25 Geniuses Who Are Creating the Future of Business

Soon, software will know how you feel--and will use that data to sell you things. The gig economy will go global (but it's not Uber-take-all). The tech industry will finally be inclusive. AI will achieve something like common sense, and it will be open source too. But that future won't build itself. Actual people (at least for now) have to make these things happen, and they aren't the C-suite hotshots you always hear about. The 25 people in these pages are the unsung creative, technical, and social visionaries working to bring the incredible world of tomorrow to you today. Get to know them now. Welcome to our second annual Next List. Surveillance is about to get much harder for overly snoopy governments. In November 2014 the Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp made a big change to its Android app: It encrypted messages so that even Facebook can't descramble them, no matter how many court orders the company receives. But the crypto software wasn't written by a Facebook employee.