Tuesday, June 2, 2015

"Exponential Finance: Cost of Living in the Future Will Be Substantially Reduced"

From Singularity Hub:
Come here for the latest from the frontiers of finance and technology as we bring you coverage of Singularity University and CNBC's Exponential Finance conference.

It's not every day that someone goes on a morning TV show and talks about the technological disruption of Fortune 500 companies and their subsequent failing as a sign of good things to come. But that's exactly what went down on CNBC's pre-market show Squawk Box today as Peter Diamandis delivered the sobering message.

Somewhat surprisingly, the conversation was generally upbeat considering the scope that was being discussed in under 10 minutes. Comments about how banks will go away and inevitably change seemed to just skate by. Fortunately, there's a silver lining: things are going to get better, according to Diamandis, even if there are short term pains (like taxi drivers in the wake of Uber's growth).

Some interesting highlights from this video:
  • When co-host Andrew Sorkin questioned whether these technological changes will bring the same benefits to both developing and developed countries, Diamandis said, "What I see is our cost of living substantially reducing," citing how technological advances in healthcare, education, and transportation, as examples, will reduce costs for consumers. He added, "A lot of the things we spend our money on will be demonetized."
  • With disruption comes instability and government regulation aims to protect industries, but these efforts can thwart progress. Addressing regulation as a dampener to growth, Diamandis point out that people still want change: "The government's job is stability...People like waking up in the morning and knowing, 'The world's the same as when I went to sleep the night before.' But we do like change if it's 10 times better."
  • Referring to the 8 predictions for the year 2025 that Diamandis wrote about recently, co-host Joe Kernen addressed the rapid growth of computational power. He asked Diamandis if he agreed with Ray Kurzweil's estimate that the Singularity—the period of time that technological change will be so extreme that we can't even imagine what things will be like—will come around 2045. ...MORE, including video.
Previously on the Diamandis channel, we take issue with some of his thinking:

The Case for Less: Is Abundance Really the Solution to Our Problems?
X Prize Founder Wants to Mine Asteroids
And Now for Some Good News
Easy Money: The $10 Million Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize
...Here's the Tricorder X-Prize homepage. There is no such thing as easy money. Vulcans never bluff.*

*"The Doomsday Machine"
Stardate 4202.9