A360 - Breaking Humanity's Constraints

I attend a mastermind conference each year called A360 hosted by Peter Diamandis. I would summarize the way I've learned to think about the world from Peter with the following sentence: How can we break through the constraints of humanity? To get there we ask, what is precious and expensive now that will one day soon be abundantly available and nearly free? And what can we do now to accelerate the race to abundance to lift up the human condition just a few inches each year?

Peter is one of the rare brilliant minds that can push even the world's best CEOs (of which I aspire to be counted among) to do more to drive global impact. He has had a movie (Visioneer) made about his life, and I would suggest he still doesn't get enough credit for his contributions.

The future we are headed toward is one in which energy, one of our precious resources, will be made nearly free in part by advances in materials science. Other human constraints like clean water, food, and basic medicines are also becoming abundantly available. Robotics will do more to care for our elderly, complete simple tasks like deliver hotel towels, and diffuse land mines. Drones will serve as our photographers, short-hop couriers, and security services. Augmented reality will open up new layers onto our world that will be personalized and crafted just for us, and virtual reality will take entertainment experiences to a new level of immersion.

OneWeb and Qualcomm will be among the ones that give us global coverage 5G internet, so even when you are traversing the Mojave on a dare, you'll be able to watch Netflix on walking breaks. Quantum computing will be coupled with traditional computing to drive far more processing capacity than we can fathom using today.

And perhaps most striking, Artificial Intelligence will be a part of our lives in so many ways that we won't know how people lived without them. I grew up in the 80's when we didn't have cell phones or the internet in my house or in any house I knew of. My children won't understand how it is possible that I lived in such a world. Similarly, in 10 years, we won't be able to understand how humans made it so long without AIs helping us do almost everything.

For those of you in the the science publishing world who want to hear more of my views on how this will impact our ind, I will be giving a keynote on Scholarly Publishing in the AI World at the STM Conference in Washington D.C. on April 25, 2017.

Thank you for another amazing conference, Peter! See you next year.

Shashi