In our cover story, Jim Mellon writes about the contents of his new book Fast Forward: the Technologies and Companies Shaping our Future. I want you to read what he writes and then I want you to go and pre-order his book.*
Then when it arrives, I want you to read it cover to cover. That’s partially because it is full of important information for investors and fabulously useful suggestions for stocks and funds to invest in that could make us all rich (or in the cases of many of you, richer) over the next decade.
But it is also because it is the first book, I have seen in the last decade that takes all the new technologies out there in everything from robotics to the ‘internet of things’ to the casual delivery of goods to space stations, cryto-currencies and Google glasses, and explains how they work. It also explains how they affect our lives now and in the future, and how we can prepare to embrace them.
Did you know that there is now a cure for Hepatitis C? That there is a potential cure for Aids (one of the companies mentioned is almost there)? That a vaccine for some cancers is a distinct possibility and that diabetics can now get special boots to cure the ulcers that have led to so many amputations in the past?
But life science isn’t the only sector producing what would have seemed to be miracles only a few years ago. In the financial sector, the traditional banks are done for.
Mobile money, crypto-currencies and peer-to-peer lending are taking much of their business and slamming down margins on the rest. If you want your ambitious children to make money and live well, tell them to avoid the City.
Then there are new forms of transport and energy, a futuristic world of companion and service robots that will relieve us all of the drudgery of repetitive work. A generation out no one will know what it was like to work in McDonald’s – already the firm is planning “to make it easier for customers to order and pay for food digitally”.
On the other hand, over their 150-year lifespans (this is a given, says Jim), they might end up knowing more about how things are made than the current generation: digital products and 3D-printing mean a future in which the final destination for a product is also where it is manufactured.
They might even get into the business of remote asteroid mining (asteroids were the original source of most of the earth’s metals), or go to space themselves for a bit (Jim rates the odds of a settlement on Mars by 2025 as 50/50).
Still, however all this excitement pans out, the basic point is a simple one: the status quo is being upended everywhere by technology. The world is moving faster and faster. We need to keep up and so does our money. Read the book.
*No, we aren’t getting any commission on the sales!