Abundance 360 2018 Conference

A few weeks ago, I attended Peter Diamandis’ Abundance 360 conference in California and had the privilege to hear a number of fascinating presentations and panel discussions from the likes of Ray Kurzweil (author, inventor and futurist), Astro Teller (head of Alphabet/Google’s X division) as well as executives from Uber and many others from a wide range of disruptive industries.

 The conference identified eight major trends that are unfolding at a rapid pace and are predicted to significantly disrupt how we live, work, communicate and get around. The eight major themes of communications, capital, transportation, energy, robotics, artificial intelligence, health, and space travel were discussed in various sessions throughout the conference. In this edition, my goal is to introduce the first two of these topics and touch on the potential in of each theme. I’ll expand on other themes in later blog posts as there was way too much info to cover in one blog post.

 The conference started with a look back 100 years to how the world looked in 1918 to remind everyone of the advances that have been made and how much we take for granted.

 In 1918, the literacy rate in North America was roughly 25% and only 6% of Americans graduated from high school. One hundred years ago, global travel was a time-consuming undertaking and it would take 5 days to travel from London to New York by ship and over 3 months to travel from London to Australia. The first vacuum tube electronic circuits were invented in 1918 and introduced the dawn of the computer age. Only 8% of homes had a telephone and a 3-minute-long distance call cost $11- this works out to $179 in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation. This list of comparisons went on, but these first few were striking. Even 20 years ago, the power and capability of an average smartphone would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and taken up an entire room full of electronics.

The Abundance of Communication – we are approaching a time where the entire planet will have access to high speed wireless internet communication for low to no cost. The major trend is that today roughly 40% of the world’s population has access to high speed internet connections – in a few years from now the technology will have advanced to the point where essentially 100% of the world will have access to high speed internet and on top of this the global population is projected to grow to approximately 8 billion people. Just as the developing world was able to skip over land line technology and jump straight to mobile phones, they will also be able to skip over dial-up and tethered communications and jump straight to mobile high-speed internet and potentially jump straight to electric cars. The addition of over 4 billion new people online with the same quality of internet access that North Americans have today is a game changer for the sharing of ideas, commerce and communication. 

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