Peter H. Diamandis

Whenever you feel like the world is going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, come back to read this book. It points at all the good ways in which it's changing, and how despite all our challenges, it's not as bleak as some might be led to believe. Not a feel-good book, but after you realize how we're advancing in a number of fields, you will feel better.

Peter Diamandis reports on, and believes in, the medical, technological and societal changes that every now and then pop above the line of invisible development to disrupt and upend, in a positive way, many of the things we took for granted that would forever be this way.… (altro)

AR and VR powered by mobile Phones with neural processors in them, it’s not Blockchain but the uses of the underlying technology of blockchain. Bitcoin, guess what, proves it can be used for coins, the myriad of other coins show it is an almost perfect binary gambling machine. NFT's illustrate the madness of being able to make a market in 1's and zeros on your hard disc, maybe NFT's are a torchlight into how content can be monetised. Central bank Digital currencies do they disintermediate the banks and if you disintermediate the currency do you disintermediate the state? you might have to wait a while 10yrs for this. AI/Deep learning and ADM (Algorithm decision making) faster algorithms and supposedly more accurate ones raise much broader ethical questions Medical, Legal and Finance decisions, initially will run riot (the present case) until the political class say wait a minute these things need to be controlled, attaching algorithms to deep learning/GAN's and aiming them at your children through social media, may not be such a good idea. Quantum computing - 30 years away, place your bets on which cat, the dead one, the live one, the one that does not exist, and the one that exists in a state that humans cannot understand, maybe its beyond the intelligence of mice and men to figure this out? answer yes or no or choose anyone of 84 qubits. The rise in processing power and integration of existing silicon chip technologies, fibre optics and LEO satellite systems will still be enough to cause considerable chaos over the next 10 years. So its still situation normal here on Earth chaotic systems will continue to create chaos no one really knows what's next, ask a cat if that cat is still on the same temporal plain as you are. Of course this begs the question: What if a tree falls on the cat's box? Can the cat hear it if it's amusing itself online by randomly typing the works of Shakespeare, inside what amounts to a Faraday cage…? (that’s why I’m a firm believer in Teleportation for a must-have in terms of Future Technology. Especially for cats).

Bottom-line: As discussed in ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson 20 years back, his metaverse (not to be confused with Zuckerberg’s concept), which was far closer to the present reality than Gibson’s, saw early adopters owning vast chunks of of VR real estate whilst late arrivals had to buy somewhere in the VR slums. Your appearance in the VR world, and how much you could effect things, was dependent on what we would now call Bitcoin. So at the lowest level, you could be a tourist there but without the power to actually do anything. The real new age was around 2002 when Google started to analyse behavioural data from search terms and used it to create brand new predictions about what people were thinking and feeling, and predicting what they would do next in their lives. Not just the search term itself, but the surplus data around it, e.g. composition of words, idiosyncratic grammar, time and location of the search, etc. Now for example they could recognise when we were feeling depressed or would be feeling depressed in the future, then sell that prediction to companies who could then target specific products to that person at their most vulnerable moments. From there, we have the world today, where every product is now an opportunity to capture more data about as, e.g. cars that gather data about how we are driving. Our private lives have become invaded by corporations and their sensor tools, leading to our private moments being turned into ruthless capitalist opportunities to their profits. Surveillance capitalism is actually really quite evil. Diamandis’/Kotler’s “future” is not something we’ve not heard it all before.… (altro)

Weird time to read a book that is so optimistic about the future, given the current dire state of affairs politically, where a fascist like Donald Trump may become President, and at the bookstore and cineplex, where people who don't even really know what dystopia means other than as a genre to be capitalized (I like Dystopian....) flock to the latest fiction where the world has Done Gone To Hell in record numbers. Not sure if I'm totally buying it, but then again, as a human, I'm wired to engage in any number of pessimistic and illogical misperceptions of reality, according to the book. This why people say the world is going down the tubes when it is not, the book argues. I hope the state of abundance comes true.… (altro)

Individual car ownership enjoyed over a century of ascendency. The first real threat it faced, today's ride-sharing model, only showed up in the last decade. But that ride-sharing model won't even get 10 years to dominate. Already, it's on the brink of 'autonomous' electric car displacement, which is on the brink of flying car disruption, which is on the brink of Hyperloop and rockets-to-any where decimation. Plus, there may soon be avatars which negate the need for physical travel itself. The most important part: All of this change will happen over the next 10 years - The future sure is faster than we think!… (altro)