4 years ago, I wrote an article about the start of the Great Acceleration. As a biologist, I knew Pandemics marked Epochs (starts and ends) in human civilization and we’d just begun our journey.
I knew were were about to experience both a massive technological and a societal change which happens during and after all major pandemics. But the question was WHAT were we going to experience?
Now four years into the unraveling we’re starting to get a clearer picture. Our old institutions are now crumbling and the new world is starting to emerge.
AI is Eating The World
Tech has crumbled but new tech has risen, we once talked about tech’s leading companies, the FAANG’s, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly known as Google) now replaced by the Magnificent 7, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, most of which are also starting to look tired already.
The pace of technological progress is accelerating amongst a wave of mass layoffs and bankruptcy’s in the tech sector not seen since the dot com crash more than two decades ago, the old is being eaten by the new in almost every sector.
AI went from a SciFi fantasy of the 1960’s to functional tools in the pandemic era replacing a multitude of workers in programing, writing and creative roles that will one day SOON, as Sam Altman of OpenAI says, be used to build billion dollar tech companies with no employees.
AI isn’t just hardware, companies like OpenAI, Tesla and others are investing heavily in robotics and the West, forced by wars in the Middle East and Russia are having to adapt to a world which has made expensive drones, missiles and fighter jets mostly useless in a fast, cheap hardware world with effective AI.
Crypto is Eating The World
“The Nigerian Government Kidnapped Executives at Binance” in an effort to stabilize their currency. Today in a world where humanity is waking up to the theft by all global governments through debasement, they’re choosing to opt out of the Fiat system.
What was once a radical libertarians wildest dream has become a reality, people globally have lost faith in fiat and they’re voting with their wallets and that has started another surging early crypto bull market as countries globally try to outlaw, regulate and fight emerging crypto currencies as their citizens choose to exit their fiat currency.
In the US and Europe, most people are still not aware of the tsunami of change that’s coming for the entire financial system but people across Asia, Latin America and Africa will leap frog fiat technologies and choose cryptographic currencies (like USDC) instead running on crypto rails.
As James from Invest Answers likes to say, Fiat is a melting ice cube, it’s madness to hold on to it long term!
Gold, a store of value as old as humanity is being eaten by Bitcoin, a scarcer and harder cryptographic store of value than this ancient metal.
Bio is Eating the World
Not only did mRNA vaccines save millions of people across the world from dying of COVID but it accelerated these vaccine technologies into a new areas including surprisingly effective cancer vaccines (still in human clinical trials) as well as fast and effective therapies for other infectious diseases.
Ozempic, a therapeutic which mimics a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 to help people feel full and loose weight has become a blockbuster drug with celebrities and billionaires bragging about how much weight they’ve lost due to the drug.
Weight loss in an injection (not quite a pill) has arrived and it will be transformational in fighting the pandemic of obesity globally AND has skyrocketed the value of Novo Nordisk which is now one of the world’s most valuable companies due to sales of this drug.
To most from the outside, it seems like the Future of Food category is DEAD. The irony is that that’s FAR from the case.
Whilst Beyond Meat may be trading at 1x revenue multiples on the NASDAQ both established large companies and startups continue their work of making better, cheaper, healthier and tastier products.
Burger King in Germany launched plant based meat products that were lower cost than meat based alternatives which is proving very successful.
In the US, cell based (lab grown) Chicken has been approved by the FDA/USDA and has been sold by UPSIDE Foods and Good Meat whilst they and many others continue the work of cost effectively scaling cell based meat production and governments around the world race to approve cell based meat to foster innovation and food security in their countries.
Industrial Animal Ag tech is 10,000 year old tech from the first human domestication of animals that will fall and be replaced, just as we replaced horses and buggies and blubber from whales to light our cities, this is inevitable.
In addition, the combination of AI x Bio will create new foods, products and therapies that are today impossible to predict but will be mind blowing and potentially lifespan extending for us. Bio eating the World has only just begun!
The Next 5 Years
Where are we going next? One Billion Dollar Employeeless companies, Massive Robotic manufacturing, Cryptographic Money Beyond Nation States, the Rise of Food Breweries, “Thinking” Machines, Accelerated Scientific Breakthroughs in every realm of Science and Technology.
All of these breakthroughs are near term with incredible work being done, the Singularity isn’t near, it’s here.
We are going to be blessed enough to live through this incredible period of human innovation. The best part is, Quantum machines, Lifespan Extension and Limitless Energy through Fusion are coming for all 10 Billion of us over the next decade too!
Stay Nimble and Open to Weirdness my Friends!
An excellent article, Ryan.
As you quite rightly state, the world is changing exponentially; we are no longer living in the imaginations of fantasy comic book writers. Let’s all hope that this transformation is for the betterment of humanity, not its destruction.
Best regards,
Mark (Prowse) 🤘👨🏻🎓