فصل 7 بخش 1

SECTION 7

JUST DO IT, ENJOY IT, AND SHARE IT!

CHAPTER 7.1

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHTER THAN YOU THINK

The point of living is to believe the best is yet to come.

—PETER USTINOV

Why do most people pursue wealth? It’s because they’re after a greater quality of life. And one thing I know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that anybody can deal with a tough today if he or she feels certain that tomorrow has greater promise.

We all need a compelling future.

So if you’re wondering why we would take time to talk about the future and technological breakthroughs in a financial book, it’s because technology is a hidden asset that every day is compounding its capacity to enrich your life.

There are breakthroughs occurring today and in the months and short years to come that will revolutionize the quality of your life and the lives of everyone else on earth. This tide of technology will offer the opportunity for all boats to rise.

And in financial terms, you know what’s really great? The cost of technology is decreasing while its capacity is geometrically expanding! What does that mean for you? It means that even if you start building wealth late in life, you will likely still have a great quality of life in the future, for even less money than you might think.

Also, learning about these trends in technologies can awaken you to some of the greatest investment opportunities of your lifetime. These technologies are growing exponentially. The time to pay attention to them is right now.

My hope is that this chapter will also inspire you to take greater care of yourself and your family, not only financially but also perhaps physically as well. Without physical health, there is no wealth. Being around long enough to take advantage of some of these huge advances in technology should be a priority—especially after you hear about some of the changes that are unfolding as we speak.

So let’s take a brief journey together and explore the cutting edge of our technological future. I’ll say in advance: this chapter takes an unabashedly positive view. But it’s not just based on my enthusiasm—but rather reflects the work of some of the greatest scientists on the face of the earth. Not those who just predict, but those who deliver what they predict. Individuals who have done everything from decode the human genome, to design the first digital voice recognition system, to develop commercial space shuttles that fly people back and forth to the International Space Station.

Now, I acknowledge that many people have a different, more skeptical view of technology. And perhaps they’ll be right. Some look into the future and see a Terminator-style dystopia of killer robots and genetically altered Frankenfoods. Others look forward to a world of flying cars, like they had in The Jetsons; or android helpers, like Star Wars’s C-3PO; or meat and vegetables that can be grown from single cells to feed the world’s hungry. None of these extreme scenarios has come to pass yet. I choose to look at how technology will be used to make a massive difference in the quality of our lives. I also understand that people often fear new technologies and worry that we’re going too fast.

After all, there has always been a “dark side” to these advances—often because these technologies initially put people out of jobs until they adapt to new forms of employment. As Steven Rattner, the influential financier and columnist, pointed out in the New York Times, even Queen Elizabeth I of England refused to patent a 16th-century knitting machine because it would put her “poor subjects” out of work. But according to Rattner, “The trick is not to protect old jobs . . . but to create new ones. And since the invention of the wheel, that’s what has occurred.” Most of the time, these new tools have been used to enhance human life. And today some of the biggest challenges in the world, from too much carbon dioxide in the air, to a lack of fresh water, to a scarcity of farmland, are being solved by new technologies. And all this seems to be happening overnight. But throughout history, there has also been a minority who will take any tool or technology and use it as a weapon. Electricity can light up a city or kill someone. But there are millions more streetlights than electric chairs. A Boeing jetliner can carry us across oceans or be used as a bomb to murder thousands—but there are millions more flights than hijackings.

It’s natural for human beings to fear the new and unknown, and to focus on worst-case scenarios. Our brains are wired for survival, and that’s how we’ve made it as a species. But our imaginations can also hold us back. Science fiction has made many fear futuristic technologies, like artificial intelligence. But actual scientists and futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, and Juan Enriquez see advanced technologies as an opportunity for humanity to evolve and transform into something better.

So if you’re irritated by an optimistic future, you should move on to the next chapter! But if you’re a person who is truly interested in knowing how technology is shaping our lives, I think this will help you understand what’s available and what’s coming. The way I look at it, you can choose to be fearful about the future, or you can embrace it. But nothing is going to change it.

Why? Because the future is already here.

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

—ALAN KAY

Every ten minutes in America someone is horribly burned. They’re rushed to the hospital in searing pain—one of the most intense pains a human body can suffer. The nurses scrub away the blistered and charred flesh and cover the wound with cadaver skin to keep the person from dying of infection. Can you imagine the skin off a dead body put on top of your own?! If the patient survives, the scarring can be brutal. I’m sure you’ve seen faces, arms, and legs scarred beyond recognition. Sometimes there are multiple surgeries, and healing can take years.

So imagine how one night Matt Uram, a 40-year-old state trooper, finds himself about to become another one of those grim statistics. His life altered forever.

How? He’s next to a bonfire when someone throws a cup of gasoline on the flames, and the burns cover his right arm and the right side of his head and face. The doctors and nurses move fast, cleaning off the blistered skin, disinfecting Matt’s wounds, applying salves. Normally he would be in the burn unit for weeks or months, going through the same agonizing process twice a day. Instead, a team of specialists goes to work with a new technique. They harvest a layer of healthy cells from unburned patches of his own skin. No cadaver skin for Matt! These cells are cultured, and before long, a spray gun is gently painting the wounds with a solution of Matt’s own stem cells.

Three days later, his arms and face are completely healed. (And this miracle has to be seen to be believed! Go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI and see the difference.) There’s barely a scar visible on him. I know it sounds like a scene from a sci-fi film. But it’s a real story that took place in Pittsburgh just a few years ago.

While the technique that healed Matt Uram is still in clinical trials in the United States, a similar stem cell procedure has already been used on hundreds of burn victims in Europe and Australia. Amazing, isn’t it?! Now there’s even a “bio-pen” that allows surgeons to draw healthy cells on layers of bone and cartilage. The cells multiply and grow into nerves, muscle, and bones, healing the damaged section. The technology allows the surgeon to place cells wherever he or she wants them, in an instant. And this is just another one of the incredible new therapies coming online and becoming more affordable for everyone.

If you hadn’t already noticed: the world we live in today is a place of everyday miracles, and change is happening so fast that sometimes we don’t even notice it. Or maybe we just take it for granted.

But if you were to describe the world of 2015 to a person back in 1980, just 35 years ago, he would think what you’re doing is magic! Spraying on stem cells? Hell, it would be a miracle just to talk to someone on the phone while you were driving in your car, right?

We’re used to the idea that we can predict tomorrow by looking at what happened today or yesterday. But that can’t be done anymore. Until very “recently,” change was very rare, and so slow that it was measured in eras: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and so on. Now change is exponential. That means it’s speeding up, making huge leaps forward in shorter periods of time. It means we’re making tools that can transform the quality of our lives faster and better, and they’re available to just about everyone.

The average person today already has options the richest pharaoh in Egypt never dreamed of. Imagine what he would have given to be able to fly in the sky in a chair or in a bed to another part of the world in a few hours, instead of months fighting the oceans? Now you can do that for $494 on Virgin Atlantic Airways.

Even a pharaoh couldn’t spend $200 million to make a movie to entertain himself for two hours. And yet every week, multiple new films are coming out that we can enjoy in the theater for $10 (or $9.99 per month on Netflix).

Let’s face it, we’re living in one of the most extraordinary times on earth. We’ve seen the lifespan of human beings in the last 100 years go from 31 years old to 67 years old—more than doubling. In the same time, the average per capita income (adjusted for inflation) of every person on this planet tripled. One hundred years ago, the majority of Americans used to spend 43% of each day working just to get food. Now, because of advances in agriculture and distribution, it’s 7%.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL!

The first time I met President Bill Clinton back in the early 1990s, I vividly remember sitting down with him and saying, “You know, Mr. President, maybe there’s a way we could communicate electronically.” He looked puzzled, so I said, “I’ve started using this new thing called email. I’ve got an account on AOL. Do you have one?” And the president said, “Oh, I’ve heard about that!” But there was no email account for the president of the United States back then. Now the phone that an Amazonian tribesman carries around the jungle has more instant computing power than Clinton had at his disposal as leader of the free world. He can go online to buy supplies for his cows or pay his child’s school fees. He can translate languages. If he wants, he can access free courses in economics from Yale and math from MIT. We’re living in a whole different universe now, and we’re just at the beginning of the beginning.

And things are getting better, faster, every day. “The future is going to be a whole lot better than you think,” says my dear friend Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation, aerospace engineer, medical doctor, entrepreneur, and all-around great human being. “Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation, in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.” What does this mean for you? It means that even if you screw up and don’t follow through on anything you’ve learned in these pages, in the future you’ll still be able to enjoy a better quality of life than you ever imagined, even if you don’t have a large income. And for those who do, the possibilities are limitless.

The key to abundance is meeting limited circumstances with unlimited thoughts.

—MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

Technology is going to change what we think of as scarcity. It’s the common denominator that makes us fearful. The idea that there won’t be enough of what we need and what we value: water, food, money, resources, time, space, joy, and love. Why do people want to be wealthy? They believe if they are, they’ll always have enough, that they’ll never have to go without. It’s a fear that’s hardwired into our brains.

But scarcity doesn’t have to be a permanent condition. Technology can change it. Did you know that there was a time when the rarest, most precious metal on Earth was . . . aluminum? That’s right! Separating the element from clay used to be incredibly difficult and expensive. Aluminum was the ultimate status symbol in 19th-century France. At an imperial banquet, Napoléon III served the king of Siam with aluminum utensils instead of the usual gold. But by the end of the century, scientists figured out how to process aluminum on a mass scale, and the light, inexpensive metal suddenly flooded the market.

Peter Diamandis likes to use the story of aluminum to point out that scarcity is a function of our ability—or lack of ability—to access resources. He wrote an extraordinary book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, which covers in 300 or so pages the concepts that this chapter is trying to capture in just a few. Here’s a great metaphor from the book about how technology can overcome scarcity: “Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit,” Peter writes. “If I pluck all of the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit—oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I’ve suddenly got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism.” Given the way our world population is growing, we’ll need to be liberating those resources faster than ever. That exponential change we were talking about? Here’s an example:

• It took a little more than 200,000 years—or until the year 1804—for the population of human beings to multiply to a total of 1 billion people.

• It took only 123 years (1927) for the human population to double to 2 billion people.

• But it took just 33 years (1960) before there were 3 billion people on the planet!

• It took a mere 14 years (1974) for another billion to be added, for a total of 4 billion people.

This growth has not stopped. In spite of China’s one-child-per-family policy for its 1.3 billion population, and all the other efforts to stop world population growth, in the last 40 years alone, we’ve added more than 3 billion more people! That’s 300% more people in these four decades than it originally took 200,000 years to achieve! Today there are 7.2 billion people on the planet! If we keep going at our current pace of growth, scientists estimate, the population will be 9.6 billion by 2050.

How can the Earth sustain so many people? If we keep consuming our natural resources at the current rate, according to Jim Leape of the World Wide Fund for Nature International, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough.” Human ingenuity and technology together have a way of keeping up with our needs.

I remember a time when we thought we were running out of oil. In the early 1970s, when I was a junior in high school, there was an oil crisis in the Middle East. If you recall, gas was rationed on odd or even days. I was wondering if we’d run out of fuel before I even got my license! Then one day in school, my engineering teacher said, “Let me read you an article.” I had already seen the Time magazine with a report from the Club of Rome, scaring the daylights out of everybody with predictions that our oil supply would last only a few more years, and the whole economy would collapse. This article sounded just like that, using the same language of gloom and doom. Then he showed us what he’d been reading: a newspaper article from the 1850s about an oil crisis. And the oil they were talking about was . . . whale oil!

In the 19th century, whale blubber was the main source of lamp oil. You couldn’t light your home without it. But whales were being overfished, people were worried about shortages of oil, and prices were going through the roof. But what happened in 1859? Crude oil was discovered in Pennsylvania. A whole new source became available. Before long, we had kerosene lamps and then internal combustion engines. The oil crisis of 1973? Technology had already eased that scarcity. New exploration and extraction techniques were opening up vast quantities of fossil fuels. And now with sideways drilling technologies, we have more gas than Saudi Arabia has oil! Such technologies change not only an economy but can also have an impact on geopolitical power. For the first time in almost a decade, in 2013 the United States produced more domestic oil than it imported from the Middle East.

The future is in alternatives such as wind power, biofuels, and—the grand-slam winner—solar energy. According to the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, all of the world’s energy needs can be met with 1/10,000th of the sunlight that falls on the Earth each day. The challenge has been to capture and store that power for a competitive cost. Ray predicts that the cost per watt of solar energy will be less than oil and coal in just a few years.

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.

—THEODORE ROETHKE

Let’s pause for a moment and think: Where will all this new technology come from? It’s already been bubbling out of the usual places: Silicon Valley, NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the world’s great universities and laboratories. But more and more, do-it-yourself inventors are using the vast resources of the internet to find ways to do things faster and better and cheaper.

Let me tell you about a teenager I met who is revolutionizing the world of prosthetics from a lab—in his bedroom! Easton LaChappelle was running a robotics program for NASA when he was 17, and he didn’t have to go to a major university to learn engineering—he had the internet.

Easton grew up in a tiny town in southwestern Colorado where there wasn’t much for a kid to do, so he entertained himself by tearing up and reassembling household gadgets. When he was 14, he decided to build his own robotic hand. Hey, why not? There was no big library in town, no university nearby, so he scoured websites like Instructables and Hack It! to teach himself electronics, programming, and mechanics. Then he used objects he had lying around—Legos, fishing line, electrical tape, small hobby motors, and a Nintendo Power Glove—to build a prototype.

By the time he was 16, he had refined his design by getting access to a 3-D printer and creating a mechanical hand out of layers of plastic. He entered his invention at the state science fair, and it was there that Easton had what he calls his “aha!” moment. He met a seven-year-old girl with a prosthetic arm that cost her parents $80,000. She would need two more over her lifetime. Easton thought, “Who can afford that?” Besides, the mechanical hand attached to the arm had only one sensor and one motion. His device was much more sophisticated, with five flexible fingers. Then and there, he decided to create a simple, functional, and affordable prosthetic to help amputees like this little girl.

Easton went back to his bedroom lab and built a full robotic limb that replicated the motion and strength of a human arm. Even more amazing, he came up with an EEG headset that converts electronic brainwaves into Bluetooth signals that control it. (Yes, these things don’t just exist in sci-fi movies.) The arm weighs one-third less than the $80,000 version, and it’s much stronger. In fact, a person using this arm can curl more than 300 pounds! A giant improvement on the past technology. So what do you think his new invention costs to make as opposed to the $80,000 limb? $20,000? $5,000? $1,500? How about $250?!

After meeting President Obama in the summer before his 18th birthday, Easton interned with NASA at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, where he led a team working on robotics for the International Space Station. By the end of August, Easton was already thinking, “I’m out of here. These guys are too slow!” He missed building the things he designed, and there were too many layers of bureaucracy. He went back home to work on building a robotic exoskeleton for a boy in his high school who was paralyzed from the waist down after an accident. Easton wanted him to walk at his graduation.

When I read about Easton’s exoskeleton project, I knew I had to contact him. I’ve been working with the survivors of recent mass shootings, including the massacres at Newtown, Connecticut, and Aurora, Colorado. I’ve helped many of them work to turn their lives around in the aftermath of such unimaginable loss, including Ashley Moser, a pregnant mother who watched the insane killer murder her six-year-old daughter before he turned the gun on her. The two bullets he pumped into Ashley’s body killed her unborn baby and left her paralyzed from the waist down. When I met her, she was filled with suicidal thoughts. I flew her family and medical team to our Unleash the Power Within event, and together we worked to create an environment where this remarkable young woman could begin her emotional healing.

I want Ashley to walk again! So I reached out to Easton and offered to fund his project. Since then we’ve gone into business together to create low-cost prosthetic devices that can be used all over the world and make a massive difference in people’s lives. No matter where they live, no matter how much money they have. That’s Easton’s mission. (And by the way, Easton’s high school friend is scheduled to graduate in 2015, and Easton reports that he is currently on track to make sure he walks to the podium. Easton’s goal is an exoskeleton so thin and flexible that it can be worn under clothing! You might not know someone is wearing one.) Easton’s other mission is to spread the word to young people all over the world that they too can become the makers of technology instead of just consumers. “Everyone can be a creator,” Easton told me. “With access to the internet and 3-D technology, kids can do anything they want. They don’t have to restrict themselves by thinking, ‘I have to go to college to be successful, there’s really no other way.’ You really do have other options.” There’s no doubt that Easton LaChappelle is an extraordinary person. It would be safe to call him a genius. But how many other Eastons do you think are out there—in places like India, Tanzania, Australia, Dagestan, Uruguay, Singapore—logging on to their computers and dreaming up ways to improve the world we live in? Easton used open-source technology to share his first robotic hand design, so people all over the world could copy it and improve it if they wanted. Now all of us can be our own publishers and creators and share our ideas with anyone with an internet connection.

The floodgates have been opened, ushering in one of the greatest revolutions of our time—what people are calling the MakerBot Era or the Maker Revolution. Easton LaChappelle is simply one of the many people at the forefront of an explosion of do-it-yourself (DIY) innovation fueled by the wild growth in technology. Chris Anderson, CEO of 3-D Robotics, calls it the “New Industrial Revolution.” Now the whole world can learn what students learn at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. They can interact with the very best teachers—and one another—sharing ideas and techniques, and making devices and supplying services that used to cost millions of dollars for hundreds of dollars.

Each year, Maker Faires are held all around America, bringing together inventors, hobbyists, engineers, students, teachers, artists, and entrepreneurs in what’s called “the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth.” In 2013 over 540,000 people attended 100 Maker Faires globally, and in 2014 Maker Media, creator of the faires, is expecting that number to climb to 140 Maker Faires. President Obama recently hosted a Maker Faire at the White House, where a 17-foot robotic giraffe named Russell greeted him, and the president toured a tiny portable house and played a keyboard made of bananas. He also met Marc Roth, from San Francisco, who was living in a homeless shelter when he started going to a local “TechShop” to learn how to use 3-D printers and laser cutters. Sixteen months later he had started his own laser-cutting business, and now runs a program to teach high-tech skills to others who need a fresh start.

Obama also gave a shout-out to two tween-age girls from North Carolina who started a robotics company instead of getting a paper route. Their motto: “If you can imagine it, then you can do it—whatever it is.” “And that’s a pretty good motto for America,” Obama told the crowd. “This is a country that imagined a railroad connecting a continent, imagined electricity powering our cities and towns, imagined skyscrapers reaching into the heavens and an internet that brings us closer together.” He challenged every company, college, and community to support these Makers. “If we do, I know we’re going to be able to create more good jobs in the years to come. We’re going to create entire new industries that we can’t yet imagine.” This Maker Revolution is being made possible by the explosion of new technologies and the massive expansion of the internet. Ten years ago, the internet connected 500 million people; today it connects 2 billion people. Within six years, experts estimate another 3 billion will be joining the web, for a total of 5 billion people. Imagine the power of that much connected and unleashed creativity across the planet! The first internet was the internet of military agencies and colleges. Then it was the dot-com internet of companies; then it was the internet of ideas; then, with social media, it was the internet of relationships. Now it’s the internet of things, of all things. Computers and sensors are embedded in everyday objects, transmitting messages back and forth to one another. Machines are connecting to other machines, which are in turn connecting to us and uniting everything in one powerful global network. And 3-D printing is how this internet will be transformed and expanded beyond our craziest dreams.

3-D PRINTING: SCIENCE FICTION TO SCIENCE FACT

You know the “replicators” they use in those Star Trek movies to synthesize hamburgers and hot coffee out of thin air on the starship Enterprise? Well, scientists say we’re not that far from creating the real thing! We’ve already been talking a lot about 3-D printing, but it’s hard to grasp what a powerful technology it can become until you’ve seen it in action. 3-D printing is really a catchall phrase for digital manufacturing, and the “printers” are actually minifactories that use computer files as blueprints to create three-dimensional objects layer by layer. The printers can use at least 200 different liquefied or powdered materials, including plastic, glass, ceramic, titanium, nylon, chocolate—and even living cells. What can you make with them? A better question is: What can’t you make with them?! So far 3-D printers have been used to create running shoes, gold bracelets, airplane parts, tableware, bikinis, guitars, and solar panels—not to mention human tracheas, ears, and teeth. As you’ve already learned, there are 3-D printers, small enough to fit into a teenager’s bedroom, that are capable of turning layers of synthetic goop into a functioning prosthetic limb. And there are hangar-sized 3-D printers in China that can print out ten houses a day using layers of concrete mixed with recycled construction waste. The cost? Just $5,000 per home, and there’s almost no labor required!

Perhaps even more importantly, NASA has partnered with America Makes, a network of 3-D printing companies, to sponsor a worldwide competition to address one of humanity’s greatest challenges: the need for shelter, especially emergency shelter, in times of natural disaster such as hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. Imagine 3-D printers printing out homes on the spot, using local materials in hours, not months. The impact of this technology, effectively used, is limitless.

Someday you might be able to print your own custom-fit blue jeans without leaving your house, while remote villages in the Himalayas will be able to download patterns from the cloud and print tools, water pumps, school supplies—anything they need. So will space travelers. Of course, as new technologies like 3-D printing come online, old ones will be disrupted, and some businesses may disappear. There won’t be much need for spare-parts warehouses anymore, will there? And much less need for shipping. Great for the planet—but not so good if you’re a truck driver. Experts project that 3.5 million truck drivers will be without a job in the United States alone because there will be robotic self-driving trucks that can operate 24 hours a day versus the eight hours a human can drive before having to take a break. Also, there’s no salary to pay after you make your initial investment in the self-driving truck.

As old industries fall away, new ones will arise. We just need the education and training and mind-set to embrace change and meet the demands of the new, emerging economy.

But 3-D printing is only one technology that’s part of the extraordinary growth that’s going to change the quality of your life. Nanotechnology, robotics, and tissue regeneration are three others to watch. And if you’re wondering why we’re talking about all this—we know that technological advances that offer solutions for our most pressing problems will keep happening no matter what the economic season may be, whether we’re experiencing inflation or deflation, or whether we’re at war or at peace.

Heard about the demographic wave? The consumer spending of 77 million baby boomers has been driving the US economy for decades. But now 10,000 boomers are turning 65 every single day. And that’s morphed into a potential retirement crisis wave, as most have not saved their money and have no pensions.

We have a debt wave building in this country that’s larger than anything in the history of the world: $17 trillion in debt and a $100 trillion worth of unfunded liabilities, between Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other commitments.

There’s an environmental wave, even if you don’t believe in climate change. And clearly we’re overfarming our land. But however big these waves may be, the technology wave is even bigger. The technology wave promises to lift all boats and carry the whole world into a more abundant future.

“I think those trends of technology tend to be bigger than any crisis,” the futurist and venture capitalist Juan Enriquez said at one of my recent economic conferences. “While everybody was worried about the Korean War and the Cold War, people were building transistors. While everybody was worried about World War II, people were making antibiotics. Most of those advancements have had more of an impact on your life and my life than the wars or the ups or the downs.” Our problems come in waves, but so do the solutions.

I’m surfing the giant life wave.

—WILLIAM SHATNER

Nobody understands this idea better than my friend Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, author, and entrepreneur. One of the most brilliant minds on the planet, he’s been called the Thomas Edison of our age. Yet you’ve probably never heard his name unless you’re a TED Talk junkie, or if you study the lineup at Google, where Ray is head of engineering. But Ray Kurzweil has affected your life in more ways than you could ever imagine. If you listen to tunes on your phone, on the internet—anywhere—he’s the guy you can thank. He created the first digital music. If you’ve ever dictated an email to Siri or other voice-to-text systems, that’s because of Ray.

I remember meeting Ray Kurzweil nearly 20 years ago and listening with amazement as he described the future. It seemed like magic then, but it’s all real now. Self-driving cars. A computer that could beat the world’s greatest chess master. He had already invented an optical character-recognition system to create the first reading machine for the blind—Stevie Wonder was his first customer. Now he wanted to help blind people read street signs and navigate cities without help, and go into restaurants and order off the menu using a little device the size of a pack of cigarettes. He told me the year it was going to happen: 2005.

“How do you know, Ray?” I asked.

“You don’t understand, Tony. Technology feeds on itself, and it gets faster and faster. It grows exponentially.”

He explained how Moore’s law—a principle that shows that the processing power of computers doubles every two years, while its cost decreases at the same rate—doesn’t work just with microchips. It can be applied to all information technologies—and eventually all aspects of our lives.

What does that mean? When things grow exponentially, instead of increasing in a linear or arithmetic pattern (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . .) they are continuously doubling: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on. So their rate of growth gets faster and faster. But as we’ve discovered, this concept is hard for us to grasp. It’s not the way humans were built to think.

“First of all, exponential growth is radically different from our intuition,” Ray says. “We have an intuition about the future hardwired in our brains. A thousand years ago, when we walked through the savannah and we saw an animal coming at us out of the corner of our eye, we made a linear prediction of where that animal would be in twenty seconds and what to do about it.” But with an exponential progression, the animal would take a few slow steps, speed up, and then suddenly be on the next continent.

Peter Diamandis offers another metaphor: “If I say to you, ‘Take thirty linear steps,’ normally you’re going to end up about 30 meters away. But if I say to you, ‘Instead of taking thirty linear steps, take thirty exponential steps.’ How far will you go? How about a billion meters? That’s twenty-six times around the planet!” Once you understand exponential growth, says Ray, its trajectory is predictable. He knows when the technology will catch up with his vision. He predicted the launch date for his first pocket-sized reader for the blind, and other products. Ray often speaks at my seminars, and he told us recently how he accurately predicted one of the most incredible discoveries of our time: the mapping of the human genome.

“I predicted that the genome project would finish within fifteen years when it was started in 1990 because I realized the progress would be exponential,” he said. But skeptics thought it would take a century to break the complex human code. After seven and a half years, only 1% of the project was finished. According to Ray, “The skeptics were still going strong, saying, ‘I told you this wasn’t going to work. You’re halfway through the project, and you’ve only finished one percent of it. This is a failure.’ ” But Ray pointed out that wasn’t a failure: it was right on schedule! “Exponential growth is not dramatic at first. You’re doubling these tiny little numbers. It looks like nothing is happening. But by the time you get to one percent, you’re only seven doublings away from one hundred percent.” The genome was successfully sequenced in 2003, ahead of schedule.

So, what’s next? We’ve already seen how stem cells can regrow human skin without the pain and scars of skin grafts, and how the abundant energy of the sun and wind can be harnessed to fuel our future. But what about other great challenges?

Lack of fresh water is one of the biggest concerns for populations growing like crazy in dry regions of the planet, and shortages are everywhere, from Los Angeles, California, to Lagos, Nigeria. According to the UN, more than 3.4 million people die each year because of water-borne diseases. But new desalinization technologies are turning seawater into tap water from Australia to Saudi Arabia. Already an Israeli company called Water-Gen is manufacturing a machine that extracts clean water out of air, and it uses only two cents’ worth of electricity to produce each liter of water. And in remote villages that have no electricity, there’s a new kind of water tower that uses only its shape and natural materials to pull moisture out of the air and turn it into drinking water.

The amazing inventor Dean Kamen (best known for the Segway scooter) has partnered with Coca-Cola to bring the world an energy-efficient machine the size of a dorm-room refrigerator that vaporizes dirty water and makes it clean and safe. It’s called the Slingshot—as in a David-sized solution to a Goliath of a problem. With innovations such as these, before long the problem of water scarcity will be solved, period.

How about food? Ray Kurzweil says new food technologies are emerging that will overcome the twin challenges of too little arable land and agricultural pollution. How? By farming vertically instead of horizontally. Ray envisions a world in the next 15 years “where we grow plants vertically, and also grow meat without the slaughtering of animals, by using in-vitro cloning of muscle tissue in computerized factories—all at very low costs, with high nutritional qualities and without environmental impact.” No insecticides. No more nitrogen pollution. No more need to kill animals for protein. Wow! That sounds impossible, but Ray says it’s real and it’s coming.

With these basic needs under control, humans will have the chance to live more fulfilling lives—especially if we meet the other challenges that Ray Kurzweil believes we can solve: health and aging.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

—MARK TWAIN

All these changes we’ve talked about are revolutionary, but according to Juan Enriquez, the changes that technology will bring to the future of health care will blow your mind more than anything else. Life, as it turns out, is an information technology. How can that be? Well, we know that our DNA is made up of a sequence of chemical bases labeled (if you remember your life science homework) A, C, T, and G. In other words, the building blocks of life itself can be expressed as a code. And codes can be altered. Or created. As in making artificial life. Which is what Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer, was able to do in 2010. Juan Enriquez was part of his team.

When Juan spoke at one of my recent seminars, I asked, “How did you and Craig Venter first come up with this idea of creating artificial life?”

He chuckled and said, “A bunch of us were having drinks at a bar in Virginia, and after the fourth scotch, somebody said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you could program a cell from scratch, just in the same way as you program a computer chip from scratch? What would happen?’ ” He paused. “That only took five years and thirty million bucks to find out!” First, they took all the gene code out of a microbe. Then they inserted a new gene code, and it became a different species. Incidentally, it’s the first life-form with a website embedded in its genetic code. As Craig Venter put it when he announced the breakthrough: “This is the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” As Ray Kurzweil explains, our genes are like software programs that can be changed to switch behaviors on and off. What does that mean? It means that we can use cells as little machines and program them to build other things—including more of themselves. “This software makes its own hardware. No matter how I program a ThinkPad, I will only have one ThinkPad tomorrow morning, not a thousand ThinkPads. But if I program a bacteria, I will have a billion bacteria tomorrow,” Juan said.

It sounds insane, like something out of a movie, but—as I keep reminding myself—this isn’t science fiction. The technique is already being used to produce clothing. “All the stuff you are now wearing—that breathable, stretchable stuff like Under Armour?” Juan said. “All that is now being made from bacteria, not out of petrochemicals.” In Japan, bacteria is growing synthetic silk that’s stronger than steel. And genetically altered farm animals are already being used as medical factories. In New England, there’s a dairy where cows produce milk that may be able to treat cancer.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

—NAPOLEON HILL

I told you, it’s a whole new world, and it’s going to be a wild ride. Advances in nanotechnology and 3-D printing mean that medical devices the size of blood cells may someday be traveling through your body, fighting conditions like Parkinson’s disease and dementia. Nanoscale computerized implants will replace the biological nerve cells destroyed by disease. And microscopic cochlear implants will not only restore hearing but also improve it, so that humans will hear as many notes as whales can sing. According to Ray, work is already being done to create genetically enhanced red blood cells that may one day carry enough oxygen to allow a diver to last 40 minutes underwater on one breath—or to save a soldier’s life on the battlefield.

Scientists are working on ways to use 3-D printers to create custom organs and other body parts for you when you need them, eliminating the need for dangerous, expensive donor transplants. Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, says, “In theory, anything that is grown inside the body can be grown outside the body.” Dr. Atala has already created fully functioning human bladders in the lab and completed the transplants. In the last 15 years, none of the tissues made from stem cells has ever been rejected by the body. He and others are already working on more complex organs, like hearts, kidneys, and livers. So someday, if a heart attack or virus damages your heart valves, your doctors will be able to order you up some new ones. Or maybe they’ll just grow you a new heart from a few of your skin cells!

If you have means, some of these miraculous cures are available already. There’s something called “extracellular matrix,” or ECM, made of cells from a pig’s bladder. When you apply it to injured human tissue, the matrix coaxes our own stem cells to regrow muscles, tendons, even bone. It’s been used already to regrow fingertips! This extraordinary substance exists right now. It’s not available to everyone yet, but it will be soon.

The concept behind regenerative therapies is simple: our body already knows how to regrow its parts; we just have to learn how to turn on the stem cells that already live inside us. We already know that when we lose our baby teeth, another set grows in. But did you realize that, according to Dr. Stephen Badylak from the University of Pittsburgh, if a newborn loses a finger, another one can grow in its place up to the age of two? We lose that ability as we grow older, so the question is: How do we stimulate it? Salamanders grow back their tails—why not human limbs or spinal cords? When we figure out how to harness the full power of stem cells, the medical and cosmetic applications are limitless.

Ray Kurzweil says that if we’re going to take advantage of these medical breakthroughs and extend our lives, we’d better start taking care of ourselves right now. The idea is to live long enough for the technology to catch up. If you’re a millennial, you might experience it. If you’re a baby boomer, it’s time to get on the elliptical machine and start eating right. Ray has even teamed up with a medical doctor to write a book titled Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, with strategies to optimize your health and keep yourself alive long enough to tap into the technology that will further extend your lifespan.

His immediate goal is to stick around long enough to see the day when computers become smarter than humans. That day is coming soon.

COMPUTERS “R” US

What takes us hours to absorb, computers can already do in seconds. But by 2020, says Ray, a $1,000 computer will have the full capacity of a human mind. By 2030, it will be able to process the knowledge of all human minds combined.

By then, we won’t be able to recognize the difference between human and artificial intelligence, he says, but we won’t have anything to fear. Why? Because computers will have become a part of us, making us smarter, more powerful, healthier, and happier. Don’t think that can happen? How do you feel when you don’t have your smartphone nearby? A little lost? It’s because that technology and all that connectivity have already become parts of our lives. The smartphone has become an “outboard brain”—it’s our portable memory center, storing so much of our personal information as to be indispensable. And we’ll be moving from mobile phones, to wearables, to implantables over the next 20 years.

So think a little further ahead. Imagine a world where you won’t have to read this book—you can just upload its content into your brain. (And I suspect that by now you are wishing the future was here already. Especially with this monster-sized book!) Or imagine a world where you can upload your mind, your thoughts, and your personality to the cloud to be preserved forever? That’s roughly the time when Ray Kurzweil and other great thinkers and futurists believe that humans and machines will merge. This epic moment is called “the Singularity” (aka “the Rapture for nerds”). When will it happen—if it does? Ray predicts the Singularity will be here by 2045.

Those who have a “why” to live, can bear with almost any “how.”

—VICTOR FRANKL

If technology solves the problems that make our resources scarce, will we be safer, freer, happier? You bet. Scarcity brings out the survival instincts in human beings; it activates that deep part of the reptilian brain that makes you believe it’s you or me. That fight-or-flight mechanism can help us survive, but it often can bring out the worst side of people in a “civilized” society. The brain we have is two million years old. It hasn’t evolved that much. So aggression and war will always be a big challenge. But with less scarcity, perhaps there’s less of a trigger to spark violence.

There’s statistical evidence to show that more access to technology can make people happier. The World Values Survey has shown that from 1981 to 2007, happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries studied. And what was going on during those years? That’s right. The digital revolution. The technology wave was spreading across the globe—or what the report calls “the transition from industrial to knowledge societies.” Social scientists have interpreted this index to mean that “economic development, democratization, and rising social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world.” The same survey said that more money doesn’t make people happier. Some of the happiest people came from the poorest countries; citizens of the Philippines consider themselves happier than people in the United States. Happiness has more to do with values than with GDP.

We all know that subsistence labor robs us of our most precious commodity: time. Remember when I mentioned that not too long ago most Americans were farmers, and spent 80% of their time digging in the ground for food; now we spend about 7% of every day earning money for food? With more technology, there’s more time on our hands, and that means there’s more opportunity to learn, to grow, to connect with others, and to give—all pursuits that fulfill us as human beings.

But there’s also a dark side to the gift of time.

Artificial intelligence and robotic devices are going to be taking on more and more of the tasks humans now perform. A study by Oxford University found that 47% of the current US labor market is at risk of being mechanized in the future. In essence, Oxford’s experts are saying that half of all workers might one day be replaced by robots! That means society will have to reboot to create meaningful work for everybody, and we are all going to have to step up to learn new skills. It’s going to be a difficult transition, no question about it.

But what happens in the future if work itself disappears, and computers do all the labor and most of the thinking? When all there is for us to do is ride around in self-driving vehicles and wait for drones to deliver the groceries? When there’s nothing to push back against to give us strength? That’s an interesting question.

More than a decade ago, I discussed this question with Ray Kurzweil, and he told me the story about a Twilight Zone episode that he’d seen as a child. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember The Twilight Zone, but it was a very interesting series, and the shows always had a creepy twist at the end. In this episode, a guy who loves to gamble dies and wakes up with a friendly “guide” in a white suit at his side. This guide, this angel, who’s more like a butler, takes him to a luxurious casino—which is this gambler’s idea of heaven. He’s ushered into an amazing suite, and he opens the closet to find it overflowing with incredible suits and fancy shoes. They all fit him perfectly. His guide opens a drawer, and it’s stuffed with cash, more than he’s ever seen before. So the gambler gets dressed, goes downstairs to the gaming tables, and everybody knows his name. Everybody smiles at him. He’s surrounded by gorgeous women. It’s his ultimate fantasy! He plays blackjack, and hits 21 the first time. He wins. This is great! He rakes in the chips. The next time: 21. Next time: 21. Ten times in a row. It’s extraordinary! He turns around and plays craps, and he wins, wins, wins. He has huge piles of chips. All he has to do is ask for drinks, steaks, women, and they appear. Everything he’s ever wanted, he gets. He goes to sleep that night . . . we’ll just say, not alone, and very happy.

This goes on day after day after day. After a few months, he’s playing at the blackjack table, and the dealer says, “Blackjack!”

The gambler screams, “Of course it’s blackjack!”

The dealer says, “Twenty-one! You win!”

“Of course! I always win! I’m sick of this! I win every time, no matter what happens!” He looks at his guide in the white suit and asks to speak to the head angel.

When the head angel appears, the man unleashes a tirade: “I’m so bored I’m going out of my mind! You know what? There must be some mistake. I’m not that good a person. I’m in the wrong place. I don’t deserve to be in heaven!” And the angel’s smile suddenly curdles as he says, “What makes you think you’re in heaven . . . ?”

So what happens when we get everything we want with little effort? After a while, it would be like hell, wouldn’t it? Then we’d have a new problem: Where will we find meaning in a world of abundance? So maybe in the future, your problem won’t be scarcity. And the solution won’t just be an abundance of material things. As Peter Diamandis says, “Abundance isn’t about providing everyone on the planet with a life of luxury—rather, it’s about providing all with a life of possibility.” So in our final chapters together, let’s look at the core of what is going to give your life lasting meaning. Something that can give you joy whether you’re facing enormous challenges or extraordinary opportunities; a source of strength in difficult economic times or abundant ones. Let’s uncover the ultimate wealth of fulfillment and meaning. Let’s learn to tap into the wealth of passion.