label ::

firm: Aurecon
publication: Just Imagine
story: The singularity, last we looked it’s not too late.
date: September 2019

read :: story

presented by

firm: Aurecon
web: home ~ channel ~ projects
banner: Bringing ideas to life.

publication: Just Imagine
web: home
banner: Imagination takes you everywhere.

podcast: Engineering re-Imagined
web: home

about ::

Aurecon is an engineering, design, planning, project management, consulting + advisory firm based in Australia — operating in 28 countries.

firm ::

Through a range of skills, we collaborate to shape tomorrow. Humanity depends on engineering, and we have a broad stewardship role. Our clients are future-ready + engineered for life.

magazine ::

Our Just Imagine magazine features stories on: careers, engineering, innovation, leadership, and sustainability. Our stories cover the possible, probable, and remotely plausible. We imagine bold, futuristic solutions.

podcast ::

Our Engineering re-Imagined podcast explores people in engineering. Each episode features a guest we can learn from.

mission ::

Throughout history, engineers are at the center of civilization. Think of the stone pyramids of Egypt, the water viaducts of ancient Rome in Italy, the airplane, and skyscrapers.

Tech is disrupting life at quickening pace. Humanity relies on engineers to solve the wicked problems our globe faces.

story ::

An introduction.

Not so long ago science fiction movies were filled with weird and wonderful — and impossible — scenarios with exciting plots. It was thrilling, entertaining. And while all humankind was always in grave danger, we never believed it could actually happen to us.

Because it’s not real — or so we thought. But now we mull-over “what if” and wonder about the blurred lines between science fiction + science fact.

The idea of the singularity.

The story we’re pondering today is called the “singularity.” It’s essentially the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) will enter a run-away reaction loop of self-improvement cycles — becoming smarter, faster, and causing an intelligence explosion.

How computer super-intelligence will impact humanity is debated. On one hand — futurist Ray Kurzweil says AI will enhance our humanity, and produce the kinds of necessary step-change solutions to give civilization a boost. On the other hand — entrepreneur + skeptic Elon Musk believes AI is “far more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Our greatest existential threat.”

Is AI the evil antagonist to “end the human era” — as scientist + science fiction author Vernor Vinge PhD predicted. Or will it be the hero of the story. The un-stoppable power of AI is terrifying.

But Toby Walsh PhD — AI expert at the Univ. of New South Wales — says the future isn’t fixed. We can decide the direction of AI if we have a say in it. Standing ankle-deep in this 4th Industrial Revolution, we’re still crafting the tech + algorithms to open-up new capabilities. But it’s not too late to be the gate-keepers.

The rise of super-intelligence.

The world is plagued by problems of immense complexity — ranging from global warming + geo-politics, to extreme market volatility. This will impact the next generation. But nothing will cause so much tectonic change as the arrival of super-intelligence on Earth.

Jurgen Schmidhuber PhD — who’s called the father of AI — said: “It’s more than another industrial revolution. It’s something that transcends humankind and life itself.” It’s no longer a matter of if — but when — machines will by-pass human cognition.

• Ray Kurzweil hangs his hat on year 2045. — story
• Louis Rosenberg PhD says a tech tipping point could be as early as year 2030. — story
• Jurgen Schmidhuber PhD says we’re 30 years off. — story
• Toby Walsh PhD pushes the date to year 2062. — story
• Peter Diamandis MD sets the date within 30 years. — story

And Jolene Creighton — editor at Futurism — asks does it really matter. If it’s only a difference of a few decades, the real issue is: what could this reality look like.

The things we can do.

Assuming by year 2030 the human brain will be successfully reverse-engineered, enabling super-computers to understand and simulate its functions — we will have laid the groundwork for this imminent intelligence explosion.

Ray Kurzweil said: “Within a quarter century, non-biological intelligence will match the range + subtlety of human intelligence. In 30 years, even our everyday devices will have incomprehensible capabilities.”

Jurgen Schmidhuber PhD said: “Rather cheap computational devices will have as many connections as your brain but will be much faster. And that’s just the beginning. Imagine a cheap little device that isn’t just smarter than humans — it will compute as much data as all human brains taken together.”

Kurzweil is looking forward to amazing solutions this reality ushers in. He sees the upgrade opportunities for our humanity. By taking these super-computers, embedding them in our brains, and then connecting our brains to the cloud — we can tap into an unlimited library of knowledge + ability. It will unlock what Peter Diamandis MD calls meta-intelligence — the next evolutionary step towards a human-scale transformation.

Fei-Fei Li PhD is an AI researcher at Stanford Univ. He said: “When machines can see, physicians will have extra pairs of tireless eyes to help them diagnose and care for patients. Cars will run smarter + safer on the road. Robots will help us brave disaster zones to save the trapped and wounded. We’ll discover new species, better materials, and explore unseen frontiers with the help of the machines.”

Li said: “For the first time, human eyes won’t be the only ones pondering and exploring our world. We’ll use the machines for their intelligence, and collaborate with them in ways we can’t imagine.”

Can we safe-guard the future of AI.

Nick Bostrom PhD said: “What if we unknowingly encode our first super-intelligent entity with goals that are best achieved through our annihilation? What if a mis-programmed super-intelligence could lead to a society of economic miracles + tech awesomeness, but with nobody there to benefit — a Disneyland without children.”

Toby Walsh PhD said: “Think about the implications of handing over the reins to decide who lives + who dies to machines.” He tells us to think carefully about the tools we’re creating — and their potential impact on society. He signed an open letter with more than 100 global tech leaders in year 2017 — to petition the United Nations to ban killer robots. Walsh said it’s essential to build algorithms that know our unconscious biases such as: race, gender, sexual identity.

Walsh said: “We have to be careful not to bake bias into algorithms and take society backwards.” He believes that eventually AI will deliver on good promises — if humanity stays close to the ground and thoughtfully architects our future tech tools.

Should we trust the optimistic judgement of one genius — Ray Kurzweil. Or join the eminent ranks of the concerned: such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking PhD.

But are these the only options? The solution could be in the middle. We need a managed evolution, a well-considered caretaking of tech — so we can balance challenges that come with harnessing the power of AI. Walsh said: “What happens next in AI is very much the product of the choices we make today .”

reading

label ::

firm: Aurecon
publication: Just Imagine
story: AI evil or avatar.
date: December 2017

read :: story

notes

AI = artificial intelligence
MD = medical doctor
PhD = doctorate
UN = the United Nations

image | above

An example of computer optical character recognition.

credit: Andrey Nikishaev :: visit

— contents —

~ story
~ report
~ historic photos

label |

publication: Forbes
story: The future of OCR is machine learning.
date: September 2019

read | story

story |

An introduction.

Whether it’s auto-extracting information from a scanned receipt for an expense report — or translating a foreign language using your smartphone’s camera, optical character recognition (OCR) tech can seem mesmerizing. And while it seems miraculous that we have computers that can digitize analog text with accuracy, the accuracy expect falls short of what’s possible.

And that’s because — despite the perception of OCR as a leap forward — it’s actually old-fashioned + limited. Largely because it’s run by an oligopoly that’s holding back further innovation.

What’s new is old.

OCR’s pre-cursor was invented over 100 years ago in Birmingham, England by the scientist Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe. He wanted to help blind people “read” text — so d’Albe built a device called the Optophone. It used photo sensors to detect black print and then convert it into sounds.

Nature | story :: the Octophone: an instrument for reading by ear

The sounds could then be translated into words by the visually impaired reader. The device proved so expensive — and the process of reading so slow — that the potentially revolutionary Optophone was never commercially viable.

Additional development of text-to-sound continued in the early 20th century. But OCR as we know it today, didn’t get off the ground until the 1970s —  when inventor + futurist Ray Kurzweil developed an OCR computer program. By year 1980, Kurzweil sold to Xerox, who continued to commercialize paper-to-computer text conversion.

Since then, very little has changed. You convert a document to an image — then the software tries to match letters against character sets that have been uploaded by a human operator.

And that’s the problem with OCR as we know it. There are countless variations in document and text types — but most OCR is built on a limited set of existing rules that ultimately limit the tech’s true utility. As character Morpheus from the Matrix film series said: “Yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be.”

Innovation in OCR has been stymied by tech gatekeepers — and its few-cents-per-page business model. This makes investing billions in its development non-viable.

report |

group: Grand View Research :: visit
report title: Optical Character Recognition
deck: The market size, share, and trends analysis report.
years: 2019 — 2025

• by type — software, services
• by vertical — retail, finance, government, education, health care
• by region
• by segment forecasts

read | report

The next generation of OCR.

But that’s starting to change. Recently, a new generation of engineers is rebooting OCR. Built using artificial intelligence based machine learning tech, these new devices aren’t limited by rules-based character matching of existing OCR software. With machine learning, algorithms trained on a significant volume of data learn to think for themselves. Instead of being restricted to a fixed number of character sets, new OCR programs can accumulate knowledge — and learn to recognize any number of characters.

One of the best examples of modern OCR: is the 34 year-old OCR software that was adopted by Google and turned open source in year 2006. Since then, the OCR community’s brightest minds have been working to improve the software’s stability. A dozen years later, Tesseract can process text in 100 languages — including right-to-left languages such as Arabic + Hebrew.

Open Source | story :: Google’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software works for 248+ languages.

Amazon also released a powerful OCR engine called Textract. Made available through Amazon Web Services, the product already has a positive reputation for accuracy.

These readily available technologies have vastly reduced the cost of building an OCR with enhanced quality. Still, they don’t solve the problems that most OCR users are hoping to fix.

Looking to deep learning.

The historic, intrinsic difficulty of character recognition has blinded us to the reality that simple digitization was never the end goal for using OCR. We don’t use OCR just so we can put analog text into digital formats. What we want is to turn analog text into digital insights. For example, a company might scan 100s of insurance contracts — with the end goal of uncovering its climate-risk exposure. But turning all those paper contracts into digital ones is only bit more useful than the originals.

That’s why we’re looking beyond machine learning — implementing another type of artificial intelligence: deep learning. In deep learning, a neural network mimics the function of a human mind, ensuring algorithms don’t have to rely on historic patterns to determine accuracy — they can do it themselves. The benefit is — with deep learning — the techdoes more than just recognize text. It can derive meaning from it.

With deep learning OCR, the company scanning insurance contracts gets more than just digital versions of their paper documents. They get instant visibility into the meaning of the text in those documents. And that can unlock billions of dollars worth of insights + saved time.

Adding insight to recognition.

OCR is finally moving away from just seeing + matching. Driven by deep learning, it’s entering a new phase where the software first recognizes scanned text, then makes meaning of it. Products with the competitive edge will provide the most powerful info extraction — plus highest quality insights.

And since each business category has its own particular document types, structures, and considerations — there’s room for multiple companies to succeed based on vertical-specific competency.

Users of traditional OCR services should re-evaluate their current licenses + payment terms. They can also try free services such as: Textract by Amazon — or Tesseract by Google — to see the latest advances in OCR.

It’s also important to scope independent providers in robotic process automation + AI who are making strides for the industry. In 5 years: I expect what’s been mostly static for the past 30 years — if not 100 — will be completely unrecognizable.

historic photos |

Ray Kurzweil and the reading machine for the blind.

from: the Kurzweil Library

photo | no. 1

about: Ray Kurzweil with the Reading Machine for the Blind.
detail: A close-up of the full machine.
year: 1976

photo | no. 2

about: Ray Kurzweil with his invention the Reading Machine for the Blind.
detail: A close-up of the internal scanner for printed books, letters, reports, periodicals.
year: 1976

— notes —

OCR = optical character recognition

— story —

publication: Journal of Accountancy
story title: Preparing for accelerating tech changes
author: by Ken Tysiac
year: 2019

note: This story is collected for the Kurzweil library.

— introduction —

by Ken Tysiac

The rise of increasingly intelligent systems, driven by powerful data network effects, poses a threat to certain tasks + roles that have been historically performed by accountants. But this moment also provides new opportunities, according to Jeffrey Rogers.

Rogers is an educator and principal facilitator at Singularity University, and spoke about how certified public accountants (CPAs) can prepare themselves to succeed in the profession — in an environment of accelerating change. Singularity University was co-founded by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis MD + Ray Kurzweil — a best selling author, inventor, and futurist.

— disruption on the horizon —

Jeffrey Rogers said tech such as machine learning models (computer software that can perform advanced computation + pattern recognition) will go far beyond what we’ve seen to date — with robotic process automation that could disrupt rote tasks, compliance enforcement, and validation duties that accountants have grown accustomed to performing. But that doesn’t mean CPAs need to be alarmed.

Rogers said: “I think there’s an opportunity to re-imagine a value proposition that the individual and the organization provide — and then to re-imagine the business model. And there’s an opportunity … to actually engage in the process of determining what the profession and practice can look like and what the future learning models for people engaging in that profession will be.”

— our time of accelerating change —

Rogers said: “Emerging technologies and the social + economic changes they drive will not proceed according to a linear or incremental pattern in the future. Instead, transformation will take place in an exponential fashion during a time of accelerating change.”

Understanding the drivers of change can help CPAs anticipate risks + recognize opportunities. He offered some heuristics that can help people comprehend what changes may bring.

— what can CPAs make of all this —

Rogers said: Living in an era of accelerating change means we’re living in a world that’s always in the process of becoming something new. So we’re always new to the world — and that then means that we have an opportunity + imperative to become something new ourselves.”

To remain relevant and successful in this environment, Rogers said CPAs need to be open and willing to change.

Rogers said: “We still tend to under-estimate the scope of the change and also the pace. At the same time, there’s a lot of opportunity.”

“Embrace lifelong learning. My big interest is helping people see their opportunity. To embrace continuous learning and be in-position to capitalize on the opportunities that a shifting landscape will reveal.”

Rogers is concerned that CPAs who don’t prepare for change will be left behind —as the forward-thinkers in the profession become future leaders and thrive. So while his message is aspirational, he can also serve as a canary in a coal mine if his words are heeded.

— the laws that predict change —

1. Moore’s Law
author: by Gordon Moore PhD

This observation shows the number of transistors in a micro-chip doubles every 2 years — while the cost of computing power is halved every 2 years.

2. Wright’s Law
author: by Theodore Paul Wright PhD

This heuristic plots the relationship between increases in total production in an industry — and exponential increases in price performance of a wide range of tech.

3. Amara’s Law
author: by Roy Amara PhD

This idea shows the impact of a tech is often over-estimated in the short term — but under-estimated in the long term.

4. Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns
author: by Ray Kurzweil

This observation shows tech develops in evolutionary systems — and drives exponentially accelerating (non-linear) change.

on the web | reading

Intel | Over 50 years of Moore’s Law
deck: Fueling innovation we love + depend on

Intel | Intel silicon technology innovations
deck: Architecture for the next era of computing

Intel | Moore’s Law + Intel Innovation
deck: Gordon Moore: raising the bar for silicon technology + innovation

Intel | Moore’s Law time-line
read: report

on the web | reading

Forbes | Wright’s Law vs. Moore’s Law

Edge | What’s your law?
list: table of contents
section: Kurzweil’s Law — aka: Law of Accelerating Returns

on the web | reading

Business Insider | Google’s genius futurist has one theory that he says will rule the future
deck: And it’s a little terrifying
topic: Kurzweil’s Law — aka: Law of Accelerating Returns

Spectrum • by IEEE | Wright’s Law edges out Moore’s Law in predicting technology development
deck: Economies of scale trump time as a factor in driving down costs, shows study of 62 different technologies
topic: Moore’s Law + Wright’s Law

MIT | How to predict the progress of technology
deck: MIT researcher finds Moore’s Law + Wright’s Law best predict how technology improves.
topic: Moore’s Law + Wright’s Law

the Times | Don’t write off the next big thing too soon
deck: From steam engines to computers: the law of new tech is that excessive hype is followed by excessive scepticism
topic: Amara’s Law

IMAGE

— notes —

CPA = certified public accountants
AI = artificial intelligence
ML = machine learning

IEEE is Institute of Electrical + Electronics Engineers
MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology

from: Innovate: Long Island
section: Opinion
story title: Sound investments on an island filled with wonder
author: by Tom Mariner
date: January 2020

read | story

An introduction.

A few years after Ray Kurzweil introduced the first Reading Machine for the blind — he cranked-out his first music synthesizer with music legend Stevie Wonder. It was a product of Kurzweil’s fertile brain and (in theory) a bet between the 2 men that electronic stuff could not sound like a concert grand piano.

The technical challenge was that large memory chips that digitally hold millions of pieces of sounds were non-existent. And “computers” at the time were crude, large, and slow.

But nature is on our side. In general, our brain only pays close attention to the first 100 or so milli-seconds of a new sound. So Ray Kurzweil did a great job of playing that part — and left us with only the frequency as the note trailed off. Ultimately, Stevie Wonder couldn’t tell the difference between the computer note — and a bunch of strings in a giant chunk of wood.

Electronic sound-making with specialized chips.

At General Instrument — in Hicksville on Long Island in New York, now Microchip Technology of Arizona — where I was a consultant for about 10 years, we did a lot of electronic sound-making with specialized chips. But also with software on the tiny micro-controllers that helped launch the electronic gaming and video gaming industries.

We borrowed heavily from other innovators at the time, including Ray Kurzweil and Stevie Wonder. I never met Wonder, but entertainment luminaries were intertwined with a lot of the products we manufactured.

The big game and toy developer at the time was now-defunct design company Marvin Glass — housed in a bomb-proof building in Chicago, IL. They used to delight in playing sounds and music on a $100,000 Kurzweil synthesizer — while whatever concept they were trying to sell to toy companies such as Mattel, Milton Bradley, or Parker Brothers played on a screen — then getting me to duplicate the game, and the sounds, on a $3 micro-controller for mass production.

Morphing into today’s artificial intelligence.

This all eventually expanded into the first commercial voice synthesizers — also relating to Ray Kurzweil’s Reading Machine for the blind — and those chips heralded the digital signal processing that morphed into today’s “artificial intelligence.” A story for another time.

notes

AI = artificial intelligence

— contents —

~ the story
~ stocks | for the law of accelerating returns
~ featurette

group: NASDAQ
section: InvestorPlace | visit

story title: 20 stocks to buy — from the law of accelerating returns
deck: Buy these stocks to play one of our era’s biggest investment trends.
author: by Luke Lango
date: February 2020

read | story

presented by

NASDAQ | home ~ channel
tag line: Envision a future fueled by innovation, technology, and expertise.

visit | re-write tomorrow

STORY

An introduction

The law of accelerating returns is probably the most important economic concept you’ve never heard of — with broad implications across the stock market, economy, and politics. It’s a simple — yet powerful — idea that could guide you to:

• 1,000% returns in the stock market
• help explain America’s widening wealth gap
• give you ammunition to win a political debate

Tech change accelerates over time.

So, what exactly is the law of accelerating returns? Coined by best-selling author, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil — the law of accelerating returns states that while most things progress linearly, tech change does not. Instead, tech change is exponential. That is, the pace at which tech changes, actually accelerates over time.

A quick glance at history confirms this. It took humans 1000s of years to figure-out fire, stone tools, and the wheel. But — in the late 1990s — it took only  30 years for humans to turn the computer + the internet from science fiction into reality.

The tip of the iceberg.

That was a landmark accomplishment. And yet, by modern standards, that’s almost slow. The 21st century has been marked by an unprecedented acceleration in tech change. The iPhone by Apple wasn’t a thing until 2007. Nor was streaming television or cloud computing.

Today — less than 15 years later — everyone has an iPhone, every household subscribes to a TV streaming service, and every enterprise is on the cloud. We’ve gone from a world where only a handful of people had mobile phones and DVD players in 2005 — to a world where everyone has an smart-phone and Netflix in 2020.

And the craziest part is: this is just the tip of iceberg. This acceleration in tech change will only continue over the next decade and beyond. As it does, it will have huge implications on the stock market, economy, and politics.

According to the law of accelerating returns: tech changes faster today than it did in 2000 — and it changed faster in 2000 than it did in 1950.

The best-selling author, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil first discussed the term in 1999. At the time, he was inspired + awed by the fact that — in just a few dozen years — US corporations transformed the concept of a computer into a mainstream, widely adopted consumer product.

He was similarly enthralled by the internet — which was essentially a science fiction concept in the 1970s — and how 1 out of every 2 Americans were using the tech by the turn of the century.

The law of accelerating returns impacts the stock market, economy, and politics.

This phenomena of accelerating returns has huge implications. Companies aligned with tech change have advanced forward at break-neck speeds. Their revenues, profits. and stock prices have soared. Similarly, individuals aligned with this trend have also benefited. Their net worth, reach and influence has grown.

More importantly, the pace of tech change is still accelerating. That means the implications are only getting bigger and not always in a positive way. Research conducted by Gustavo Grullon PhD — from Rice University — has shown that the ability for many firms to generate sales commensurate with their assets has not kept pace with tech acceleration.

He said: “What we’re finding is that the market valuation factor has been increasing exponentially over the past few decades. But for some reason the asset utilization — the ability of firms to generate sales given their assets — has been declining systematically over the last 40 years.”

That has huge implications for the market because investors are not keeping track of the fundamentals. So the market valuations are going up relative to sales. But for some reason, the ability of firms to generate sales has been going down.

The law of accelerating returns is the driving force behind the wealth gap.

For this reason, investors have to know the difference between over-valued stocks and true industry disruption — to understand which companies are right for long-term gains.

The law of accelerating returns is the driving force behind the wealth gap. This means that while it’s a massive wealth-creation tool — it only functions favorably for those at the forefront of tech trends. So it’s one of the most important investment mega-trends of our era.

Grullon said: “The issue is that most of the value created in the markets is mainly driven by tech. So you see the market valuation of many high-tech firms has exploded over the past decade. And the problem is that most of those firms are controlled by few individuals. So the market value is highly concentrated — and only a small fraction of the population is benefiting from these increases in stock valuation.”

Why it matters for investors.

The law of accelerating returns matters because it has profound systemic implications for investors. With respect to the stock market: it essentially implies that companies that are aligned with tech change will continue to succeed.

Meanwhile, companies that are out-of-sync with tech change will remain sluggish (at best). That’s because as tech change accelerates, companies levered to that change will reap all the rewards. Companies without exposure to that change will be left in the dust.

Just look back at the past twenty years for proof. Companies which have been levered to tech change:

• Apple — with the iPhone
• Netflix — with streaming TV
• Amazon — with e-commerce
• Tesla — with electric vehicles
• Facebook — with digital advertising

These companies have seen their revenues, profits, and stock prices soar. Meanwhile, companies without exposure to tech change — like these below — have struggled:

• General Electric
• Macy’s
• Exxon Mobil

This trend will persist. The best-performing stocks in the market will be those aligned with tech change.

Why it matters for the economy + politics.

Meanwhile, with respect to the economy, the law of accelerating returns explains America’s widening wealth inequality. Importantly, tech change doesn’t just drive revenue momentum — it also drives cost savings.

Amazon figured out how to sell items without needing stores, or even needing employees for those stores. This simultaneous revenue growth + improved efficiency translates into more revenue and market value per employee. This leads to more concentration of wealth among fewer individuals.

The more tech change accelerates, the more the few aggregate all the wealth. Thus, the law of accelerating returns is why we have a widening wealth gap problem in the US. It’s also why this problem may not get better anytime soon.

Lastly, the recurring phenomena of accelerating tech change has profound implications on politics. Politicians aren’t going to fix the wealth gap problem. Their policies all broadly miss the point. The only way to fix the wealth gap is to address the core issue — the law of accelerating returns, and the aggregation of those accelerating returns among fewer + fewer individuals.

— the top 20 stocks —

With that in mind, let’s take a look at 20 stocks to buy to align your portfolio on the right side of the law of accelerating returns. Here are the top 20 stocks to buy for the greatest exponential impact from the law of accelerated returns:

1. Amazon — ticker symbol: AMZN
2. Twilio — ticker symbol: TWLO
3. Facebook — ticker symbol: FB
4. Chegg — ticker symbol: CHGG
5. Shopify — ticker symbol: SHOP
6. Tesla — ticker symbol: TSLA
7. Netflix — ticker symbol: NFLX
8. Okta — ticker symbol: OKTA
9. Intuitive Surgical — ticker symbol: ISRG
10. Beyond Meat — ticker symbol: BYND
11. Square — ticker symbol: SQ
12. Alphabet — ticker symbol: GOOG
13. the Trade Desk — ticker symbol: TTD
14. Teladoc — ticker symbol: TDOC
15. Roku — ticker symbol: ROKU
16. Splunk — ticker symbol: SPLK
17. Adobe — ticker symbol: ADBE
18. Uber — ticker symbol: UBER
19. Axon — ticker symbol: AAXN
20. Cardlytics — ticker symbol: CDLX

stocks | for the law of accelerating returns

no. 1 |  Amazon — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: e-commerce + cloud

The law of accelerating returns says to buy Amazon because this company is only extending its lead in the rapidly growing e-commerce and cloud infra-structure markets.

Over the next 10 years, the pace at which consumers migrate to online shopping will accelerate. Amazon will leverage its Amazon Prime eco-system, wide distribution network, and huge fulfillment centers to remain the world’™s largest online retailer. Amazon’s e-commerce sales and profits will continue to roar higher.

At the same time, the pace at which enterprises migrate to the cloud will also accelerate, and Amazon will similarly sustain leadership position in that market given its huge data-center capacity. Cloud revenues and profits will push higher in the long run, too. So will Amazon stock.

Sure, you can knock the valuation. But, valuation has been a œhead-wind for the past decade. That hasn’t stopped Amazon stock from rising 1,750% over that stretch. It won’™t stop Amazon stock from heading higher over the next decade, either.

no. 2 |  Twilio — on NYSE

tech disruption: cloud communications

Twilio stock is a buy according to the law of accelerating returns — because the company is pioneering a new way for businesses to communicate with customers.

Long story short, everyone texts these days. Businesses have been slow to catch onto this trend. Most of them still use email marketing to reach and communicate with customers. Twilio is changing that, by creating programmatic APIs which allow businesses to employ text-based customer communication at any scale.

This is the future of business-to-consumer (B2C) communications, and the pace at which companies migrate to text-based B2C communications will only accelerate over the next few years. As it does, Twilio’s customer base and spend per customer will rise dramatically. Revenues and profits will run higher, too. And so will Twilio stock.

no. 3 |  Facebook — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: digital advertising

There are many reasons to like Facebook stock as a long-term holding, and the law of accelerating returns is one of them. In a nutshell, consumers are spending more and more of their time on their phones. Facebook owns four of the biggest apps on those phones.

As such, the more consumers shift their time to the mobile channel, the more time they spend in one or several of Facebook’s 4 apps. Ad dollars chase eyeballs. So, the higher Facebook app engagement goes, the more ad dollars will flow into those apps.

This dynamic is only accelerating. Over the next several years, the digital consumption shift will accelerate. That will spark a digital ad shift acceleration. For Facebook, that means the company’s core growth drivers are only going to get more robust over the next few years. As they do, the company’s revenues and profits will keep running higher, and so will Facebook stock.

no. 4 |  Chegg — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: digital education

Accelerated adoption of digital education services will power shares of America’s leading connected learning platform Chegg higher over the next few years.

Consumption of all sorts is pivoting online. The education world has been slow to adapt to this change. The majority of learning materials remain physical, not digital. Chegg is changing that. They’re creating a digital, on-demand learning platform which allows students to access: tutoring services, homework solutions, writing help, test prep, and academic help services — at any point, through any internet connected device.

Their education services are made for the modern student. Adoption of these services will accelerate over the next 5 -to- 10 years. During that stretch, Chegg will become ubiquitous in the high school + college worlds. Accelerated adoption will push Chegg’s revenues and profits higher. As those trend higher, so will the stock.

no. 5 |  Shopify — on NYSE

tech disruption: e-commerce

One of the hottest stocks on the market over the past few years has been Shopify. Shares of the e-commerce solutions provider are up 800% over the past three years, and the law of accelerating returns implies that there’s plenty more upside over the next decade.

For all intents and purposes, Shopify is the digital store-front. Whereas retailers in 2005 needed a pretty storefront in a mall in order to succeed, retailers in 2020 need a well-built website on the internet in order to succeed. Shopify makes those websites. And they do a better job of making those websites than anyone else. Consequently, Shopify isn’t just a nice-to-have in the e-commerce world — many would argue it’s a must-have.

Over the next decade, retail sales will increasingly pivot online. As they do, retailers will increasingly pour money into building better and more robust online store-fronts. That means more money going to Shopify. This positive dynamic will keep Shopify stock on a healthy uptrend for a lot longer.

no. 6 |  Tesla — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: electric vehicles + self-driving

By now, it’s pretty clear that electric vehicles are the future of the auto market. Given ground-level demand changes (consumers actually want electric vehicles now) and top-level government support (legislation across the globe continues to support electric vehicle adoption through tax subsidies). And there’s a secret behind Tesla that few investors understand, but you can.

That’s great news for the world’s leading electric vehicle maker Tesla. Over the next decade, electric vehicle penetration in the auto market will soar from about 3% today, to somewhere north of 20%. That will translate into something like 20 million or more electric vehicle sales by 2030 — versus just 2 million in 2018.

This accelerated adoption of electric vehicles will provide a huge tail-wind for Tesla, who has an enormous lead in the market in terms of: battery tech, production capacity, and brand equity. Consequently, Tesla’s delivery volumes will roar higher over the next several years. That will push revenues higher, lead to positive operating leverage, and push profits higher. Ultimately, all that growth will inevitably result in Tesla stock moving higher in the long run, too — yes, even from today’s elevated levels.

no. 7 |  Netflix — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: streaming TV

There’s been a lot of competitive noise surrounding Netflix recently. But, the truth is that the law of accelerating returns implies that there’s only good things to come for the streaming TV giant.

Zooming out, streaming TV is the future of TV consumption. Eventually, for price and convenience reasons, all content will move to a streaming model, and all consumers will cut the cord. The linear-to-streaming pivot will accelerate in coming years as more traditional media players move into the space — meaning that the whole streaming TV market is due for a huge growth in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, zooming back in, Netflix is well positioned to fight off competition thanks to its low price, and huge size and data advantages. That is, because Netflix allocates more resources to original content production than anyone else. And because they have more viewing data to inform their content production than anyone else, the streaming giant should continue to produce some of the best original content in the market.

So long as that remains true, consumers won’t stop paying $15 a month for the service, which delivers a ton of value for that $15. Big picture: both the streaming market and Netflix are due for huge gains over the next several years. Those big gains will push Netflix stock higher in the long run, once competitive concerns fade.

no. 8 |  Okta — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: identity security

Cloud security giant Okta (understands that the future of security is identity-based security, and because of this, the law of accelerating returns implies a bright future for Okta shareholders. It also helps that Okta only boasts a $16 billion market capitalization — which aligns with Fry’s recommendation of spotting small companies that have the bulk of their growth still ahead.

Broadly speaking, enterprises are becoming increasingly complex and decentralized, with a lot of moving parts. It’s tough to secure all those moving parts with one giant cybersecurity solution. Instead, it’s much easier to secure all those moving parts by outfitting each one of them with their own individual security systems.

That’s exactly what Okta does. They employ an identity-based security solution which focuses on protecting each individual in the eco-system, with the rationale being that if each individual is protected, so is the whole system. Enterprises are just now starting to pivot towards identity-based security. Over the next several years, this pivot towards identity-based security will accelerate.

As it does, Okta will add a ton of customers, current customers will increase their spend, revenues and profits will run higher, and Okta stock will post huge returns.

no. 9 |  Intuitive — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: medical robotics

Over the next several years, adoption of automation tech across various verticals and applications will accelerate meaningfully higher. As it does, one company positioned to benefit from this automation boom is Intuitive Surgical.

Intuitive Surgical is a leader in the medical robotics field. Specifically, they are the maker of the Da Vinci Surgical System, which is essentially a smart robot that is designed to help doctors perform surgeries. Adoption rates of Da Vinci Surgical Systems remain relatively low. But, they are rising rapidly. They will continue to rise rapidly over the next few years, as the systems get better and medical professional and public trust in the systems improves.

Thus, over the next five to ten years, Intuitive Surgical will sell a ton of Da Vinci Surgical Systems. This sustained robust sales momentum will help power Intuitive Surgical higher in the long run.

no. 10 |  Beyond Meat — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: plant-based food

There are two things which underpin the long term bull thesis on Beyond Meat:

First — plant-based meat is the future of meats consumption. This is because plant-based meat is more environmentally friendly, cost-efficient, and safe at scale. Consequently, plant-based meat penetration will grow exponentially from less than 1% today — to 10%, 20%, and higher over the next decade.

Second — Beyond Meat is the brand in plant-based meat, much like Tesla is the brand in electric vehicles. That is, when consumers think of plant-based meat, they think of Beyond Meat. This gives the company tremendous branding leverage over competitors. At the same time, Beyond Meat has huge production and tech advantages over new entrants. And those advantages should help sustain the company’s leadership position for a lot longer.

So net-net, plant-based meat is the future of meat consumption, and Beyond Meat reasonably projects as the leader in the plant-based meat market in a decade. That’s a recipe for big long-term gains in Beyond Meat stock.

no. 11 |   Square — on NYSE

tech disruption: cashless payments

Shares of payments processing giant Square should move higher over the next several years because the company is perfectly aligned with one of the world’s most robust tech pivots: the shift from cash to cashless payments.

Cash has many shortcomings. It’s clunky, inconvenient, easy to lose, and tough to keep orderly. Cash transactions also take longer because merchants have to count change. That’s why banks invented cashless payment methods like credit and debit cards. These payment cards are slim, convenient, easy to keep in a wallet, and transaction times are very short (just insert the chip).

Because of this, we’ve already seen consumers pivot gradually from cash to cashless payments over the past few years. This pivot will accelerate over the next decade. As it does, cashless payments processors — like Square — will become more important than ever in the global retail ecosystem.

Merchants will increasingly deploy Square’s chip readers, and sales volume through those chip readers will accelerate higher with the cashless payment shift. Broadly, then, acceleration of the cashless payments pivot over the next few years should power Square stock higher.

no. 12 |  Alphabet — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: digital advertising, cloud, autonomous vehicles

Global tech giant Alphabet (NASDAQ:) is aligned with many tech changes, the sum of which will only accelerate over the next few years and keep the company and stock on a winning path.

First — you have the digital advertising pivot. Consumers are increasingly spending time in the digital channel. Marketers are increasingly chasing that engagement and spending ad dollars in the digital channel. This dynamic will persist over the next few years. As it does, Alphabet — the world’s largest digital advertiser — will continue to be supported by healthy ad growth trends.

Second — you have the cloud pivot, where enterprises of all shapes and sizes are increasingly moving their data and workflows into the cloud. This pivot, too, will only gain momentum over the next few years, as cloud-based work becomes the enterprise norm. Alphabet — the world’s 3rd largest cloud service provider — will benefit from this continued shift.

Third — you have the whole self-driving angle. Alphabet owns Waymo. Waymo is considered the leader in self-driving. Sure, self-driving seems like science fiction today. It’s not. Cars are already driving themselves, and it’s only a matter of time before these self-driving cars start to generate enormous revenue. When they do, Waymo will accelerate the entire Alphabet growth trajectory meaningfully higher.

All in all, thanks to its exposure to multiple secular tech pivots, Alphabet stock is positioned to keep moving higher over the next few years. As is another virtually unheard-of company that has logged more than a million autonomous miles and has developed the standard for self-driving vehicles. This is a small corporation with big partnerships in the form of the world’s top car companies and most disruptive tech firms. Best of all? It’s a bargain right now. If you want to know the name of this potential 10x stock.

no. 13 |  the Trade Desk — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising, or the use of data and algorithms to optimize the advertising process, is the future of advertising. That’™s great news for the Trade Desk — who’s established itself as a leader in the programmatic ad world.

Long story short:  the traditional, human-powered advertising process is inefficient, clunky, and slow. Programmatic advertising is not any of those things. It’s efficient, streamlined, and fast — because it leverages data + algorithms to make real-time, dynamic ad allocation decisions.

Because programmatic advertising is simply better, marketers everywhere are accelerating their adoption of this new ad method. Many of these marketers are turning towards the Trade Desk, because the company has established itself as a demand-side leader in the programmatic ad world, helping ad buyers increase the effectiveness of their ad campaigns.

Over the next decade, programmatic advertising will become ubiquitous across the entire ad ecosystem, meaning that the Trade Desk’™s reach, relevance, and revenues will all grow significantly. That big growth will provide ample firepower to keep the Trade Desk stock on a long-term winning trajectory.

no. 14 |  Teladoc — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: tele-medicine

Huge breakthroughs in tele-medicine will power the field’s leading company Teladoc, to sizable long term gains. In a nutshell, tele-medicine has been around for a while. But it hasn’™t been that good, mostly because the tech wasn’t good enough to support sufficient virtual health-care. That’s changing now.

Thanks to advances in data analysis and streaming video connectivity, tele-medicine is finally getting to a point where it’s good enough for most everyday health-care issues. Because of this — and because consumers hate going to the doctor’s office or urgent care —” the tele-medicine field has becoming increasingly popular over the past few years.

The law of accelerating returns implies that tele-medicine’™s growth will continue for the foreseeable future. As it does, Teladoc — the world’™s largest provider of tele-medicine services — will leverage favorable network and marketplace effects to maintain its market leadership position and drive sustained huge growth. That sustained huge growth will keep Teladoc stock on a healthy long-term up-trend.

no. 15 |  Roku — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: streaming TV

As mentioned earlier, the law of accelerating returns implies that streaming TV adoption rates will soar over the next few years, and that eventually, all consumers will be in the streaming TV channel. That reality implies huge growth ahead for Roku (NASDAQ:).

At its core, Roku is the œcable box of the streaming TV world. They make little devices and smart TVs. Those devices connect you to a centralized internet TV ecosystem, from which you can watch any streaming service in the world.

Importantly, Roku is the biggest player in this market, with the largest market share among both streaming devices and smart TVs. That’™s important, because Roku is a marketplace. The more supply Roku has (the more streaming services), the more demand the company will attract (more viewers), and the more demand the company has, the more supply it will attract — lather, rinse, repeat.

no. 16 |  Splunk — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: big data

Splunk is an enterprise data analytics company which will grow by leaps and bounds over the next few years as we increasingly move into a data-driven world. Splunk’s core product is its data-to-everything platform. That platform does exactly what the name says it does. It transforms data into anything you want it to, from selling and marketing insights, to market research, and everything in between.

Over the next decade, data-driven decision making will become the norm across the enterprise landscape, mostly because it’s more reliable, more efficient, and produces better results. As that happens, companies will increasingly allocate resources towards data capture, monitoring, and analysis.

Splunk does all three of those, and better than anyone else. Consequently, Splunk’s big data services will become ubiquitous across the enterprise landscape. As they do, the company will grow significantly.Significant growth will power significant gains in Splunk stock.

no. 17 |  Adobe — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: paper-to-digital transformation + creative media

The law of accelerating returns implies that cloud giant Adobe has robust long-term growth prospects in both its creative media and digital document businesses.

On the creative media side, videos and pictures are everything these days. Where content creators can put a video or a picture instead of text, they are doing so, because those videos and pictures resonate much more deeply with consumers.

Adobe is the king of solutions which help content creators capture, edit, and publish creative media like pictures and videos. Consequently, as the pivot towards digital video and photo consumption accelerates over the next few years, demand for Adobe’s creative media solutions will move higher.

Meanwhile, on the digital documents side, enterprises are in the midst of enormous paper-to-digital transformations. This transformation won’t slow until all workflows and processes are digital.

Thus, the enterprise paper-to-digital transformation will likely only accelerate, and as it does, demand for Adobe’s leading digital document solutions will similarly accelerate. Acceleration in its 2 core businesses will power Adobe stock significantly higher over the next few years.

no. 18 |  Uber — on NYSE

tech disruption: ride sharing

Ride sharing giant Uber has had a rough run on Wall Street. But, the company is aligned with a huge tech change, and as such, the law of accelerating returns implies that Uber stock actually has a very bright future.

Ride sharing won’t ever completely eradicate car ownership. But, given its price and convenience advantages in many situations, it is quite likely that consumers continue to opt for ride sharing over personal driving for things like going out at night, going into a city where parking is tough, going to the a hotel from the airport, etc.

Ride sharing usage in those situations will accelerate over the next few years. Because Uber is one of only two companies in the North American ride sharing market, ride sharing usage growth in North America will translate into billing and revenue growth for Uber.

At the same time, the company is cutting back on promotions, rationalizing its driver fees, and gutting the expense model. All of those moves should lead to improve profitability. Higher revenues plus improving profitability equals rising profits, and rising profits should guide Uber stock higher.

no. 19 |  Axon — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: police smart-tech

Over at Axon, the long-term bull thesis is all about accelerating adoption of police smart-tech. The law enforcement world is behind the curve when it comes to adopting tech. Axon is changing that.

They are providing the law enforcement world with an array of tech solutions ranging from smart weapons and cameras to cloud-based record management systems, the sum of which will modernize law enforcement agencies everywhere.

Adoption of these smart-tech solutions will accelerate in coming years. As it does, Axon’s revenues will roar higher, because they are essentially the only game in town when it comes to police smart-tech. More than that, Axon’s cloud-based solutions are high margin, so the more of those Axon sells, the higher margins and profits will go.

As go profits, so go stocks. Thus, considering Axon’s robust profit growth outlook over the next few years, Axon stock should keep moving higher over that stretch, too.

no. 20 |  Cardlytics — on NASDAQ

tech disruption: big data

Cardlytics is a payment card analytics company, which leverages credit and debit card data to pair marketers with consumers and power relevant and strong bank loyalty and rewards programs. In so doing, they’ve leveraged big data to create a win-win-win situation.

Marketers win because Cardlytics leverages data to match their products and services with target consumers. Banks win because, through matching consumers with products and services they’ll actually buy, Cardlytics ups how much consumers spend with a specific credit or debit card. And, of course, Cardlytics wins because they collect a fee for setting up the whole system.

It’s a genius business model. Over the next few years, more and more banks will sign up with Cardlytics. More and more marketers will, too. The entire Cardlytics ecosystem will expand dramatically, and this company will become the backbone of bank loyalty and rewards programs everywhere.

For reference, Cardlytics has a market cap of $2.5 billion. If that seems way too small for a company with this much potential, that’s because it is. In the long run, Cardlytics stock has tremendous upside potential.

When all is said and done, these are prime examples of companies that will contribute to the widening wealth gap in America today. And none of our politicians are thinking about how to solve this problem in an equitable manner for US citizens.

The only thing you or I can do is to align ourselves on the right side of the law of accelerating returns, allowing us to benefit from, rather than be victimized by, wealth inequality.

featurettes

1. |

group: by NASDAQ
series: re-write tomorrow
featurette title: The pace of tomorrow

2. |

group: by NASDAQ
series: re-write tomorrow
featurette title: Home to the world’s most innovative companies

— notes —

NASDAQ = the National Assoc. of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations
NYSE = the New York Stock Exchange

API = application programming interface
B2C = business-to-consumer
DVD = digital video disc

US = United States

Wall Street is colloquial for the professional financial district of New York, NY • United States

— contents —

~ story
~ select reading

publication: Futurism
story title: Ray Kurzweil claims the singularity will happen by 2045
deck: Get ready for humanity 2.0
date: October 2017

read | story

presented by

Futurism | home ~ channel
tag line: Bringing you the world, the news, the products, and the narratives of tomorrow — today.

Recurrent Ventures | home ~ brands
tag line: Mission-driven media. Passionate audiences.

the STORY

Ray Kurzweil’s predictions.

Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, is a well known futurist with a high-hitting track record for accurate predictions. Of his 147 predictions since the 1990s, Kurzweil claims an 86 percent accuracy rate. Recently he made yet another prediction: the technological singularity will happen sometime in the next 30 years.

Kurzweil said:

The year 2029 is the consistent date I’ve predicted, when an artificial intelligence will pass a valid Turing test  — achieving human levels of intelligence. I have also set the year 2045 for singularity — which is when humans will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold, by merging with the intelligence we have created. By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence.

Singularity is that point in time when all advances in technology — particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) — will lead to machines that are smarter than human beings.

Kurzweil’s time-table for the singularity is consistent with other predictions. Notably those of Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, who predicts that the dawn of super-intelligent machines will happen by 2047. But for Kurzweil, the process towards this singularity has already begun.

Kurzweil said:

That leads to computers having human intelligence, humans putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, that’s not just a future scenario. It’s partly here, and it’s going to accelerate.

Ultimately, it will affect everything. We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.

Kurzweil predicts that during the 2030s some tech will be invented that can go inside your brain and help your memory. He says it will be a future of unparalleled human-machine synthesis.

To fear or not to fear?

Should humanity fear the singularity? Everyone knows that when machines become smarter than human beings, they tend to take over the world. Right? Many of the world’s science + tech bigwigs — like Stephen Hawking PhD, Elon Musk, and even Bill Gates — warn about this kind of future.

Kurzweil doesn’t think so. In fact, he isn’t worried. What science fiction depicts as singularity — when AI enslaves humanity — is fiction, he says. ‘That’s not realistic,’ he said. He says singularity is an opportunity for humans to improve.

Kurzweil said:

What’s actually happening is machines are powering all of us. They’re making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies — but by the 2030s we will connect our neo-cortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.

We’re going to get more neo-cortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music, we’re going to be sexier. We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.

He envisions the same tech that will make AIs more intelligent — will give humans a boost as well. This idea is similar to Elon Musk’s controversial ‘neural lace’ — and to X Prize Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis’ meta-intelligence concept. Kurzweil expounded on how this tech could improve human lives.

To those who view this cybernetic society as more fantasy than future, Kurzweil points out that there are people with computers in their brains today — Parkinson’s patients. That’s how cybernetics is just getting its foot in the door, he said.

And — because it’s the nature of tech to improve — Kurzweil  predicts that during the 2030s some tech will be invented that can go inside your brain and help your memory. He believes it will be a future of unparalleled human-machine synthesis.

— end —

for reference

from: Wikipedia

profile | Alan Turing
profile | Bill Gates
profile | Elon Musk
profile | Masayoshi Son
profile | Neuralink
profile | Parkinson’s disease
profile | Peter Diamandis MD
profile | SoftBank
profile | Steven Hawking PhD
profile | Turing test
profile | X Prize

select reading

1. |

publication: Futurism
story title: Softbank CEO: The singularity will happen by 2047
deck: So, what do we do then?

read | story

2. |

publication: Futurism
story title: Singularity: explain it to me like I’m 5 years-old
deck: Here’s how to understand the merger of humans + robots.

read | story

3. |

publication: Futurism
story title: Musk is preparing to release ‘brain hacking’ tech — and he’s not alone
deck: Get ready for the next age of humanity.

read | story

4. |

publication: Futurism
story title: Peter Diamandis thinks we’re evolving toward meta-intelligence
deck: Over the next 30 years.

read | read

5. |

publication: Futurism
story title: Are we already living in the age of the cyborg?
deck: Your neighbor could already be part cyborg.

read | story

— notes —

AI = artificial intelligence

Singularity University is a for-profit, non-accredited institution dedicated to the theories of futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Several times a year it admits groups of executives for a $14,000, week course in exponential leadership.

Singularity University was founded by Ray Kurzweil and space entrepreneur and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis in 2009. It promulgates the philosophy of Kurzweil — the futurist, now at Google — who believes progress biotechnology and artificial intelligence is accelerating and will rapidly, radically change what it means to be human.

Ray Kurzweil predicted that in the 2020s your life-span will increase by more than a year for every year that you live. Kurzweil sometimes meets the class via robot.

web references:
Singularity University | main
Singularity University | executive program
Singularity University | YouTube channel
Singularity University | Vimeo channel

1. video | Singularity University — executive program
Instructors explain how humanity has entered an era of rapidly accelerated change.

2. video | Singularity University — executive program
Founder Peter Diamandis explores key & transformative aspects of session.

Tech hubs that enable a more advanced society can progress at a faster rate than other societies.

19th century entrepreneurs knew more and had better tech than 15th century business owners, so society was far more advanced in the 19th century. This law of accelerating returns works on the small scale particularly in Silicon Valley, as self-driving cars become a reality.

As we can see with self-driving cars, entrepreneurs are making the law of accelerated returns prominent.

If the predictions are accurate and self-driving cars are a distinctive part of culture by 2021 then we are on the brink of advances we have never seen before in such a short period of time.

Singularity comes from the science fiction concept of a point where tech changes so rapidly it transforms human life. More specifically, it comes from futurist & inventor, co-founder Ray Kurzweil’s 2006 book The Singularity Is Near: when humans transcend biology. Singularity University co-founder Peter Diamandis is best known for X Prize, a $10 million reward for the first private reusable manned spacecraft.

Google co-founder Larry Page championed Kurzweil’s and Diamandis’ idea of a “transhumanist” approach to goals. Founded in 2009, Singularity University changed from a non-profit to a benefit corporation, a form of for-profit business. It considers solving big problems and ordinary corporate profit making goals.

Singularity University’s summer program called Global Solutions has this participant agenda: come up with an idea to positively impact the lives of a billion people. Clean water, renewable energy, health, hunger, poverty. “Exponential” is a word used at Singularity University, which focuses on tech with potential to accelerate at warp speed.

related links:
Singularity University | main
Singularity University | YouTube channel

1.) video | Singularity University
Founders’ vision.

2.) video | Singularity University
Our inspiration.

3.) video | Singularity University
Welcome to the Singularity University YouTube channel.

Ray Kurzweil’s initial claim to fame was his inventions — including the flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech converter for the blind, and a groundbreaking music synthesizer .

But he has received more attention in past decades for his predictions and his books. In the 1990s, he made 147 projections for 2009. In 2010, he reflected on them and determined that 86% of them were correct.

While his critics dispute the accuracy of some of his forecasts, Kurzweil has predicted the age of mobile computing, digital books, wearables, self-driving cars, and high speed wireless data transmission. In the 1980s, he eerily predicted the emergence of a global online network long before the internet as we now know it exists. Bill Gates has called Kurzweil “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”

Many of Kurzweil’s ideas seem outlandish at first — a necessity he argues, because our human brains are only equipped to think linearly while technology is evolving at an exponential rate. His most famous theory is the singularity: tech will continue to evolve at exponential pace, changing human destiny, giving humans the option of immortality. In the Wall Street Journal, he deflected criticism from theologians who insist death is necessary by saying: “Oh, death, that tragic thing? That’s really a good thing.”

Kurzweil sees humans heading for a tipping point — adding more than a year to our life expectancy each year. Biology is inherently an information process, Kurzweil argues, and in the coming decades, humans will gain the ability to not only turn off disease genes and program our own biology.

So it’s not surprising that tech entrepreneurs find creative ways to blow off steam in their spare time.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, for example, spends time learning flying trapeze, while former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is an avid beekeeper.

From DIY rocketry and zero gravity flight to sonic meditation, many tech execs need more than yoga to claim their me time — and say it helps them feel more fulfilled, relaxed, productive at work. But it’s also a revealing insight into what makes them tick. Here, in their own words, 8 entrepreneurs explain their favorite extra-curricular activity.

name: Ray Kurzweil
hobby: collecting Alice in Wonderland memorabilia
day job: currently a director of engineering at Google, heading up a team working on machine intelligence

Ray Kurzweil discovered a painting of the girl Alice Liddell by artist Terry Guyer — the inspiration behind book Alice in Wonderland — in a fair in San Francisco, CA.

In his own words: The first piece I collected related to Alice was a facsimile of a 90 page handwritten manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, written by Charles Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll.

The manuscript was written for and inspired by Alice Liddell. Later he expanded this into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and it became a world-wide success.

Decades later Miss Liddell needed money and sold the original manuscript. I have since collected various original editions, annotated editions of the book, and some paintings.

Alice is emblematic of the imaginative alternative realities we will create with emerging tech.

Once I was walking in a San Francisco, CA city fair and recognized the girl Alice Liddell in a painting by artist Terry Guyer. I was familiar with the photograph of Alice by Charles Dodgson — that Guyer had based his painting on — so I bought the painting.

I also have a painting of the White Rabbit by Grace Slick and a hologram of the Cheshire Cat, who disappears when you move leaving only his smile.

related reading:
Terry Guyer | main
Terry Guyer | oil portraits: main
Terry Guyer | oil portraits: Alice Liddell

Lime Light Agency | art of Grace Slick

image | portrait of girl Alice Liddell, inspiration for Alice in Wonderland
Oil painting by artist Terry Guyer from a photo by Lewis Carroll.

Back in the 1980s — when we were lugging around our Motorola bricks  — he already predicted a bunch of things that are now part of everyday life.

This includes self-driving cars, prosthetic legs for paraplegics, and wirelessly accessing info on the internet. He also reckons singularity, where human intelligence will merg with non-biological technology, will happen in 2045.

“The non-biological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that’s a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today,” he said in an interview. “I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical tech will add one additional year, every year to your life expectancy. By that I don’t mean life expectancy based on your birthday, but rather your remaining life expectancy.”

He went on to say that we might be able to just hack our bodies and live forever.

Explaining the accelerating rate of technical progress, Kurzweil said technical developments form very predictable trajectories, and those trajectories are exponential.

Consider the progress of the computing industry, he said. He spoke about his cell phone, which he said is several billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer he used as a student at MIT.*

“I went to MIT because it was so advanced that it actually had a computer in the late 1960s,” Kurzweil said. “It took up the floor of a building. Still, this cell phone is thousands of times more powerful, and a million times less expensive. That’s a several billion-fold increase in price|performance. It’s also a tiny fraction of the size.”

Kurzweil said 4 years ago Google founder Larry Page and he were asked by the National Academy of Engineering to study emerging energy tech. Page and Kurzweil selected solar due to its exponential growth. Kurzweil said solar has been around for over 25 years, and its market share has doubled every 2 years.

Kurzweil explained, “In 2012 solar panels were producing 0.5% of the world’s energy supply. Some people dismissed it, saying it’s nice but at a half percent solar is a fringe player, not going to solve the problem. They were ignoring the exponential growth — like they ignored the exponential growth of the internet and human genome project. Half a percent is only 8 doublings away from 100%.

“Now 4 years later solar has doubled twice again. Now solar panels produce 2% of the world’s energy, right on schedule. People dismiss it saying 2% is nice, but a fringe player. That ignores the exponential growth — which means it’s only 6 doublings or 12 years from 100%.”

2 years ago Kurzweil presented this to the prime minister of Israel, who attended his class at the MIT Sloan School in the 1970s. Kurzweil said the prime minster asked him a question, “Do we have enough sunlight to do this with a doubling 7 more times?”

Kurzweil said, “Yes. After we double 7 more times, and meeting 100% of the world’s energy needs, we’ll still be using only one part in 10,000 of the sunlight we have. It’s not true we’re running out of energy. We’re only running out of resources if we stick with 19th century tech.”

* MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology

set | background on 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering
Highlighting the global challenges for humanity with featured solutions from field leaders.

Wikipedia | Grand Challenges

National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: main
National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: challenges list
National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: report
National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: committee — members list
National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: committee — Ray Kurzweil

list | 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering
Developed by the National Academy of Engineering.*

1. Advance personalized learning

A growing appreciation of individual preferences and aptitudes has led toward personalized learning — instruction is tailored to a student’s individual needs.

Given the diversity of individual preferences, and the complexity of each human brain, developing teaching methods that optimize learning will require engineering solutions of the future.

2. Make solar energy economical

Currently solar energy provides less than 1% of the world’s total energy, but it has the potential to provide much more.

3. Enhance virtual reality

Within many specialized fields, from psychiatry to education, virtual reality is becoming a powerful new tool for training practitioners and treating patients, in addition to its growing use in various forms of entertainment.

4. Reverse engineer the brain

A lot of research has been focused on creating thinking machines — computers capable of emulating human intelligence— however, reverse-engineering the brain could have multiple impacts that go far beyond artificial intelligence and will promise great advances in health care, manufacturing, and communication.

5. Engineer better medicines

Engineering can enable the development of new systems to use genetic information, sense small changes in the body, assess new drugs, and deliver vaccines to provide health care directly tailored to each person.

6. Advance health informatics

As computers have become available for all aspects of human endeavors, there is now a consensus that a systematic approach to health informatics – the acquisition, management, and use of information in health — can greatly enhance the quality and efficiency of medical care and the response to widespread public health emergencies.

7. Restore and improve urban infrastructure

Infrastructure is the combination of fundamental systems that support a community, region, or country. Society faces the formidable challenge of modernizing the fundamental structures that will support our civilization in centuries ahead.

8. Secure cyberspace

Computer systems are involved in the management of almost all areas of our lives; from electronic communications, and data systems, to controlling traffic lights to routing airplanes. It is clear that engineering needs to develop innovations for addressing a long list of cybersecurity priorities

9. Provide access to clean water

About 1 out of every 6 people living today do not have adequate access to water, and more than double that number lack basic sanitation, for which water is needed. It’s not that the world does not possess enough water – it is just not always located where it is needed.

10. Provide energy from fusion

Fusion is the energy source for the sun. The challenges facing the engineering community are to find ways to scale up the fusion process to commercial proportions, in an efficient, economical, and environmentally benign way.

11. Prevent nuclear terror

Engineering shares the formidable challenges of finding the dangerous nuclear material in the world, keeping track of it, securing it, and detecting its diversion or transport for terrorist use.

12. Manage the nitrogen cycle

It doesn’t offer as catchy a label as “global warming,” but human-induced changes in the global nitrogen cycle pose engineering challenges just as critical as coping with the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels for energy.

13. Develop carbon sequestration methods

The growth in emissions of carbon dioxide, implicated as a prime contributor to global warming, is a problem that can no longer be swept under the rug. But perhaps it can be buried deep underground or beneath the ocean.

14. Engineer the tools for scientific discovery

Grand experiments and missions of exploration always need engineering expertise to design the tools, instruments, and systems that make it possible to acquire new knowledge about the physical and biological worlds.

* National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine

related reading:
news | Ray Kurzweil proposes entrepreneurial peace fund and renewable-energy initiatives to Israeli leaders

video | the future of wind + solar power
Current challenges to productivity and consistency.

Prager University | Is green energy, particularly wind and solar energy, the solution to our climate and energy problems? Or should we be relying on things like natural gas, nuclear energy, and even coal for our energy needs and environmental obligations? Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress explains.

related reading:
Prager Unviversity | YouTube channel
Prager University | main

That may be tough to swallow, given that solar currently only supplies around 2% of global energy. But Kurzweil’s predictions have been overwhelmingly correct over the last 2 decades.

Kurzweil’s basic point, reported by Solar Power World, was that while solar is still tiny, it has begun to reliably double its market share every 2 years — today’s 2% share is up from 0.5% in 2012.

Many analysts extend growth linearly from that sort of pattern, concluding we’ll see 0.5% annual growth in solar in the future, reaching 12% solar share in 20 years. But linear analysis ignores what Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns — that as new technologies get smaller and cheaper, their growth becomes exponential.

So instead of looking at year over year growth in percentage terms, Kurzweil says we should look at the rate of growth — the fact that solar market share is doubling every 2 years. If the current 2% share doubles every two years, solar should have a 100% share of the market in 12 years.

Technically, that would suggest solar would have a 128% share of the market in 12 years — highlighting the fact that Kurzweil’s prediction is only partially grounded in the real world. Even 100% share is extremely unlikely, fossil fuel giants are not going down without a fight.

But those giants ignore Kurzweil at their own peril. He predicted the internet, cloud computing, and wearable tech nearly 20 years ago — on the basis of the same principle of accelerating returns that’s behind his solar call.

related reading:
Solar Power World | main
Solar Power World | “Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts solar industry dominance in 12 years”

PBS | What if we could overcome disease and aging to extend our lives indefinitely? Inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil says that’s a reality that’s coming soon. He sees living forever in our future. Kurzweil reflects on the exponential growth of technology and the promise of human immortality.

Part of the PBS* News Hour special series Brief but Spectacular.

related reading:
PBS | News Hour : main
PBS | News Hour : Brief but Spectacular

full transcript | Inventor Ray Kurzweil sees immortality in our lifetime
With PBS News Hour host Judy Woodruff.

Judy Woodruff: And now to another in our Brief but Spectacular series.

Tonight, we hear from inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil about immortality and the exponential growth of technology. Since 2012, Kurzweil has been a director of engineering at Google.

Ray Kurzweil: Our immediate reaction to death is that it’s a tragedy. And that’s really the correct reaction. We have rationalized it, saying, oh, that tragic thing that’s looming, that’s actually a good thing. But now we can actually seriously talk about a scenario where we will be able to extend our longevity indefinitely.

I decided to become an inventor when I was 5. I would bring back broken bicycles, radios. This was an era where you would allow a 5 year old to roam the neighborhood and do this. And I had this idea, if I could just figure out how to put all these things together, I could solve any problem.

Ray Kurzweil: I wrote a program that could recognize the patterns in melodies from famous composers and write original music. So I went on this show I’ve Got a Secret hosted by Steve Allen. And my secret was, I had built and programmed a computer that composed music. I created a program that could recognize printed letters in any type and created a reading machine for the blind.

Probably, the most important theme I have talked about is the exponential growth of information technology. Price, performance, and capacity of information technology progresses predictably and exponentially. It doubles every period of time. So this little computer is actually billions of times more powerful per dollar than the computer I used when I was an undergraduate.

We will do that again in the next 25 years. And we will have computers the size of blood cells, little robotic devices that can go through our bloodstream, its capability thousands or millions-fold by connecting to the cloud. That’s a 2030s scenario.

We have been expanding our life expectancy for thousands of years. It was 19 1,000 years ago, 37 in 1800. We’re going to get to a point 10, 15 years from now where we’re adding more time than is going by to our remaining life expectancy.

People say, oh, I don’t want to live past 90. But you know, I talk to 90 year olds, and they definitely want to live to 91 and to 100. People sometimes say that death gives meaning to life because it makes time short, but actually death is a great robber of meaning, of relationships, of knowledge.

We’re going to be able to overcome disease and aging. Most of our thinking will be nonbiological. That will be backed up, so part of it gets wipes away, you can recreate it. And we will be able to extend our lives indefinitely. I would rather use that word than forever.

My name is Ray Kurzweil, and this is my Brief but Spectacular take on our exponential future.

Judy Woodruff: And you can watch more Brief but Spectacular episodes on our website.

books | by Ray Kurzweil & Terry Grossman, MD on longevity

Ray Kurzweil has authored 2 best selling books on high tech medicine and the breakthroughs in science heralding a future of health and even immortality, co-authored with visionary practitioner Terry Grossman, MD.

1. book | Fantastic Voyage: live long enough to live forever

about | Immortality is within our grasp. In Fantastic Voyage, futurist Ray Kurzweil teams up with life extension expert Terry Grossman, MD, to consider the benefits to human health and longevity promised by leading edge medicine — and how you can take advantage of startling advances. Citing extensive research that sound as radical as the most speculative science fiction, Kurzweil and Grossman offer a program designed to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you should be in good health and good spirits when more extreme life extending, life enhancing technologies in development, become available. This bridge to the future will enable us to make the journey from this century to the next.

2. book | Transcend: 9 steps to living well forever

about | This groundbreaking book by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD marshals thousands of scientific studies to make the case that new developments in medicine and tech will allow us to radically extend our life expectancies and slow down the aging process. Soon, our notion of what it means to be a 55 year old will be as outdated as an 8 track tape player.

Transcend presents a practical, enjoyable program so that readers can live long enough — and remain healthy long enough — to take full advantage of the biotech and nanotech advances that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace during the years ahead. This easy-to-follow program will help readers transcend boundaries of our genetic legacy and live long enough to live forever.

To help readers remember the 9 key components of the program, Kurzweil and Grossman have arranged them into a mnumonic.

Talk with your doctor
Relaxation
Assessment
Nutrition
Supplements
Calorie reduction
Exercise
New technologies
Detoxification

* PBS is Public Broadcasting Service

Another artificial intelligence called Deep Blue, built by IBM, was used 20 years ago to beat the world’s chess champion, spelling the beginning of machine learning’s rivalry with human ability. What does this new artificial intelligence victory mean for the future of AI?

James Barrett explores this question in his book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era in which he interviews futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Alpha Go is artificial intelligence in a narrow sense, it can only be used to play go. But our brains can do many different tasks, humans have a universal intelligence. However, this development can lead to the creation of a robot, a computer system that has farther reaching abilities, this depth of learning is a very important step.

related reading:
Google | Deep Mind: main
Google | Deep Mind: Alpha Go
Google | Alpha Go using machine learning to master the ancient game of go: summary

Nature | main
Nature | Mastering the game of go with deep neural networks and tree search: paper

Deep Mind | Alpha Go
About the Nature paper.

Our Nature paper describes the technical details behind a new approach to computer go that combines Monte Carlo tree search with deep neural networks that have been trained by supervised learning, from human expert games, and by reinforcement learning from games of self-play.

The game of go is widely viewed as an unsolved “grand challenge” for artificial intelligence. Despite decades of work, the strongest computer go programs still only play at the level of human amateurs. In this paper we describe our go program, Alpha Go. This program was based on general purpose AI methods, using deep neural networks to mimic expert players, and further improving the program by learning from games played against itself.

Alpha Go won over 99% of games against the strongest other go programs. It also defeated the human European champion by 5–0 in an official tournament match. This is the first time ever that a computer program has defeated a professional go player, a feat previously believed to be at least a decade away.

video | How AI beat the world’s top human at Chinese board game of go
Background on the historic artificial intelligence victory.

Nature | Go is an ancient Chinese board game, often viewed as the game computers could never play. Now researchers from Google owned company Deep Mind have proven the nay-sayers wrong, creating an artificial intelligence, called Alpha Go, which has beaten a professional go player for the first time.

In this Nature video, we go behind the scenes to learn about the game, the program and what this means for the future of artificial intelligence.

related reading:
Nature | YouTube channel: main
Nature | YouTube channel: news stream

Business Insider • Tech Insider | Astrophysicist and Star Talk show host Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD sits down with futurist and author Ray Kurzweil for the first time.

Two of the smartest people in the world on what will happen to our brains and everything else.

Star Talk is a podcast and radio show hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD — where comic co-hosts, guest celebrities and scientists discuss astronomy, physics, and everything else about life in the universe.

producer | Kamelia Angelova, Laura Berland, Kevin Reilly, Darren Weaver
producer | Curved Light, Star Talk
executive producer | Helen Matsos

related reading:
Star Talk | main
National Geographic Channel | Star Talk

Business Insider • Tech Insider | YouTube channel: Business Insider
Business Insider • Tech Insider | YouTube channel: Tech Insider
Business Insider • Tech Insider | YouTube channel: Star Talk
Business Insider • Tech Insider | presented by Boeing + Star Talk: innovators

Wikipedia | Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD
Wikipedia | Star Talk: radio show
Wikipedia | Star Talk: television show

Boeing | innovation series

American Museum of Natural History | Hayden Planetarium: main
American Museum of Natural History | Hayden Planetarium: Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD

Business Insider • Tech Insider  | The world’s leading futurist Ray Kurzweil isn’t shocked by much. Except for this one thing. Kurzweil, one of the world’s leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism, has a strategy on how to prolong his own life — until science figures out how to make us immortal.

But he still can’t wrap his head around this one fact. The futurist is also author of best selling books, including The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind.

producer | Will Wei
editor | Christine Nguyen

transcript | What is the one scientific fact that blows your mind?

“Well, the size of the universe blows my mind. There are billions and billions, to quote Carl Sagan, of stars in our galaxy. And there are billions and billions of galaxies. So the vastness of the universe is quite extraordinary. But it appears that we may be the only place — at least within our light sphere — that we know about, in terms of light coming to us, that has a technologically capable civilization.

Because if the other ones were out there, I believe we would have noticed them already. That’s a long discussion. But we may be in the lead, despite the vastness of the universe.”

— Ray Kurzweil

related reading:
Business Insider | main
Business Insider | YouTube channel

Tech Insider | main
Tech Insider | YouTube channel

gallery | Carl Sagan collection

image | Portrait illustration of Carl Sagan by Heather Brennan.

Heather Brennan | main
Heather Brennan | Billions upon Billions

image | Quote from Carl Sagan by AZ Quotes.

AZ Quotes | main
AZ Quotes | Carl Sagan

image | Carl Sagan quote print by Leyda V Campbell.

Leyda Design | main
Leyda Design | Etsy

“Technology’s at its best when used to heal, not hinder, and enhance human potential,” says Dave Zaboski, an animator and classically trained painter who gave a keynote February 9, 2016 at the UBM* conference Medical Design + Manufacturing, called MD+M west.

“The ability of technologists to improve the lives of others is increasing dramatically. It’s all about exponentially accelerating technologies empowering like minded people aligned around a shared goal.”

Consider for instance the Limbitless Solutions project, a student led non-profit based at the University of Central Florida, which distributes 3D printed prosthetic arms to children for free. To date, the group has distributed 2000 body powered arms to kids in more than 40 countries.

“Behind the curtain, all of us are students. When I first started, I had no idea that it was just college students getting together to create these arms for someone else,” said Stephanie Valderrama, Limbitless creative director.

She shared the keynote stage with Dominique Courbin, director of production at Limbitless, and renowned futurist and author Ray Kurzweil.

gallery | UBM event Medical Design + Manufacturing

image | Exhibitors gather at UBM event Medical Design + Manufacturing. Over 2,100 innovative suppliers demo latest, ground breaking technologies and comprehensive products.

The program offered interactive hands-on sessions and panel discussions led by industry thought leaders with valuable insights.

image | Medical device manufacturers look for inspiration and cutting edge products and services.

“It was beautiful to see that passion really change in our community, to see that we’re not all engineers as well. I’m an artist, we have fashion designers. We’re open to have others help create these arms.”

The group made all of its current prosthetic designs open source, releasing upgraded plans so anyone can use or help create future design iterations. We’re at a unique point in time when the divisions between traditionally separate fields are blurring, clearing the way for insights from niche disciplines to be applied to other fields.

“We can now fully cross pollinate different disciplines to solve problems and challenges in a more holistic way,” Dave Zaboski said, who also teaches creativity at Singularity University, which Ray Kurzweil co-founded. “In archetypal terms, we have concluded our individual hero’s journey — our deep dive into particular discipline specialties — we can now share expertise to solve bigger problems.”

This was a theme in Ray Kurzweil’s keynote address at MD+M west. Kurzweil anticipates continued advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning to have profound cultural implications.

People should question whether the same types of problems that have affected humanity in the past will continue to do so in the future, Kurzweil said. While the earth’s quickly growing population is concerning, tech will ultimately meet the resources and needs of humanity in the future. “I think we will avoid the kind of problems we had before,” Kurzweil said.

Kurzweil pointed to internet history. “If you remember the 1990s, there was the internet craze, and if you had the URL dog.com, you were a billionaire.

“Then in 2000, people took stock and said you can’t really make money with these websites. And we had the internet crash,” he recounted. “After the exponential growth continued, and we had mature understanding of what was required, we now have internet companies like Google that are worth half a trillion dollars.”

Kurzweil and Limbitless team members Stephanie Valderrama and Dominique Courbin asked how tech can solve previously unsurmountable challenges. “Ray Kurzweil certainly has optimism in his talk. The work Dominique and Stephanie are doing is beautifully aligned with a whole view of tech. That’s the future,” Zaboski said.

gallery | UBM event Medical Design + Manufacturing

image | At UBM conference MD+M west, Dave Zaboski animator and classically trained painter, gave a speech and sketched Ray Kurzweil, who gave a keynote.

related reading:
Dave Zaboski | The Divine Line
Dave Zaboski | The Alchemy of Creativity 

keynote | Science, Technology and Invention: strategies to create the future
by Ray Kurzweil

about | The democratization of innovation is a turbulent process with rapid creation, violent destruction, many winners and many losers. Despite the apparent chaos, we can discern predictable patterns. The pace of innovation itself is doubling every decade. The overall price-performance and capacity of every form of information technology grows exponentially, generally doubling in a year or less. As information technology achieves each new level of price-performance and capacity, new applications become feasible and existing business models lose their viability.

Another implication is that the tools of disruptive change have been democratized. A couple of students created Google on their thousand dollar laptops. A few years later, a couple of undergraduates created Facebook with tools that everyone has. The rate of change is now so rapid that even three to five year business plans need to consider that every level of an industry will undergo major changes during that period.

It’s not just the devices we carry around that are influenced by these exponential changes. Health and medicine is now an information technology with the collection of the human genome, the means of changing genes in a mature individual, and the ability to design interventions on computers and to test them on biological simulators. Even energy will be transformed as we apply nanotechnology to the design of solar panels and energy storage devices. The means to change the world are in everyone’s hands.

keynote bio | Ray Kurzweil: influential author, inventor, futurist. Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc ranked him no. 8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS selected Kurzweil as one of the “revolutionaries who made America.” He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists.

That’s not all. Kurzweil was the first to invent many things — the first CCD flatbed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, and large vocabulary speech recognition, are among his list of creations.

gallery | UBM event Medical Design + Manufacturing

image | Keynote speaker Ray Kurzweil anticipates advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning to have profound cultural implications.

related reading:
UBM | events
UBM | events — Medical Design + Manufacturing: east
UBM | events — Medical Design + Manufacturing: west 
UBM | Med Tech World

Qmed | main
Qmed | The future of medical technology according to Ray Kurzweil
Qmed | How unbridled optimism can spur innovation

* UBM is United Business Media

Within 30 years, machines will be smarter than humans and have power over society, says Kurzweil, renowned inventor and author. He sees an immensely bright future. He predicts:

• There will be more of everything: humans will become funnier, sexier and more creative.
• This technology is a continuation of evolution. And it will make us smarter.

Prompted by today’s Nobel Prize events, our topic is the future of intelligence. Confidence among the distinguished scholars and successful entrepreneurs participating in the Nobel talks is strong. They firmly believe that human beings are becoming more educated, working more and more with machines that are increasingly intelligent — which will bring us solutions to most social problems.

Who really has seen the light is Ray Kurzweil, now a Director of Engineering at Google to make computers more teachable. The trend is in the right direction, he says.

The world is becoming wealthier and more peaceful. Unfortunately, these positive trends are under-reported in the media, creating unnecessary pessimism. This also applies to concerns that intelligent machines will take away jobs from humans.

That fear of losing work to mechanization is 200 years old, arising among English weavers during early days of industrialization.They were right, their jobs disappeared. But new, even more qualified jobs are created all the time.

Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines is the most optimistic text I’ve ever read. Sometimes it’s provocative.

His book claims there is no reason to refrain from machines, and the path we’ve embarked on is a road paved with gold. Risks? Well, maybe. The machines are quickly becoming so intelligent that they constitute a power that must not fall into the wrong hands.

“We must,” writes Kurzweil, “use technology in accordance with our human values.” At the same time, these risks could be brushed aside without reasoning. It is optimistic to believe in humanity’s capacity to rein in the forces that liberate it.

The origin of Kurzweil’s optimism lies in the exponential growth curve. Artificial intelligence capacity increases exponentially, by doubling per a given unit of time, rather than growing linearly. The capability curve bends dramatically upward.

The exponential growth of computing power — that makes it enormously cheaper, faster and smaller — will enable us to enhance our biological intelligence on a large scale. First, by various electronic implants, partly through miniature computers the size of blood cells that link our brains to the cloud.

I ask if this is really an example of progress. Since we will all have access to the same cloud, since the connection will be so fast and so cheap, won’t that equalize all people without giving an individual an advantage? It is not fundamentally about being forced to run, just to stand still?

Kurzweil says, “Well, the fact is that we all become smarter over time. Before, it was through education, now it is through upgrades to the brain that will connect us with all human knowledge. But this does not mean that we all become equally intelligent, even if we have the capacity and conditions. We are leveraging our capabilities in different ways, and I think that the differences will increase in the future.”

The singularity is the hotly debated time in the future when machines’ intelligence outruns humans, then the technology finally takes over the development of society while becoming incomprehensible to us. We simply will not understand how it works anymore, nor where it is heading. Incomprehensibly intelligent machines will create even more intelligent machines, ad infinitum.

His 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, places the singularity in year 2045. What I wonder is how it’s even theoretically possible to be optimistic — or indeed pessimistic — about a process that we are challenged to understand, by definition.

Kurzweil explains, “The singularity is a metaphor taken from physics — we have enough knowledge to understand what would happen if we were sucked into a black hole, for example. We can describe how we experience singularity, although we probably would be destroyed rather quickly. And in the same way I can in my books discuss what happens after 2045. What I foresee is a great intelligence and knowledge explosion, comparable to what happened two million years ago when we evolved from primates to hominids. The difference is that everything is going to change so immeasurably quicker when we can upload the brain’s neocortex to the cloud — and to different kinds of synthetic neocortex.”

But, I insist, if we look at history and how people treat less intelligent species, is there really a reason to be optimistic about super-intelligent machines, that would act against us? Isn’t surrender the price for survival?

Kurzweil replies, “No, when you talk about the different species, it is not a proper analogy. We are our tools and machines, it is not about a contradiction or conflict. We will fuse with them. It’s already happening now.”

Which is hard to dispute and does not exclude the need for a continued dialog about where the convergence is actually different from subjugation. Kurzweil maintains that people will become immortal.

about | Ray Kurzweil is a United States writer and researcher, born in 1948. He is active in the computer field of optical character recognition and machine learning.

Among other things, he invented the first machine that converts written text to spoken reading, an assistive tool for the blind. Since 2012, he is a Director of Engineering at Google.

Google’s resident futurist and famed inventor Ray Kurzweil takes 100 pills a day to help him reach singularity, the point at which he believes exponential developments in technology will allow him to live forever.

He stopped by our office and talked to us about food science and supplemental nutrition. Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism. He is author of 5 best selling books, including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind.

related reading:
Tech Insider | main
Tech Insider | YouTube channel

Business Insider | main
Business Insider | YouTube channel

As author, futurist, and inventor Ray Kurzweil — who also happens to be my father — shared in his talk, innovators and entrepreneurs should internalize this exponential rate of progression before launching their projects.

By doing so, we put ourselves in a position to accurately time our projects, and best take advantage of tomorrow’s capabilities as soon as they are available.

video | Ray Kurzweil talk at Cloud CEO Summit

Insights on cloud computing

Ray Kurzweil shared insights into what the current rate of technological progress portends for information technology and health care. Check out his full talk here.

Cloud CEO Summit gathered 100 of the top cloud CEOs who are defining the future of cloud computing — hosted by Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Bessemer Venture Partners presented its State of the Cloud Report. We are pleased to make this year’s 2015 version public. This report provides an in depth look into the state of the cloud, industry trends, future predictions, and key metrics that cloud start-ups can use to benchmark trajectories.

The State of the Cloud Report draws on our experiences as early cloud evangelists, operators, and investors in the space. Through the years we have collectively met with thousands of private and public cloud companies, invested in almost 100 of them directly, and developed extensive custom data sources and assets.

This is only the beginning. We remain bullish on the cloud and predict the Bessemer Venture Partners Cloud Index — tracking top public companies — will triple in the next 5 years, reaching $500 billion of total market cap by 2020.

Bessemer Venture Partners | State of the Cloud Report: 2015
Key findings from the report.

the cloud wins

1. first category — customer relationship management — goes over 50% cloud in 2016
2. now at 42 public cloud companies in Bessemer Venture Partners Cloud Index — up 160% in 3 years
3. Bessemer Venture Partners Cloud Index crosses $500 billion by 2020

major trends + coming disruption

1. industry cloud comes of age
2. cyber security a threat + opportunity
3. business-to-dealer opportunity for developers + entrepreneurs
4. further commoditization of infrastructure-as-a-service
5. more mergers + acquisitions from legacy vendors ahead
6. dawn of enterprise mobile

related reading:
Bessemer Venture Partners | main
Bessemer Venture Partners | cloud computing
Bessemer Venture Partners | State of the Cloud Report: 2015

about | Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers and futurists, with a 30 year track record of accurate predictions. Called a restless genius by The Wall Street Journal and the ultimate thinking machine by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the rightful heir to Thomas Edison. PBS selected him as one of 16 revolutionaries who made America.

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Kurzweil received the 2015 Technical Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in the field of music technology. He is recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds honors from 3 United States presidents.

He authored New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind. He is a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

They talked about evil and progress, then the audience went upstairs for cocktails. Steinsaltz is a writer on religious principles, Jewish theorist, and a popular university and radio commentator.

Kurzweil is a prolific inventor and writer, known for his predictions about technology, who brought his kids up Jewish in Massachusetts. He is a director of engineering at Google.

“Our tools are better and better. Our brains are not better. There are depths of human viciousness and human evil. We have a little hell within us,” said Steinsaltz.

“The amount of violence in the world is at its lowest level ever,” said Kurzweil, who grew up a Unitarian Universalist. “Life has already expanded.” Kurzweil cited political theorist Hannah Arendt on evil.

“That won’t be helped by more information,” Steinsaltz said. “It’s not just information. As communication has improved, so has democracy,” said Kurzweil.

“Democracy is a nice name,” Steinsaltz said. “Democracy is a good idea, and democracy is theoretically with people that have equal intelligence, democracy can work.”

Kurzweil quoted Winston Churchill on democracy. Churchill was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 1940s and 1950s. “The most beautiful time in the history of Rome was the time of the emperors,” Steinsaltz said.

And then, just as Steinsaltz seemed on the brink of a broad argument against democratic rule, the moderator cut everyone off and asked them to predict the future. The rabbi said most people are like chemical elements, but some are like radioactive elements, “the moving power,” he said. Kurzweil did not respond directly.

The setting was a dinner for the Aleph Society at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, New York. After, the audience retired for drinks, a chicken dinner and dessert.

Rabbi Adin Even Israel Steinsaltz is a philosopher, social critic and author called by Time magazine a “once in a millennium scholar.” His work in education earned him the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor.

audience comments

The dialog sounds like cynicism in one corner and optimism in another. When times are good, which orientation prevails? I wonder if Judaism isn’t paddling upstream in an era of stability and prosperity. Even more to the point, was Judaism ever about cynicism? I thought it was supposed to be the antidote to it. — Dana Lieberman

I consider futurist Ray Kurzweil one of the greatest minds today. In his sphere, he’s on a plane with Einstein. His philosophy, thinking and book The Singularity Is Near is genius. I personally heard Kurzweil speak at a packed audience lecture in Las Vegas, Nevada in January 2013. I posit the singularity, nanotechnology and molecular assemblers are our future. — Clyde Dinkins

related reading:
Aleph Society | main
Museum of Jewish Heritage | main

Wikipedia | Adin Even Israel Steinsaltz
Wikipedia | Hannah Arendt
Wikipedia | Winston Churchill

listen to the show | In this episode of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tech trends radio show Spark, hostess Nora Young interviews Ray Kurzweil on his principles for understanding the brain’s organization and functions, heralding new advances that could result in computers that mimic human abilities.

full transcript | You can think of the brain as an amazing feat of engineering. Researchers struggle to piece together just how the brain does what it does — how nerve cells deep in the neocortex, a layer unique to us mammals, are involved in higher order functions like emotions, gut feelings and jokes.

“For the first time now we can see inside a living, thinking brain with enough resolution to really see what’s going on,” Ray Kurzweil told Nora Young on radio show Spark in an interview. “We not only see your brain create your thoughts, but we see your thoughts create your brain, because every time we think about something we’re creating new connections that embody that thought. It’s said ‘you are what you eat’ but really, you are what you think.”

Kurzweil is an inventor, author and futurist. In his new book, How to Create a Mind: the secret of human thought revealed, he discusses how the brain creates thought, and examines how we can use our understanding of that process to create better artificial intelligence. He wants to reverse engineer the brain, if that’s possible.

“If we understand how the brain works, we can create human like intelligence in our machines, and then use that to make ourselves smarter,” Kurzweil explained.

Since the late 1980s, Kurzweil has written extensively on where he thinks humanity goes next. Kurzweil is a steadfast proponent of a particularly potent vision of AI: not just that we can create something that can pass for intelligence, but that we can create something that does what humans do when we think.

Human intelligence is already considerably dependent on digital technology. “I would say we’re already in that process…all the gadgets and services we use like Google and Wikipedia do make us smarter,” Kurzweil said.

First, though, we have to wrap our heads around one important concept: the pattern recognition theory of the mind, which Kurzweil considers the fundamental algorithm for thinking. “I’ve always felt that what the human brain does well is recognize patterns,” he said.

“And now that we’re actually discovering how the brain works by looking inside it, we’re discovering that’s what it does. The same algorithm is repeated throughout the neocortex.” And there’s a hierarchy, from low level pattern recognition like recognizing capital letters to higher level functions like identifying humor or irony.

“We have this capacity for hierarchical thinking. We have ideas that are composites of other ideas, and those ideas are composites of other ideas. We have this very elaborate hierarchy in the brain,” he said. “And animals that don’t have a neocortex can’t do hierarchical thinking.”

Of course, human thought is far from perfect. We’re subjective and biased. Is there a risk of mimicking our flaws in addition to our strengths? “As we take on broader challenges, imperfection is inherently part of the test,” said Kurzweil. “But I think this hierarchical structure that the neocortex represents is the best way to be intelligent. There are limitations that we can recognize, one of which is just capacity.”

One of the goals is to expand the neocortex, according to Kurzweil. He pointed out that “300 million pattern recognizers [what our brains are currently made of, on average] sounds like a big number, and it was big enough for humans to master language and art and science, but it’s also very limited. We see that in how long it takes us to master one book, and how many different subjects or languages you can learn. We could use a greater neocortex. Why not a billion?”

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation | Spark

about | Spark radio show is all about tech, trends, and fresh ideas. With an eye on the future, host Nora Young guides you through this dynamic era of technology led change, and connects your life to the big ideas changing our world right now. Spark is produced by Michelle Parise, Dan Misener, Kent Hoffman and Nora Young.

Nora Young was the founding host of the CBC Radio show Definitely Not the Opera, where she often focused on new media and technology. As a journalist, author, and speaker, Nora Young explores how new technology shapes the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. Her book is The Virtual Self. Her favorite tech is her bicycle.

related reading:
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation | Spark
book | The Virtual Self: how our digital lives are altering the world around us by Nora Young
blog | The Sniffer: New Directions in Trends + Tech by Nora Young and Cathi Bond
blog | At the Corner of Technology + Culture by Nora Young

Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist and inventor, envisions a more cooperative future. He says the human brain will soon merge with computer networks to form a hybrid artificial intelligence. “In the 2030s we’re going to connect directly from the neocortex to the cloud,” said Kurzweil. “When I need a few thousand computers, I can access that wirelessly.”

Creating artificial minds

In his 2012 book, How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil said the neocortex of the human brain contains 300 million pattern processors that are responsible for human thought. These pattern processors could be artificially replicated, he argued, allowing artificial intelligence to surpass human ability.

That wouldn’t make the human brain obsolete, though. By linking our brains to cloud computers, humans could expand the limits of our own computing ability — and eventually, upload our own brains to the cloud. “As you get to the late 2030s or 2040s, our thinking will be predominately non-biological and the non-biological part will ultimately be so intelligent and have such vast capacity it’ll be able to model, simulate and understand fully the biological part,” said Kurzweil. “We will be able to fully back up our brains.”

Kurzweil said human intelligence has already merged with technology, although not to the extent that he predicts. “A kid in Africa with a smartphone has more access to human knowledge than the president of the United States did 15 years ago. I finally figured out how to live forever in a robot body,” he joked.

Fear of artificial intelligence

Kurzweil acknowledged artificial intelligence is a scary prospect. He argued that humans will eventually become comfortable sharing the world with AI.

“It’s helping us diagnose disease and cure disease, alleviate poverty, clean up the environment. I’m optimistic, but that doesn’t mean we should be lulled into a lack of concern,” said Kurzweil.

“I think this concern will die down as we see more and more positive benefits of artificial intelligence and gain more confidence that we can control it.”

Kurzweil also tackled the question of legal rights for artificial intelligences, a popular science fiction motif. To him, the rise of intelligent machines connected to human consciousness will force humanity to rethink the idea of rights. “It wasn’t very long ago that women didn’t have the right to vote,” noted Kurzweil in response to an audience question. “We’ll realize that consciousness, free will does not require a biological substrate.”

A history of bold predictions

Kurzweil has a long history of making bold predictions about the future of technology. Much of his writing has focused on the singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence.

In a 2010 essay, Kurzweil reviewed 147 predictions — essay | “How my predictions are faring”  — he made  in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. Of those predictions, Kurzweil determined that 78 percent were “entirely correct” as of the end of 2009, and eight percent were “essentially correct.”

Those predictions included:

• The rise of portable computing.
• The availability of wearable computing.
• The removal of keyboards from portable devices.
• Cables disappearing in favour of wireless technology.
• Computer displays built into eyeglasses, and,
• The distribution of media such as books, music, and movies in an entirely digital form.

An expert in the artificial intelligence field of pattern recognition, Kurzweil is known for inventing software that could scan a document written in any font and turn it into digital text. He was also a pioneer in text-to-speech technology and computerized speech recognition. He has received numerous awards and accolades in the fields of engineering and technology design. Kurzweil joined Google as director of engineering in 2013.

explore the series:
The Huffington Post + The World Post  | Exponential Technology — series
The World Post  | YouTube channel
The Huffington Post  | YouTube channel

full series | articles:

• article link | 1.  Peter Diamandis’ Bold a reminder of how entrepreneurs will control the world’s fate
by Vivek Wadhwa | 3.25.2015

• article link | 2.  Let’s treat robots like Yo Yo Ma’s cello: as an instrument for human intelligence
by Nicholas Agar | 09.10.2015

• article link | 3.  Controversial philosopher says man and machine will fuse into one being
— An interview with philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.
by Nathan Gardels | 9.10.2015

• article link | 4.  Genome pioneer: we have the dangerous power to control evolution
— An interview with genome and synthetic life scientist J. Craig Venter, PhD.
by Nathan Gardels | 9.10.2015

• article link | 5.  We are sequencing the genomes of the world, and it’s giving us a new vision of life
by Dawn Field | 9.10.2015

• article link | 6.  This 50 cent paper microscope could democratize science
by Aaron Pomerantz | 9.14.2015

• article link | 7.  Can we create an artificial brain?
— This leading neuroengineer thinks it’s dangerous to even try.
by Kathleen Miles | 9.16.2015

• article link | 8.  As sexbot technology advances, ethical and legal questions linger: do me baby, said the robot
— What happens to society when sexbots are everywhere?
by Peter Mellgard | 9.22.2015

• article link | 9.  A post human world: should we rage, rage against the dying of the mites?
by Martin Rees, PhD + Huw Price, PhD | 9.23.2015

• article link | 10. Ray Kurzweil: in the 2030s tiny nanorobots in our brains will make us god like
— Once we’re cyborgs, he says, we’ll be funnier, sexier and more loving.
by Kathleen Miles | 10.1.2015

• article link | 11. The qualities most valued in employees are changing and not how you think
Nicholas Agar | 10.7.2015

10. article summary | Ray Kurzweil: in the 2030s tiny nanobots in our brains will make us god like

Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts humans are going to develop emotions and characteristics of higher complexity, as a result of connecting their brains to computers. Once we’re cyborgs, he said we’re going to be funnier and sexier.

“We’re going to be better at expressing loving sentiment,” Kurzweil said at a recent discussion at Singularity University, Executive Program 2015, which he co-founded with Peter Diamandis, MD.

Kurzweil predicts that in the 2030s, human brains will connect to the cloud, allowing us to send e-mails and photos directly to the brain and back up our thoughts and memories. This will be possible, he says, via nanobots — tiny robots from DNA strands — swimming around in the capillaries of our brain.

He sees the extension of our brain into predominantly non-biological thinking as the next step in the evolution of humans — just as learning to use tools was for our ancestors.

And this extension, he says, will enhance not just our logical intelligence but also our emotional intelligence. “We’re going to add more levels to the hierarchy of brain modules and create deeper levels of expression,” he said.

link | full article

full series | videos:

• watch video | 1. Ray Kurzweil talk at Singularity University
The Huffington Post + The World Post  | Futurist Ray Kurzweil speaks about humans becoming more god like.

• watch video | 2. Ray Kurzweil talk at Singularity University
The Huffington Post + The World Post  | Ray Kurzweil says AI will result in more human jobs, not fewer.

• watch video | 3. Craig Venter, PhD says we now have the power but not the wisdom to control evolution.
The Huffington Post + The World Post  | Craig Venter, PhD explains the near future of synthetic biology and understanding the human genome.

related reading:
Singularity University | main
Singularity University | YouTube channel

Fittingly for a conference discussing the viability of robotics, the closing keynote was futurist, inventor Ray Kurzweil, author of book The Singularity Is Near, and now a director of engineering at Google, with a focus on machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

Kurzweil’s keynote was packed with a whirlwind tour through computing history, bringing us right up to date with 3D printed organs, populated by stem cells.

“Reprogramming biology as a software program to overcome disease is the next frontier,” Kurzweil said. He talked about turning on and off genes and “putting our neocortex on the cloud” so we become a hybrid of biological and non-biological processes, augmenting our limited capabilities, especially while aging.

As the conference drew to a close, Kurzweil said he thought a machine will pass the Turing test convincingly in 2029. There were many people at Robo Business who are spending a lot of money in the hope that that day comes.

related reading:
Boston Consulting Group | main
Boston Consulting Group | “The rise of robotics” — report

Electronic House Publishing | Robo Business
Electronic House Publishing | Robotics Trends
Electronic House Publishing | Robotics Business Review