The Future: Destructive Technology Trends

Creative destruction has been at the heart of Capitalism for a long time. Technology and innovation destroy existing world orders and create new ones.

The story is old.

The story is celebrated.

Recently, however, several technology trends are destroying without creating robust alternatives.

Media is a very good example.
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The Future: End of Capitalism

On October 17, 2016, I gave a talk titled The Future of Capitalism at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Kolkata, India. RKM, for the uninitiated, is India’s largest NGO. It was founded by one of the greatest social entrepreneurs the world has ever known – a Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda, who in 1893, delivered a message of universal religion at the Chicago Parliament of the World’s Religions. In these days of intolerance and bigotry, it was an honor for me to stand on the grounds of an institution that shaped my own egalitarian worldview since childhood. You can listen to my speech here:

Photo credit: Hamza Hussein/Flickr.com.

The Future: The Problem with Longevity

We are extending life expectancy by leaps and bounds through the miracles of science and technology.

Today, longevity doesn’t necessarily mean quality of life. It means, simply, surviving to a much older age.

Given the march of progress in the medical sciences, it may be safe to assume that over time, quality of life will also increase in the later years of life. As geriatric diseases become treatable, and even curable in certain cases, long life may also become more enjoyable through better health.

But there are other problems with longevity.
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The Future: Technology Without Philosophy

I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, right off Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, California. Supposedly, this is the seat of the modern Renaissance.

Technology is disrupting everything.

Technology will continue to disrupt everything for the foreseeable future.
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How to Fund Fat Startups

While we focus a lot more on lean startups than startups that require capital to get going these days, fat startups still play an important role in developing large-scale success stories with significant, defensible, competitive advantages.

The bulk of the VC industry has moved away from the ‘fat startup’ category. Investors expect that you will have your product launched, customer acquisition model fleshed out fully, and a team in place before Series A.

However, infrastructure software, hardware, networking, chips – they all need capital. Even in cloud software, to build complex technology like personalization, analytics and artificial intelligence requires some serious investment.
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