the global nature of the problems we’re facing and the structure of national politics.

Building the New Normal

Just as our old normal was the new normal for our grandparents in the mid-1900s, this new normal that feels so shocking to us right now will simply be normal for our children and grandchildren. But there are some critical—and wonderful—differences between the mid-1900s and now.

We have more educated people, stronger connections, faster sharing of information, and more technological tools and scientific knowledge than ever before in history. “The number of people who can be part of this conversation is unprecedented,” Metzl said. “We couldn’t have done this in the industrial age or even the nuclear age. There’s never been this kind of motivation combined with this capacity around the world.”

In 1941, the global planning process was top-down: a small group of powerful, smart people decided how things would be then took steps to make their vision a reality. But this time will be different; to succeed, the new global plan will need to have meaningful drive from the bottom up.

“We need to recognize a new locus of power,” Metzl said. “And it’s us. Nobody is going to solve this for us. This is our moment to really come together.”

Vanessa Bates Ramirez is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Brianna Welsh is an entrepreneur focused on intersection of blockchain and AI and renewable energy.

Within a week, many world leaders went from downplaying the seriousness of coronavirus to declaring a state of emergency. Even the most efficacious of nations seem to be simultaneously confused and exasperated, with delayed responses revealing incompetence and inefficiency the world over.

So this begs the question: why is it so difficult for us to comprehend the scale of what an unmitigated global pandemic could do? The answer likely relates to how we process abstract concepts like exponential growth. Part of the reason we’ve struggled so much applying basic math to our practical environment is because humans think linearly. But like much of technology, biological systems such as viruses can grow exponentially.

As we scramble to contain and fight the pandemic, we’ve turned to technology as our saving grace. In doing so, we’ve effectively hit a “fast-forward” button on many tech trends that were already in place. From remote work and virtual events to virus-monitoring big data, technologies that were perhaps only familiar to a fringe tech community are now entering center stage—and as tends to be the case with wartime responses, these changes are likely here to stay.

So how will the implications of Covid-19 change the face of technology and business?

Virtual Reality: Mobile Communication & Socialization

We’re currently in the epicenter of the biggest remote-work experiment in history, not to mention remote learning. Tools that let us digitally communicate and collaborate, like Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox, are enabling unprecedented remote work. Just look at the explosive growth in video conferencing tool Zoom (the app was downloaded 343,000 times in one day alone), which grew from a $9 billion IPO less than one year ago to a peak in March of a whopping $44 billion market capitalization.

But as I’m sure everyone has experienced these past few weeks, there are still terminal failures in 2D digital communications. Virtual reality offers a compelling alternative to video calls, allowing people to feel like they are in the same space together—a clear win for the environment and a better use of time. While VR has thus far struggled to go mainstream due to the cost barriers of headsets and the technical idiosyncrasies associated with virtual designs, I expect we’ll see a renewed emphasis on VR programs to help with everything from socialization to mental health support.

5G: Ubiquitous and Next-Gen Networks

Assuming we’re headed for a marked increase in remote work, high-speed and stable internet will be a prerequisite. China is already leveraging 5G for health applications and for monitoring the coronavirus spread. Despite the controversy about health consequences from 5G networks (and ironically, the conspiracy theories blaming 5G for coronavirus), Covid-19 highlights the potential demand for telemedicine, video conferencing, and virtual reality worlds, which will all require a 5G-scale internet upgrade.

China is also planning for a more sophisticated internet protocol. They’re reinventing the internet experience through the creation of a New IP internet, replacing the “anachronistic” version of TCP/IP that we’re all acquainted with.

Data Science: Data Harvesting Through the Media

It’s been said that data is the new oil in today’s digital economy, but that may be underestimating data’s impact. In a relevant example, Toronto-based health monitoring AI platform BlueDot beat both the WHO and the CDC to the punch, warning about the Covid-19 spread in early January, a whole nine days before the WHO released a statement. It then correctly predicted the path of transmission across several cities.

Similarly, researchers at Harvard’s medical school are using citizen-generated data to monitor the progress of Covid-19 by mining social media posts and using natural language processing to look for mentions of the known symptoms. The White House facilitated a task force led by 60 tech companies including Facebook, Google, and IBM to explore the possibility of harnessing location and movement data from Americans’ smartphones to get an edge on coronavirus. The news may not be well-received by privacy-championing Americans. But in China, where “privacy” is barely a word in the common vernacular, these tactics managed to almost zero out the virus’s exponential growth, so the West is beginning to listen up.

Blockchain: Trusted Tracking & Misinformation Management

During this pandemic, the internet has played host to some downright dangerous viral media. The French government had to warn citizens that cocaine could not protect them from the coronavirus. Hundreds of Iranians died from bootleg alcohol poisoning following online claims that it cured coronavirus, and the National Security Council had to debunk myths of a nationwide quarantine. Officials are blaming social media for all of the above.

Social media giants have made valiant attempts to sanitize their platforms. Twitter mobilized a badge system to signal authoritative voices regarding coronavirus, issuing a blue check-mark for verified sources. Data integrity seems to be finally coming in vogue, where science and facts might actually be more valuable than click-bait headlines and advertising dollars.

I predict we’ll see a rise in more sophisticated approaches to data verification, signaling a preference for real-time record management over democratic soap boxes. Blockchain offers a single source of truth with verified data provenance, spotlighting misinformation threads and charlatans alike. A new consortium including IBM, Oracle, and the World Health Organization are collaborating on an open-data hub called MiPasa that will use blockchain technology to check the veracity of data concerning the coronavirus pandemic. It will be the first “information highway” that’s validated by key authorities and available publicly, in hopes of curtailing the spread of false or even dangerous information.

Sensors: Biosensors to Track Health Information

In a recent Financial Times article, sociologist and author Yuval Noah Harari posited a dystopian future where “a hypothetical government demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart-rate 24 hours a day.”

His article paints an ominous picture of the future, but let’s consider the potential positive implications. Leveraging biosensors, tech startup Medopad has been able to provide clinicians with a remote patient monitoring platform to virtually observe ill and at-risk patients, providing insights to flag patients with worsening symptoms. Now imagine we extrapolate this type of physiological monitoring to normal life; it could beget a whole new level of healthcare management for early intervention and treatment. With the help of wearables like Cloud DX’s Vitaliti, doctors can remotely monitor five different vital signs for 72-hour periods, and can auto-diagnose 19 different conditions with the help of AI and machine learning.

If people are empowered to track their own medical condition 24 hours a day, we can discern not only when we have become a health hazard to other people, but also which habits contribute to or degrade our own health.

Machine Learning: Vaccines and Drugs Faster and Cheaper

The logic of our current market-based system means that private pharmaceutical firms are unlikely to prioritize vaccines until profitability is assured. In the case of public health crises, that puts us at risk when time is of the essence. But to support the acceleration of drug development, AI could manage initial drug discovery in two ways: 1) screening through millions of chemical compounds for potential drugs in simulation tests far faster than any human could; and 2) identifying targets that new drugs can latch onto to make people less sick or to slow the spread of disease.

For Covid-19, DeepMind is focusing on the latter using AlphaFold, a deep learning system that attempts to predict protein structures accurately where no similar proteins exist. And Atomwise is using convolutional neural networks that find patterns in test data. The technology can analyze billions of compounds to identify a promising subset for in-depth testing, compressing years of research into weeks. AI on its own is no silver bullet in overcoming all of the hurdles in vaccine development, but it can certainly speed things up.

3D Printing: Printed Medical Devices

Forget “move fast and break things”; tech is now focused on “move fast and make things.” Notably, making protective face shields, patient gowns, oxygen masks, and even ventilators, all on-demand. Part of the speed of design and manufacturing for some of these items has come from the ability to hack traditional medical devices using parts made with 3D printers. The potential speed and scale of 3D printed components was illuminated in Italy when engineers developed a replacement valve for respiratory aids. They were able to produce 100 within a day at a cost of a 2 Euros each, far cheaper than the $10,000 the valves typically sell for. Talk about disrupting profiteering models!

The Future Looks a Bit Different

The existential threat of the coronavirus has many people asking if this is the end of the world as we know it—and if this crisis is marking a new beginning; a forced metamorphosis, if you will? Perhaps the 2019 Burning Man installation—a metamorphosis theme celebrating change and an exploration of uncertainty—was more prescient than we realized at the time. The theme was aimed at taking stock of current behaviors and acknowledging that the political, cultural, and ecological landscapes are in “a cascade of tipping points.”

There’s no playbook for our current scenario, but pivotal global moments are truly rare. No one knows for sure what the world will look like after this crisis has abated—but we can likely expect an accelerated evolution of our current conventions and tools as a result.

Brianna Welsh is an entrepreneur focused on intersection of blockchain and AI and renewable energy.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.