Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Abundance 360 Conference Takeaways

Some of you may have heard that I spent the last few days in Los Angeles attending the Abundance 360 conference. Organized by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, my favorite guest was futurist Ray Kurzweil, who spoke about his systematic methodology for predicting the future.

Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil on stage at A360

It was my impression that most attendees were entrepreneurs who don’t closely follow exponential technologies. In fact, 95% of them run businesses outside of IT, AI, or science. 30% alone work in real estate, which quite surprised me. The majority of attendees were age 40 or older.

Since I’m in the business of general AI and futuristic technologies, I didn’t learn much about my field from the conference – but I don’t mean this in a negative sense.  I actually found it quite useful to connect with business people working outside the sciences, because they have a different point of view and tend to notice different things than my colleagues.

There were a number of interesting questions asked, including “What technology may disrupt your business in 1-3 years?” and “What will not change in the next 20 years?”

I also saw that there’s a community of successful, wealthy, experienced people following Peter Diamandis. This was a positive surprise for me, and I realized that if I need such a community in the future, it won’t be necessary to build it myself from scratch. Going forward, it will be sufficient to connect with others who have already established this network of support and thinkers.

Finally, it became clear that most exponential technologies and businesses discussed will be obsolete when we develop a truly general, human-level AI. For me, it’s critical to think about where to invest or not, given that many investments won’t be valuable 20 years from now. It’s also interesting to note how certain exponential technologies are in competition with one another – if we have great VR in the coming years, it may eliminate the need for a Hyperloop, as people will travel less.

I’d like to hear more about your favorite exponential technologies and how they will perform in the next decades – please feel free to leave your ideas in the comments.

Many thanks for reading!

Marek Rosa
CEO, CTO & Founder
GoodAI, Keen Software House
:-)

Facebook: www.facebook.com/GoodArtificialIntelligence
Twitter: @GoodAIdev
www.GoodAI.com
www.keenswh.com

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