In early June, I had the opportunity to attend Singularity University’s Exponential Finance conference, and it was an eye-opening event. Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of both the university and the X Prize for scientific breakthroughs, gave a presentation that hammered home how fast the world is changing—for better and for worse.

In Diamandis’s view, we are moving away from a world of haves and have-nots to one with haves and have-mores. It’s a worldview that flies in the face of conventional wisdom that income inequality is surging around the planet as the Darwinian pace of technological change spawns an elite clique of winners who take all, leaving scraps for everyone else.

Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel economics prize winner, confirmed this take on inequality with research showing that, for the first time in history, fewer than 10% of the world’s population is living in poverty. But tell that to a young middle-class family trying to get by in San Francisco or London or Tokyo and they’d tell you to go jump into the Arctic Ocean.

Diamandis believes we should be focused on the floor rising, not the gap between top and bottom, as technology enables some once-lagging societies to leapfrog more modern ones. Africa, for example, has the most advanced digital banking system in the world.

As economic disruption accelerates and threatens to destabilize modern societies, there is a glaring need to upscale labor skills. Automation and technology have eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs, but in the next two decades artificial intelligence will take jobs in the white collar world.

How this will play out falls into three schools of thought. One school holds technology will create more jobs, as it always does. We don’t yet know what they are. Another says we’re screwed in the short term but fine over time. The third contends millions of workers are just screwed and society should consider a universal basic income for the displaced. Take your pick.

When it comes to the advisory world, developments in areas like blockchain, digital banking and crypto-currencies are where exponential change in finance is happening right now. The current generation of robo-advisors are not where the action is for now, as most of the assets are being captured by Schwab and Vanguard. Venture capital money is finding greener pastures everywhere.

The crypto-currency universe is likely to expand far beyond Bitcoin. Some see it expanding to as many as 700 crypto-currencies growing at 50% or 60% a year to $5 trillion over the next decade.

For now, the financial advisory business may appear too service-intensive to interest VC investors. But nothing is permanent. The next generation of robo-advisors might be a lot smarter.

Evan Simonoff
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