Ever the Optimist Peter Diamandis Shares His Top Ten Meta Trends of This Decade

Over the next decade, waves of exponential advancements in technology and scientific discovery will eclipse past decades of breakthroughs in both scale and impact. These include 10 meta trends that will impact entire industries, redefine businesses, and transform lives.

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

So welcome to a new era of runaway technological booms and watershed disruptive moments that will lead to extraordinary future abundance.

10 Meta Trends Shaping This Decade

1. Continued Increase in Global Abundance: The number of individuals in extreme poverty continues to drop, as the middle-income population continues to rise. Every day goods and services (finance, insurance, education, and entertainment) are being digitized and becoming fully demonetized, available to the rising billion on mobile devices. This meta trend is driven by the convergence of high-bandwidth and low-cost communication, ubiquitous AI in the cloud, growing access to AI-aided education and AI-driven healthcare.
2. Global Gigabit Connectivity to Connect Everyone and Everything, Everywhere, at Ultra-low Cost: The deployment of 5G mobile network infrastructure, and the launch of global satellite networks such as Starlink and OneWeb will allow for ubiquitous, low-cost communications for everyone, everywhere, not to mention the connection of trillions of IoT devices. The growth of connectivity will bring an additional 3 billion people onto the Internet and will drive tens of trillions of dollars into the global economy. This meta trend is being facilitated by low-cost space launch capacity growth, advancements in hardware, 5G networks, AI, material science, and the growth in computing power.
3. Average Human Healthspan Will Increase by 10+ Years: A dozen game-changing biotechnology and pharmaceutical solutions (some currently in Phase 1, 2, or 3 clinical trials) will become available to consumers this decade adding an additional 10+ years to the human healthspan. New biotechnology that includes stem cell supply restoration, advancements in how to use Wnt signalling pathways into cells to cure diseases like cancer, advancements in senolytic drugs, the development of a new generation of Endo-Vaccines, GDF-11, and supplementation of NMD/NAD+ are among these many breakthroughs. And as machine learning continues to mature, AI will deliver new drug candidates in growing profusion. This meta trend is being driven by advances in genome sequencing, CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies, AI, quantum computing, and cellular medicine.
4. Capital Abundance Will Increase Access to It Everywhere: Over the past few years, humanity hit all-time highs in the global flow of seed capital, venture capital, and sovereign wealth fund investments. Future recessions may slow this trend down but the overall upward trajectory will continue. Capital abundance will lead to the funding and testing of crazy entrepreneurial ideas, which will, in turn, accelerate innovation. Already, $300 billion in crowdfunding is anticipated by 2025, democratizing capital access for entrepreneurs worldwide. And even during the current pandemic, we are seeing the deployment of more venture capital than ever before. This metra trend is being driven by the growth in global connectivity, dematerialization, demonetization, and democratization.
5. Augmented Reality and the Spatial Web Will Arrive: The combination of Augmented Reality leading to the Spatial Web in combination with 5G network infrastructure offering geometric growth in the speed of connectivity will transform our everyday lives, and impact education and business Consumers will have a level of access to play, learn and shop in a newly intelligent, virtually overlaid world. This is where technologies like SpatialWeb.net, Vatoms, and Apple’s next-generation AR & VR headsets will shine. This meta trend is being driven by hardware advancements, global 5G network deployment, AI, new materials, and abundant computing power.
6. Everything is Smart, Embedded with Intelligence: The price of specialized machine learning (ML) chips is dropping rapidly as global demand for this type of AI grows. Imagine specialized $5 chips that enable AI for toys, shoes, kitchen cabinets and more. Combined with low-cost microscopic sensors and high-bandwidth networks this decade will make almost every device intelligent. Your child’s toy will remember her face and name. Your household appliances will respond to your voice and anticipate your needs. This meta trend is being driven by advances in sensor technology, AI, and the proliferation of 5G networks.
7. AI Will Achieve Human-level Intelligence: Long predicted by visionaries like futurist Ray Kurzweil, AI will reach human-levels of performance by 2030. Throughout this decade AI algorithms and ML tools will increasingly become open source, available in the cloud, and accessible to any individual with an Internet connection to supplement his or her cognitive abilities, augment problem-solving capacity, and build new ventures at low cost. This meta trend is being 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 to Skyrocket Across Professions: The rise of AI as a Service (AIaaS) platforms will enable humans to partner with various AIs in any industry. AIs will be entrenched in business operations to serve as cognitive collaborators, support creative tasks, generate new ideas and achieve new levels of innovation. Some fields will require partnership with AI, such as medicine where making confirming diagnoses without an AI consult may be deemed malpractice. This meta trend will be driven by the convergence of increasingly intelligent AI, global high-bandwidth connectivity, neural networks, and cloud computing.
9. Most will Add a Software Helper to Improve Our 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 a cognitive prosthetic available to us all the time. Imagine a companion software helper that can listen to all your conversations, read your email, monitor your blood chemistry, and more. These AI-enabled software companions will learn your preferences, anticipate your needs and behaviors, shop for you, monitor your health, and help you problem-solve in support of your mid and long-term goals. This meta trend will be driven by the convergence of increasingly intelligent AI, neural networks, and cloud computing.
10. Globally Abundant, Cheap Renewable Energy: None of the above is possible without two other advancements: the first in energy conservation and improvements in energy efficiency, and the second advancements in solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, nuclear, localized and distributed grids to create cheap, abundant, and ubiquitous energy that is free of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. The price per Kilowatt-hour continues to drop and will be below a cent, with storage below 3 cents by the end of the decade. These meta trends will end up displacing the majority of fossil fuel energy sources globally. With the world’s poorest countries also the world’s sunniest, the democratization of both new and traditional storage technologies will create energy abundance for those who currently suffer from an overall lack. Incredible companies like Heliogen will mine sunlight and water to create cheap, abundant hydrogen to be used as a storage medium. We will also see breakthroughs in fusion power technology with companies like General Fusion moving from prototype to working commercial reactors. This meta trend will be driven by the convergence of advances in materials science, hardware, AI algorithms, and battery technologies.