The Brave New World of Abundance Economics in Industry 4.0
The global economy is going through a massive transition that is currently referred to as the 4th Industrial Revolution.
We are suffering from Burnout because we have more choice than ever before in human history and are drowning in data, information, consumerism and choices but starving for wisdom for how to process this much change, sift through this much data & information, and how to make wise choices when there are way too many to process this fast.
I recommend reading 4 books on these topics (Abundance By Peter Diamandis, The Singularity is Near By Ray Kurzweil, Life 3.0 By Max Tegmark and Sapiens By Yuval Noah Harari).
What’s happening is that every industry is going through digital transformation and every good and service imaginable through exponential technologies is becoming deceptive, demonetized, decentralized, democratized, digitized and dematerialized. This is happening at a scale and at a pace that is unprecedented. The developing world and countries such as China and India are going through a boom however the developed economies such as US will go through a lot of pain (at least in the short term).
Thus we are seeing populist political candidates rise to power in the US and around the world and taking advantage of the increasing confusion that is arising in the world (due to a lack of understanding of these technology and economic metatrends). We are also seeing increasing rates of mental illness and burnout in developed economies. We are seeing governments, regulators and corporations fail to keep up with the brutal pace of change. And we are seeing exponentially increasing hyper competition in capital markets and disruption from every angle possible. We are seeing more startups, venture capital funding and we are even seeing competitors in cryptocurrencies and the digital currency space trying to disrupt capitalism and other centralized corporations! It’s getting out of hand already.
I think the first thing we have to do is understand this change thoroughly so please read those books for a more complete understanding of the changing laws of economics, artificial intelligence, history and future of humanity and the technology meta-trends that are reshaping entire industries overnight. But every single industry is going to rapidly change overnight and the pace of this change is going to get faster and faster, and the noise is going to get louder and louder at an accelerating pace. There is going to be a lot of pain because of these simple metatrends where technology innovation is accelerating so fast that it is disrupting everything in it’s way.
It’s more important now then ever to understand this change, to empathize for others who are going through pain and to spread the new gospel for changing laws of economics and transformational metatrends in technology. Because technological change is accelerating and it’s already out of control. It’s becoming impossible now to understand what’s going on and most people including me no longer can process the increasing rates of change.
That’s why, for the sake of my sanity, I don’t worry anymore about 24/7 business, political or technology news cycles (especially from the mainstream media such as Crisis News Network (CNN)) and solely focus on metatrends or mega trends in technology that are reshaping the global economy and financial markets. I think that it is important that people have empathy, creativity and be human in the age of robotics, algortithms and artificial intelligence. I think it’s necessary that we adapt our mindsets from winner-take all market capitalism and scarcity economics to abundance economics where for one person to win, more people need to win.
However, a general understanding is becoming very clear. The future is here, and it is now. Our technology is godlike now and the pace it is accelerating is truly transformational on every front from gaming hardware to open-source software. The impact it is having on every industry is also transformational. I think the exponential and emerging technology landscape that encapsulates everything from 3D Printing, Artificial General Intelligence, Robotics, Biotech, CRISPR-Cas9, Nanotechnology, Quantum Computing, Blockchain to Cryptocurrencies, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Electric Vehicles, VTOL (Vertical Take Off & Landing) Vehicles, Autonomous Self-Driving Cars, Flying Cars, Clean Energy and Vertical Farming is creating a new futuristic science fiction fantasy come true for geeks like me.
When most people watch science-fiction shows or movies they see it as science fiction. When I now watch a science-fiction show or movie I see the present or the near future.
The roadmap of the future is very clear for me now as to where the world is heading, where the economy is heading, where financial markets are heading and where technology is heading. I feel more enlightened with this knowledge and wisdom but I still have to figure out what my next moves are because to be honest I have no idea. To be honest, I am interested in too many things myself so I am constantly trying to limit my number of options and the number of things I pay attention to, as the number of options and things I can pay attention to expands exponentially.
However, I have faith I will figure out what I need to figure out. It is pretty life-changing to realize that the future is now after all and that we are all connected to this future that is coming faster than ever. The tough part is figuring out how to process and sift through the change to make wiser decisions and then to figure out how to make a living in a dynamic and disruptive world that changes at the speed of light now. After all according to IBM, human knowledge now doubles every 12 hours in 2020. 90% of all data that was generated in the history of the internet has been generated in the last 2 years. That is mind-boggling and just goes to show how far we humans have come as a civilization! However, we are just at the beginning of this exponential arc upwards as a civilization and futurist Gerd Leonhard predicts that we will witness the technological singularity in 2023. Personally, I made a prediction earlier that the technological singularity will occur in 2025, and Ray Kurzweil has a prediction that the singularity will occur by 2029.