MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (83 page)

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.