“It cost $100 million the first time they sequenced a genome, but today they can do it for $1,000 and in five years it will be $10.” — Dr. Craig Venter
I recently attended a very special seminar in Los Angeles called Abundance 360. It was hosted by X Prize creator Peter Diamandis and included more than a dozen of the top thought leaders in the world on innovation. We discussed eight areas where innovation is changing not only the business world but also the entire world. Those eight areas were:
- Artificial intelligence
- Deep machine learning
- Robotics
- Augmented reality
- Virtual reality to listen
- The Internet of Things
- Genetic coding and decoding
- Synthetic medicine
I do not have the space to go into each of these in detail, but I’d like to share a few of the key thoughts I have after attending this conference.
“To be successful in the future, the rate of internal innovation must exceed the rate of external innovation.”
At first blush, that doesn’t seem like much of an idea, but when you think about it more carefully, you begin to understand that this means that in order to be successful in the business arena, you must out-innovate, out-strategize and out-execute better than everyone you compete against. But, even more challenging, for you personally to be successful in the future, you have to be more innovative than anyone who competes with you. And lastly, for the United States to be successful, we have to out-innovate the rest of the world. Now you understand the ramifications of this simple sentence.
Another area that was particularly exciting, and a little bit scary, was the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. Although there were about 250 people in attendance at the event, a dozen or so were attending by robot. We had people from France, Portugal, Latin America and the United Kingdom all participating actively via two wheeled robots that had a long pole holding an iPad at about face level. Every morning, I would walk in and one of the robots would roll over to introduce themselves or say good morning. It was possible to carry on a very natural conversation with someone sitting on the other side of the world. I was also amazed when one of the robots rolled up to a microphone to ask a question.
We also talked about things like the Google self-driving car, which has now logged more than a half-million miles without a person in the car and without a serious accident. We discussed new industrial robots, which teach themselves to be more precise and efficient without any assistance from a human. We examined how the Internet of Things is going to connect pretty much everything, everywhere, to the Internet. Sensors in your closet, sensors in your car, sensors in your house…tiny computers the size of a human blood cell can be placed in thousands of different “smart” products.
On the last day, we heard an amazing talk from Dr. Craig Venter, the man who is credited with being the first person to sequence the human genome. It cost $100 million the first time they sequenced a genome, but today they can do it for $1,000 and in five years it will be $10. As Dr. Venter said, “We have discovered that DNA is just like a computer code, which means we can go in and recode if we want to.”
It was during the same week that a woman in France who had a genetic defect in her eggs was able to use another woman’s DNA to go in and replace the defective genes so that her baby would be born healthy. In other words, this is the first human baby to be born with genes from three different people.
This is only a very small amount of what we learned, and as I left the conference, I was literally overwhelmed by the staggering implications of how this technology will impact businesses around the world and the entire world itself. There are several huge moral and ethical challenges that we will face in the next 20 years as computers become faster, smarter and able to replace a significant number of jobs that humans currently do. Also, how do we prepare our society for people who will live to be 140 years old and still be active and healthy at 100? How will we respond when doctors have the ability to go in and program the genes of an individual to turn off cancer or increase intelligence? These are big questions that will need to be answered in the near future. Innovation can be extremely beneficial and deliver incredible positive outcomes, but used incorrectly, it can also wreak havoc. It will be up to all of us to make prudent decisions about how these amazing technologies will be allowed to impact the world.
John Spence has been recognized as one of America’s top 100 business thought leaders and as one of the top 500 leadership development experts in the world. He is the author of four books on business and life success.