Will innovation make us better?

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Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research, in front of IBM Q System One on October 18, 2019 at … [+] the company’s research facility in Yorktown Heights, NY

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Over the past year, Apple’s AAPL stock price has outperformed Bitcoin, and Tesla’s TSLA stock price, which has so far been umbilically linked to bitcoin, has been much more nervous (over the past two years it has had 29 moves per day of over. 10% compared to a simple 17 for bitcoin).

These insights raise many questions, about how the market works, investor appetite and simply, if bitcoin is old and boring now. There is a debate that instead of being a risky asset across the spectrum of broad asset classes (bonds, stocks, etc.), bitcoin is simply a safe asset within a highly volatile crypto world, although the The fact that bitcoin has fallen by 15% since I started writing this note mentions the former.

More importantly, it could be that bitcoin has gone out of fashion and is being replaced in the investor mindset by other rapid innovations. Remember the memorable line from a Davos speech by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in which he said “The pace of change has never been this fast, but it will never be this slow again.”

exponential

The spirit of this sentence is captured by the long-term forecasts of futurologists, economists and thinkers. Having made my predictions before Christmas, I have the benefit of sitting down and reading others, an excellent example is Azeem Azar’s weekly “Exponential” email and a growing number of other notes trying to sum up what’s boiling. .

What is evident is that there is a strong sense of the “Roaring Twenties” in the strands of structural trends that analysts see occurring in the aftermath of a pandemic. Chief among these is a focus on nuclear energy as a substitute for fossil fuels, not to mention the entire greentech complex.

If the forecasts and reflections I mentioned are a good representation of where capital will flow, then a new and exciting infrastructure is being built: IT, logistics and finance to name a few sectors that share data intensity. I could say that having witnessed the dot.com bubble, the only value of an asset bubble is that it leaves behind an important infrastructure (telecom in this case).

MetaVerso

My three key conclusions from analyzing many reports are that, while exciting on the one hand, the central message of new emerging technologies is that they will lead to a historical and potentially overwhelming challenge for humanity, and especially for our minds and sociability, with potentially very impacting health benefits.

Without exaggerating, I believe that 2022 is a threshold year in which innovative technologies make our bodies healthier but invade our mental spaces.

First take a collection of the most popular trends, they group around Web 3.0, NFT, metaverse, social media and cryptocurrencies. In a brutal way this means that we will all spend more time out of the light, hunched over phones and doubting that the people and things we encountered in the metaverse are real and if it was worth investing $ 10,000 in a metaverse apartment.

This trend is historic because for the first time, and with only the strength of religion (and perhaps politics) as a rival, humans will spend time and enjoy experiences in an unreal world, and for some this will come to dominate their existence. . Two very obvious side effects will be sociability and mental health.

quantum

In previous bulletins I have stressed that mental health must become a fundamental pillar of how health services are reimagined, and it may be that the metaverse is the trigger (ironically it is used to help soldiers overcome PTSD. ).

On the bright side, too, the enormous advances in medicine and health technology – largely spurred by the coronavirus crisis, will have a positive effect on humans – pending at least two factors, that the generosity of these advances can be as widespread as it is. possible, and that the ways in which they are delivered are rethought in the sense that health systems must change.

An inspiration here, and my second point, is that the growing attention that technologies such as blockchain have placed on decentralized autonomous organizations – organizations actually run by coded relationships between disparate parties, as opposed to a centralized or even hierarchical bureaucracy (i.e. sanitary). While it is a stretch to imagine that today’s health systems and other institutional arrangements can be quickly replaced by decentralized forms, there is a lot the blockchain can do to cut that bureaucracy (closer relationships between doctors, patients, billing and other parties such as pharmacists).

DAO

A third related threshold change in technological influence that is getting a lot of attention and capital, quantum computing (70% of startup-level investments in technological hardware go to quantum computing projects). Governments, especially China and the European Union, are also spending a lot on this. In short, quantum computing is revolutionary in that it uses different “bit” arrangements to produce more powerful processing. While there aren’t many applications of quantum computing yet, it has the ability to drastically change aspects of healthcare, finance, and industrial sectors such as chemicals.

Having already witnessed historical and positive changes stemming from the pandemic – the general patience and obedience of the world population, the acceptance of work from home and the power of vaccines, we are now crossing a threshold in terms of how technology will change ours. bodies, as well as our minds and the ways we relate to the world.

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