Last year in December, the most prestigious startup event in Slovakia took place. Startup Awards 2016 aimed to be bigger and better than ever before. And it did. Among many engaging talks and famous speakers, one caught attention of the Slovak Alliance for the Innovative Economy (SAPIE) Executive Manager. Petra Dzurovčinová summarized and commented on the most interesting points of Yanki Margalit.
In his keynote talk, the Israeli entrepreneur and investor shared his views about The Future of Future. If you didn’t manage to be there or simply want to refresh the key insights, here is the guestblog from Petra. Originally, the blog post was pusblished on blogsite of Denník N daily and we are publishing it with their kind permission. To see the original post, follow this link.
Enter Petra.
Entrepreneurs, investors, technology geeks… the world of the innovative economy and startups seems like it is only available for a small group of the chosen ones who are clearly divided from the rest of the world. One of the tasks of the Slovak Alliance for the Innovative Economy (SAPIE) is to change such impression since digital projects will have crucial importance on our everyday lives. More crucial than they have now.
The Startup Awards 2016 event hosted an Israeli entrepreneur and investor Yanki Margalit with his talk called The Future of Future. In a few points, he presented his vision of a near or far future which is not just a theory but rather a logical result of our current technological development. For more futuristic views, he mentioned robots who will affect our day-to-day lives. According to Margalit, the robots usage will lead to more social and physical relationships between robots and humans. However, at the first place, we should use them as assistants or even replacements in our everyday activities. The Israeli businessman also moved his ideas beyond our planet Earth. It is important to look at Mars as our plan B, as the humanity will face great challenges in the near future. And still, even if a relationship with a robot or life on Mars may sound like a sci-fi movie, Margalit mentions several changes we can expect to happen soon:
The concept of self-driving cars is slowly finding its ways to a broader audience, and, even thought so far such cars don´t fulfill all the security requirements and, therefore, cannot be used by masses, according to Margalit it’s only a question of 5-10 years. Their main contribution is clear – higher security on the roads, lower risk of accidents and mortality. However, this isn’t the only remarkable change we can expect. Driver as a profession will lose its status with drivers losing their jobs and being forced to look for another occupation. In addition, as the automatization will also touch other professions (e.g. the whole manufacturing sector), there will be other millions of people dealing with the same issue. I do emphasize that this is going to be our near future.
When it comes to energy supply and sustainable means of its production, Margalit is quite the optimist. For energy production, solar panels will be used widely and locally in most cases, so there will be no issues with energy transmission. Batteries will be used for energy storage and that is the reason why Tesla Gigafactory – a great factory for the production of lithium-ion batteries – was created.
Median age will increase rapidly thanks to the fact that humans sick or old organs could be replaced by tailored organic products. Therefore, such problems as waiting for the right donor or the patient’s organ rejection rate will be overcome as the newly “made” organs will contain an organic trace of the specific patient. This is the goal of a young American Danny Cabrera who is the founder of BioBots and who created a 3D biological printer. With biomaterial, cells and accurate programming, it is possible to create human tissue in just a few hours.
The second, the third and maybe also the first vision can be positive yet they might raise controversial questions. Lower mortality rate together with longer human life duration will lead to faster population growth which always comes together with ecological risks. The environmental debate will be more and more important not only in question of sustainable production but also in the individual consumption because even a slight, almost invisible ecological trace will become more visible with billions of consumers.
With all this said, the future should bring such a remarkable step forward in our everyday lives that Margalit talks about a new term – Human 2.0. However, if you are just thinking about the poorest part of the world and their quality of live in the future, you are bringing up the right question.
This is the crucial problem that the technology development usually ignores but tend to be profound. The relation between the rich and the poor will remain the same – representing the scissors that will tend to open a little bit more. The impact of potential risks of social inequality can be uncovered only hardly, but if we continue to ignore this issue, it is more than sure that the pendulum will bring the rich even higher into the sky while the poor will be pushed even harder against the ground.
For the future, we need to find the right education approach dedicated for all the classes who will help to press the scissors more together. If we get ready for the historical change from “Human to Human 2.0”, we can embrace the best period of the human race in history. However, if the technological progress won´t go hand by hand with progressive social ideas, our prosperity will be replaced by strong social restlessness.
Photo: Startup Awards Facebook Page
