Yes, Uber’s service is superior in terms of availability, convenience, and customer experience to traditional taxi and limousine service, but could it so easily have overpowered the incumbents without access to billions of dollars in investment capital, which allowed it to subsidize lower prices for consumers and pay incentives to drivers? Arguably

“Only around 15% of the money flowing from financial institutions actually makes its way into business investment,” says Rana Foroohar.28 “The rest gets moved around a closed financial loop, via the buying and selling of existing assets, like real estate, stocks, and bonds.” There is some need for liquidity in the system, but 85%? As we’ll see in t

To make the future economy better than the present, find new ways to augment workers, giving them new skills and access to new opportunities. As we automate something that humans used to do, how can we augment them so that they can do something newly valuable?

When making sense of the future, think in terms of gravitational cores, not hard boundaries. Just as the sun’s gravity well reaches out beyond the orbit of Pluto and encompasses not just the planets in the ecliptic but comets and planetoids with eccentric orbits, so too the forces shaping the future all have a gravitational core and a gradually att

What is the future of business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces let people choose when and how much they want to work?

As Blyth notes, every intervention is subject to Goodhart’s Law: “Targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable.”

“Unanswered still,” Margaret continued, “is Wael’s concern about how you transform coordinated and directed action to a sustained movement and community willing to work together to solve hard problems. Especially when they begin as a heterogeneous set of people with somewhat conflicting end goals. They may agree on getting rid of the dictator, but

perhaps the most riveting thing to realize is that, bit by bit, the global brain is getting a body. It has eyes and ears (billions of connected cameras and microphones), a sense of position and motion (GPS and motion sensors) that is far more precise and powerful than that of humans, and with specialized sensors, data-gathering capabilities that fa

When faced with the unknown, a certain cultivated receptivity, an opening to that unknown, leads to better maps than simply trying to overlay prior maps on that which is new.