It’s easy to leave unnoticed the incredible pace at which innovation has changed our lives in the recent years. And many more changes are on their way to revolutionize our world, giving us good reasons to be optimistic about our future. Here’s a summary of a talk in a small committee at ParisTech Entrepreneurs with Vivek Wadhwa, tech entrepreneur and academic, recently named to Time magazine’s list of the Top 40 Most Influential Minds in Tech.
In brief, watching innovation happens, and the pace at which it happens, gives us hope that we’ll be able to solve humanity greatest challenges like energy, education, water, food, and health.
Solar energy is booming as it becomes affordable and more efficient (world record of solar cell efficiency at 44.4%), and that’s only one of the many clean energies that are currently being developed.
The progress in genetics and vertical farming will quickly allow the world to generate enough food for everyone, and seawater desalination will be the answer to clean water shortage.
Education is going through its own revolution. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are made available to everyone. Cheap devices like the Aakash, a $60 phablet (phone+tablet) from India, and programs currently providing it to students who cannot afford expensive devices, will help uplift communities.
Vivek talked longer about health, as there is a lot to do in this field. When you combine cheap sensors with an incredible computing power in modern mobile devices, you unleash a potential of applications that could be used to monitor our health and prevent diseases or accidents, instead of spending money treating them afterwards. This would not only be an improvement to most of us but would also dramatically drop the costs of nations’ health care programs. Many entrepreneurs already work on such applications: diabetes apps, ECG heart monitors, the list keeps growing and growing.
In telecommunication, one can already forecast the nearing end of phones. With the advent of projects like Google Loon, deploying stratospheric balloons providing wi-fi connections, we can imagine a world where wi-fi would be available everywhere, at very low cost, even in the most remote places.
The general trend is this: with sensors, raw materials and computing power becoming affordable, entrepreneurs have a unique opportunity to revolutionize our world in so many ways. This decade will be the decade of innovation. And innovation rules are changing too: VCs are no longer almighty, as we see crowdfunding kickstart more and more startups – it’s simpler and often more likely to have a positive outcome. This is a clear sign that people understand what’s at stake and want to be part of those changes.
All this won’t come at no cost of course. The great question is whether humanity will be able to evolve as fast as our technology. Genetics and AI progress raise ethics issues that will have to be answered. Protection of privacy is already a great concern and there’s no sign it’s getting any better. With the advances of robotics, it’s no longer cheaper to outsource manufacturing to manual workers in China while you can do it at home. Loss of jobs in China will certainly lead to major social unrests. Meanwhile, unemployment will remain an issue in the Western world as we’ll see more and more work done by robots, drones, self-driving cars. And more importantly, being able to generate enough food and water for everyone is nothing if we cannot distribute it fairly.
Innovation can only solve that much. I believe social concerns are a different issue. They definitely have to be dealt with, they will be the greatest challenges of the coming decades, but they shouldn’t stop entrepreneurs from creating innovative solutions to today’s problems. Innovation is shaping our future, we’ll just have to adapt. People get more and more involved, social debates now quickly go global, those are good signs we’re getting ready for the changes to come.
Vivek Wadhwa: “I believe that this will be the most innovative decade in history”.
http://wadhwa.com/2012/06/25/forbes-why-i-believe-that-this-will-be-the-most-innovative-decade-in-history/
Entrepreneurship on Rails 
Nice piece, thanks for sharing this talk/article! Reminds me of what I’ve heard about the topics of interest at Singularity University.There’s a big world outside of web apps 😉 By the way, are we talking of the current decade or next?
We’re talking right now, the current decade 🙂 But the next one should be pretty exciting too!
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