Aah, Brave New World

Last week we looked at how technology has the potential to slow and possibly reverse aging within the next two decades. Marvelous cures for the main reasons of death like cancer, heart disease, dementia and Alzheimer's, not to mention the potential to manage weight, are in our future. Amazing innovations in communications are rapidly coming at us, as is an increased ability to process information. Hunger and malnutrition are in our sites, as we increase the ability to find harvests which yield more, as well as biotech and nanotech processes to manufacture food.

Further down the road, the ability to manipulate molecules at the quantum level will mean we can produce the materials we need at much lower costs. As we map and reverse engineer the software which runs our brains, powerful new software can be developed on machines which can aid in the development of whole new technologies, as well as allow us to directly access information and communicate with each other. It will mean I can get rid of this annoying keyboard, which is bouncing around as the plane I am on is in a little turbulence.

(At the end of the letter, I will speculate about how we invest in these trends. Next week, we get back to our usual beat of finance, but judging from the letters I am getting, a lot of you are enjoying the speculation about the future.)

Ray Kurzweil, in his latest book, The Singularity is Near, writes of an almost Utopian future. For him, as well as others, such a future of…