The Future of Business: Critical Insights into a Rapidly Changing World from 60 Future Thinkers by Rohit Talwar (editor)

Book review by José Luis Cordeiro

The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
William Gibson

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Key

Disrupt yourself, or be disrupted.
John Chambers

Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.
Ray Kurzweil, 2005

Rohit Talwar has edited an excellent new book about the future of business, very appropriately called The Future of Business. This new book “explores how the commercial world is being transformed by the complex interplay between social, economic and political shifts, disruptive ideas, bold strategies and breakthroughs in science and technology. Over 60 contributors from 21 countries explore how the business landscape will be reshaped by factors as diverse as the modification of the human brain and body, 3D printing, alternative energy sources, the reinvention of government, new business models, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and the potential emergence of the Star Trek economy”.

Other similar books remind us of the radical changes that our societies will experience in the next few years. My Singularity University friends Ray Kurzweil with The Singularity is Near (and now working on The Singularity is Nearer), Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler with Bold and Salim Ismail with Exponential Organizations have considered the disruptive changes ahead. In fact, the mission of Singularity of University is to “to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges”. These exponential technologies are the ones disrupting the business landscape as well, and the challenges and opportunities are both enormous. As Peter Diamandis says: “the best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people”.

In fact, the Silicon Valley mentality considers every problem an opportunity. And through creative destruction, as discussed by famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, there are always continuous opportunities through innovation. As the Silicon Valley saying goes: “fail fast, fail often, and fail forward”. Some experts think that over half of the current Fortune 500 will not exist as such in just two decades. Which companies will survive? Which enterprises will be able to transform and adapt? Which organizations will be disruptors and which ones will be disrupted?

The Future of Business draws on the ideas of over 60 futurists from 22 countries on four continents. It presents a wealth of business ideas distributed on 10 major sections covering a wide set of views to think, act and react about the future:

1. Visions of the Future: What are the global shifts on the horizon?
2. Tomorrow’s Global Order: What are the emerging political and economic transformations that could reshape the environment for society and business?
3. The Emerging Social Landscape: What are we becoming, how will we live?
4. Social Technologies: How will tomorrow’s technologies permeate our everyday lives?
5. Disruptive Developments: How might new technologies enable business innovation?
6. Surviving and Thriving: How can business adapt to a rapidly changing reality? What are the critical success factors for business in a constantly evolving world?
7. Industry Futures: How might old industries change and what new ones could emerge?
8. Embracing the Future: What are the futures and foresight tools, methods and processes that we can use to explore, understand and create the future?
9. Framing the Future: How should organizations look at the future?
10. Conclusions: Navigating uncertainty and a rapidly changing reality.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been considering most of the same issues. In fact, during its 2016 meetings, some of the main topics considered were radical disruptions and technological unemployment in the future due to advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, mobile supercomputing, 3D printing, self-driving cars and other exponential technologies. In fact, the founder and executive chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, has published another enlightening book called The Fourth Industrial Revolution, where he explores the impact of this new revolution on businesses.

The Millennium Project has also been developing scenarios about the future of work and technology by the year 2050. The accelerating changes are disrupting not just business, but all society as we know it. Because of the real possibility of technological employment in the coming decades, if not years, some people are advancing the ideas of universal basic income (UBI) or basic income guarantee (BIG). These proposals are coming from both right and left in the political spectrum, which reinforces the urgency about considering these issues very seriously. The Millennium Project is developing three such scenarios for the year 2050, where people can participate with their own ideas about the future.

The Future of Business is a delightful read for those concerned about business and about the future. The concepts developed through the pages of the book by many experts are fundamental to thrive in a world of exponential changes, where we have to carefully navigate in the middle of much uncertainty. The Future of Business is just the first on a list of books to be published in the FutureScapes series by Fast Future Publishing. After this first excellent book, I can’t wait to read the other books coming out in the FutureScapes series, and I would highly recommend them to others as well.

José Luis Cordeiro, MBA, PhD (www.cordeiro.org)

Visiting Research Fellow, IDE-JETRO, Tokyo, Japan (www.ide.go.jp)
Director, The Millennium Project, Venezuela Node (www.Millennium-Project.org)
Adjunct Professor, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia (www.mipt.ru)
Founder and President Emeritus, World Future Society, Venezuela Chapter (www.FuturoVenezuela.net)
Founding Energy Advisor/Faculty, Singularity University, NASA Research Park, California, USA (www.SingularityU.org)

The Rise of the Rest and Mars Colonization
The Chinese word for crisis has two characters (危機). The first character represents danger and the second can be interpreted as opportunity, change of time, moment or chance. Even though the meaning of these Chinese characters can vary according to the context and nearby characters, the understanding of crisis (危機) as danger (危) plus opportunity (機) can help us think about the challenges faced by humanity in 2030.

In the coming years, China will have the largest economy of the planet, dethroning the USA to number two, both economically and scientifically. India will also be catching up fast as the third largest economy in the world, and its population will continue increasing after overtaking that of China in 2025. The re-emergence of Asia, as represented by China and India, will create a dramatic shift in power and geopolitics from what has been called the West to the East. The international hegemony enjoyed by the West during the last half millennium will move back to the East, which already led the world in many areas before the European Renaissance.

Fortunately, during the next two decades, the world economy will keep expanding and human conditions will get better throughout the whole planet. Indeed, a rising tide lifts all boats. Poverty will be substantially reduced and the environment will be significantly improved thanks to a growing global conscience and continuous advances in technology. Even Africa, the historic cradle of civilization, but considered a basket case during the last few centuries, will experience its own re-emergence in the world stage. After experiencing growth of 5% during the 2010s, and even higher during the 2020s, most African countries will be joining the rapid development of China and India, like most of the rest of the world.

The world in 2030 will be radically different from the world today. Rapid economic growth and convergence will have lifted the conditions of the bottom of the pyramid, and many people will raise their eyes into outer space. The colonization of Mars will start during the 2020s according to different plans by many governments (like those of China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia, and the USA) and even some private enterprises (for example, MarsOne, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic).

Exponential Technologies and Immortality
Change is not constant, in fact, change is accelerating very fast. We will see more transformations in the next 20 years than in the past 200 years. Some technologies are radically changing humanity, in general, and also changing human beings, in particular. Many experts now talk about the four sciences and technologies of the future: NBIC (nano-bio-info-cogno). The NBIC fields are converging at an accelerating rate and they will help to transcend many human limitations in order to improve lives all around the world, and eventually beyond our tiny planet.

We might think of nano and bio as the hardware of life, and info and cogno as the software of life. In the next two decades, we will be able to replicate and improve the complexity of both the hardware and software of human beings. The complexity of our hardware is embodied in the human genome and its 3 gigabits of data, while the complexity of our software is implied by the human brain and its 10¹⁷ operations per second.

According to some technology trends, we might achieve physical immortality by copying, reproducing, augmenting, and enhancing our current hardware and software. In medicine, some scientists say that aging is actually a disease, but a curable disease. In fact, some cells do not age, for example, bacteria, germinal cells, stem cells, and cancer cells do not go through the aging process. It is fundamental to understand why this happens and use that knowledge to stop aging in more complex organisms like us. By so doing, our hardware might live indefinitely thanks to longevity discoveries related to genetic treatments, regenerative medicine, and stem cell therapies, for example.

We might also reach immortality through backing up our software. Thanks to research like the Human Brain Project in Europe and the BRAIN Initiative in the USA, we will be able to reengineer our brains. As computer-to-brain interfaces keep improving, some scientists believe that we will eventually be able to upload our brains into machines. In the next two decades, we might well see the “death of death”.

Humanity is fast approaching what some people call the “Singularity”: the moment when artificial intelligence will reach human intelligence levels, and then quickly overtake it. Perhaps then some humans might become transhumans and posthumans, changing forever life on Earth and the universe.

José Luis Cordeiro, MBA, PhD (www.cordeiro.org)

Visiting Research Fellow, IDE-JETRO, Tokyo, Japan (www.ide.go.jp)
Director, The Millennium Project, Venezuela Node (www.Millennium-Project.org)
Adjunct Professor, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia (www.mipt.ru)
Founder and President Emeritus, World Future Society, Venezuela Chapter (www.FuturoVenezuela.net)
Founding Energy Advisor/Faculty, Singularity University, NASA Research Park, California, USA (www.SingularityU.org)

Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation:
How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030
By Tony Seba

Book review by Jose Cordeiro

All the armies in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo, 1854

If you find a prediction reasonable, than it is probably wrong, because the future is not reasonable; it is fantastic!
Arthur C. Clarke, 1964

Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil — and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the Oil Age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.
Sheik Ahmed Yamani, 2000

Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential” view.
Ray Kurzweil, 2005

Tony Seba has been working, teaching and researching about energy issues for years. Since last decade, he has been making energy forecasts which might have looked unreasonable then, but that have already become reality this decade. Now he forecasts that by 2030 all energy generation will be solar (and wind), and all new cars will be autonomous (self-driving) and electric vehicles. Since only about 1% of the global energy production is solar (and wind) today, some might think that the 100% target by 2030 seems impossible. Others might ponder that it is even more incredible to go today from less than 1% electric vehicles and basically 0% self-driving cars (just to give two very rough numbers about the current situation) to 100% electric and 100% autonomous for all the new vehicle production by 2030.

If those predictions were not enough, he also forecasts that the current oil, nuclear, natural gas, coal, biofuels, electric utilities and conventional car industries will be totally “obliterated” through the convergence of solar (and wind) with electric and autonomous vehicles by 2030. Will Tony Seba’s predictions for 2030 be right again? I sincerely hope so, for the benefit of humanity!

Clean Disruption

Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation is a really disruptive book. More than disruptive, it is a revolutionary book that envisions the evolution of the energy and transportation industries during the next two decades. The economic value of those two sectors is truly immense, the energy industry represents about US$ 8 trillion and the transportation industry about US$ 4 trillion, every year. Thus, we are talking about disrupting US$ 12 trillion, which is a huge number, almost as big as the economy of China, the European Union or the United States.

In his previous book, Solar Trillions, Tony Seba already considered the rapid, even exponential, growth of solar energy. His 2010 forecasts have been surprisingly accurate, particularly since organizations like the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Information Administration (EIA) have been consistently wrong, always underestimating the growth of the solar industry. While the IEA and EIA have basically used linear projections, Tony Seba has considered exponential increases in production and exponential decreases in costs.

Tony Seba

Tony Seba has had a distinguished career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and executive. He got his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where we studied together, and later he received his MBA from Stanford University. He was an early employee in Cisco Systems, and he later cofounded PrintNation.com, where he received several awards. Currently, he is a lecturer at Stanford University, startup mentor, private investor and corporate advisor. His leadership has been recognized in publications like BusinessWeek, his articles have appeared in Forbes, and has written three best-selling books. Tony Seba has been a keynote speaker from Abu Dhabi to Hong Kong, from Auckland to Seoul.

On his new book, Tony Seba describes very well why solar energy is related much more to the new digital industries of Silicon Valley than to the old fossil fuel industries. SolarCity is an example of the new energy companies, while ExxonMobil is an example of the old energy dinosaurs. Similarly, he describes an electric and self-driving car as a computer on wheels, and he explains how far ahead the new cars are from the traditional vehicles manufactured in Detroit, Germany and Japan. Google and Tesla are pushing forward with electric and self-driving cars, while GM and Toyota, for example, seem to have a hard time following these new trends.

Exponential Growth

Exponential growth is the main driver behind the growth of the solar industry, and exponential growth is also behind the growth of the electric and self-driving cars. Even if today there is only 1% of solar energy capacity, and less than 1% of new cars are electric vehicles, it is just seven doublings away before reaching 100%. Both industries seem to be doubling about every two years, more or less, and so there will be 2% in two more years, 4% in four years, 8% in six years, 16% in eight years, 32% in ten years, 64% in twelve years, and 100% in fourteen years, or less. Obviously, it depends on the continuous growth of such industries until market saturation, but the historical trends are very clear. And self-driving cars, which are not yet commercialized, have the potential to grow even faster thanks to network effects. Therefore, thinking exponentially, it is not surprising to move from 1% to 100% in fourteen years if the doubling time is just two years, which has been very close to reality until now. Think of Moore’s Law for solar energy, actually called Swanson’s Law in honor of the Stanford professor who founded SunPower, and also Moore’s Law for electric and self-driving cars, i.e. computers on wheels.

Indeed, a “solar energy tsunami” is fast approaching and it will completely obliterate the fossil fuel companies and the old electric utilities. In parallel, another “electric and self-driving car tsunami” will also disrupt the traditional car companies that do not adapt to the fast new realities. Emerging companies with new Silicon Valley models will completely disrupt the conventional energy and transportation sectors. What is even better, this disruption will be clean, and it will actually improve the human condition. For years, for decades, energy and transportation were two of the dirtiest industries in the world. In the future, they will be cleaner, much cleaner.

How much will it cost?

Is it really possible to transition from the current Oil Age to the future Solar Age? According to the famous Sheik Ahmed Yamani, the answer is certainly affirmative. But will it cost more than the existing status quo? Let’s consider the facts!

According to the World Energy Investment Outlook published by the IEA in 2014, the energy industry will require $48 trillion investments from 2015 to 2035. That huge amount will roughly be distributed as $23 trillion in fossil fuels, $10 trillion in power generation (including only $6 trillion for renewables), $8 trillion in energy efficiency, and $7 trillion in transmission and distribution. On top of that, half a trillion dollars are spent yearly on subsidies for fossil fuels, about $550 billion in 2013. Obviously, the IEA favors fossil fuels since the agency was created by the OECD in 1974 following the 1973 oil crisis to guarantee the oil needs of the industrialized countries. Just like the US DOE was originally created in 1977 as a reaction to the 1973 oil crisis. Thus, both institutions consider mostly fossil fuels in their projections, with much less than 10% solar energy by 2035. However, this linear thinking does not capture the reality of solar capacity growing exponentially, and its costs decreasing exponentially.

Solar costs have been decreasing exponentially from almost $100/W in the 1970s. Today, total costs of solar installations vary from $3/W to $1/W, depending on altitude and longitude, including cities and rural areas, and size, including utility-scale, commercial and residential sites. Continuing with the exponential decrease of costs, combined with the exponential increase of production, it is foreseeable that in the next few years it will cost less than $1/W to install solar power anywhere, including storage costs.

The total power consumed by humanity today is about 15 TW, and this number might increase very little during the next few years, since over half of all the energy produced today is wasted. The worst industry is the transportation sector, where close to 80% of the energy is wasted. Thanks to big improvements in energy efficiency, like it has happened in the last few years, and the great energy savings thanks to electric and self-driving cars. Total power consumption might even remain constant or decline slightly.

Combining the total power consumption of 15 TW and $1/W, it gives $15 trillion in investments to transform the energy matrix from fossil fuels to solar energy, including storage. Even considering a small increase in power consumption, and low capacity factors, the total amount might be $30 trillion, or even $45 trillion, considering three times the production capacity of 15 TW. Therefore, the numbers given by the IEA to sustain the Oil Age are an insult to those who want a cleaner world, and with cheaper energy.

The “Enernet”: clean energy and transportation for all

My friend Robert Metcalf, former MIT professor and inventor of Ethernet, popularized the idea of an Energy Internet or “Enernet”. This Enernet or Energy Network will allow us to connect the whole world and to increase, not reduce, our energy consumption. With the Enernet, energy and power will become abundant and basically free, just like information and bandwidth are today thanks to the Internet. Storage considerations are also important, but new batteries and other advanced technologies will make the Enernet more resilient and create positive network effects. This intelligent Enernet will also help power the new transportation system based on electric and self-driving cars. Humanity will more from

According to Metcalfe, the Enernet will bring fundamental changes in the way we produce and consume energy, from generation to transmission, storage and final utilization. The Enernet should really create a smart energy grid with distributed resources, efficient systems, high redundancy and high storage capacity. The Enernet should also help the transition to clean energy and renewable sources, with new players and entrepreneurs taking the place of traditional “big oil” and utilities, and old monolithic producers giving more control to energy prosumers (producers and consumers). Finally, we will continue the transition from expensive energy to cheap energy in a world where energy will be recognized as an abundant resource.

Global companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, IKEA, Walmart, among many others, have publicly announced that they want to power all their operations with renewable energy. Additionally, retailers like Walmart also announced that they will install electric car chargers in their stores, so that clients can charge their vehicles for free, just like the Tesla Superchargers, also for free. Why for free? Because electricity is much cheaper than oil, and it will only get cheaper with more and more solar power, at lower and lower installation costs.

Clean Disruption shows the path for abundant and cheap energy for everybody, with economic and efficient transportation on-demand. Poor people around the world will leapfrog the fossil fuel and utility dinosaurs and move directly to intelligent distributed energy systems, just like the poor moved from no phones to mobile phones. In fact, many of those mobile phones are charged today by solar panels in many rural areas. This Clean Disruption will be better for you, better for me, better for humanity, and better for the environment.

José Cordeiro, MBA, PhD
(http://cordeiro.org)
Visiting Research Fellow, IDE – JETRO, Japan
(http://www.ide.go.jp)
Director, Venezuela Node, The Millennium Project
(http://Millennium-Project.org)
Adjunct Professor, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia
(http://mipt.ru)
Founding Faculty, Singularity University, NASA Research Park, Silicon Valley, California
(http://SingularityU.org)

Half of the report covers the 15 Global Challenges that were defined by The Millennium Project in 1998, after an international Delphi expert survey, and were used as additional input for the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. Since then, The Millennium Project has been assessing the yearly evolution of these challenges with quantitative indicators and comprehensive qualitative analysis. But why are these global challenges so important? Well, as my friend Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation and co-founder of Singularity University, likes to say: “the greatest challenges are also the greatest opportunities”. Indeed, with every challenge there is a huge opportunity to improve the human condition, as well as create new businesses, jobs and economic activity.

Let’s consider quickly these 15 global challenges, not in any specific order, since they are all equally important and fundamental to the long-term development and survival of humanity:

1. How can sustainable development be achieved for all while addressing global climate change?

2. How can everyone have sufficient clean water without conflict?

3. How can population growth and resources be brought into balance?

4. How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes?

5. How can decision-making be enhanced by integrating improved global foresight during unprecedented accelerating change?

6. How can the global convergence of information and communications technologies work for everyone?

7. How can ethical market economies be encouraged to help reduce the gap between rich and poor?

8. How can the threat of new and reemerging diseases and immune micro-organisms be reduced?

9. How can education make humanity more intelligent, knowledgeable, and wise enough to address its global challenges?

10. How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflicts, terrorism, and the use of weapons of mass destruction?

11. How can the changing status of women help improve the human condition?

12. How can transnational organized crime networks be stopped from becoming more powerful and sophisticated global enterprises?

13. How can growing energy demands be met safely and efficiently?

14. How can scientific and technological breakthroughs be accelerated to improve the human condition?

15. How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?

If there are global challenges, let’s solve them, and let’s make money in the process, while saving humanity along the way. This is part of the Silicon Valley mentality, where every problem is also an incredible opportunity for new ideas and solutions. Think of Google and its technology “moonshots”, or the new X Prizes, among several such initiatives around the world. Exponential technological advances are giving us incredible tools to solve many of these challenges, if not all of them.

For example, let’s consider the energy challenge (global challenge 13 in the The Millennium Project list) and the critical condition of 1.3 billion people who still have no access to electricity around the world. Without any doubts, this is a major global challenge, but it is also a major global opportunity. The energy industry is worth about eight trillion dollars every year, and it will be radically changed in the coming years, moving from fossil fuels to renewables, from centralized to distributed systems. These are totally disruptive changes, similar to what has happened in telecommunications during the transition from fixed-line telephones to mobile telephones. For the first time in history, today is possible to think that in less than 20 years, every human being in the planet will have access to electricity. The energy industry is just starting a similar technological disruption to the one with cell phones reaching every corner of the planet in the last 20 years.

The opportunities for both developed and developing countries are enormous. My friend Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic, has written extensively about the incredible opportunities that technology will bring to solve the global grand challenges of humanity. He not only talks about the positive prospects for the USA, but also around the world, including his original India. Wadhwa believes that “technology can unleash India’s full potential” through smartphones, Internet transparency, health care revolution, cheap tablets for education, new water sanitation, agricultural automation, and harnessing the impressive talents of the young. Such ideas are not just valid for India, but all over the developing world, and even in some parts of the developed world.

We are truly living through incredible times, and thanks to technology, we will probably see more changes in the next 20 years than in the previous 200 years. Now is really the time to “make poverty history” as the United Nations and other international organizations try through the global campaign to eradicate poverty over the next two decades. In fact, even Bill Gates wrote in his 2014 annual letter that eliminating poverty is finally within our grasp by 2035. This time is for real, and those global challenges are also the greatest opportunities for humanity.

José Cordeiro, MBA, PhD (www.cordeiro.org)

The 2013–14 State of the Future is available at http://millennium-project.org/millennium/201314SOF.html and realtime updates of this work are in the Global Futures Intelligence system at GFIS.