Healthcare won’t be spared, either, because the Star Trek tricorder is coming thanks to the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE contest, which will award $10 million to the developer of the best working handheld medical diagnostic device to one of two finalists later this year.
“Within 12 months we’ll have a hand-held device that will beat most doctors in providing health care,” said Ismail. “Ask your doctor, anybody that you know in the healthcare space, and none of them know this is happening.”
Though Ismail didn’t directly discuss the financial industry, historical exponential growth is evident in one area considered “disruptive” in financial circles: flows into index funds, ETFs and smart beta products, and analysts have suggested that efficiencies created through AI, digital advice providers and block-chain technology will continue to disrupt the space.
Utopia may have to wait, Ismail said. Humans and their institutions are completely unprepared for all of this change.
“Every mechanism by which we run the world is designed for a world 200 years ago,” Ismail said. “We’ll have to rearchitect everything from the ground-up.”
The exponential growth in access to news information, for example, is disrupting democracy. Media consumers are having difficulty determining truth from fiction because information is moving faster than reason. Thus, Ismail believes that “democracy is not a functioning form of government going into the future” because information is too easily misused or faked.
As humans live longer, the institution of marriage also becomes impractical, argues Ismail.
“What happens when we expand the human lifespan past 120 years? Are we supposed to live with the same person for 100 years? That’s institutionalized torture!”