Peter Diamandis is known as a futurist. But the author and entrepreneur is also amazed by the present. "We are living in the most extraordinary time in human history," the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation said during his Open Lending-sponsored keynote Monday at the CUNA Governmental Affairs Conference (GAC) in Washington, D.C. Technology's existential leaps forward, and how people adapt to those leaps. "Technology is a force that makes whatever was scarce in the past more abundant," Diamandis says, noting that technological advancements are leading to an abundance of energy, food, and potentially workers if artificial intelligence (AI) continues to progress. As computational power continues to double, AI, sensors, robotics, blockchain, and more technologies are converging to reinvent the future and transform business models.

When Peter Diamandis took to the stage at Madrid's Palacio de Cibeles for the Audi Summit for Progress last Tuesday, WhatsApp had crashed and the Wi-Fi wasn't working properly. It was a blow to the audience's faith in technology, but Diamandis, the star speaker at the summit, was ready to counter this. The 61-year-old doctor and engineer from New York has blind faith in the power of innovation and science. Diamandis, who is the founder of Singularity University and a friend of tycoon Elon Musk, has set up a number of technology companies and written several books in which he predicts a future of abundance, longevity, flying cars and an exponential increase in resources. It's a vision that is hard to imagine in times of war, an energy crisis and growing fears of recession.

In this video, Rohin Francis, MBBS, reviews modern health trends and the dangers of unsupported medical claims. The following is a transcript of this video; note that errors are possible. Francis: There is so much that I could say about the collision of the worlds of Silicon Valley and the mindset that drives it, sometimes referred to as the "tech bros," with the world of medicine and the strange bedfellows that they make. I will explore many of the phenomena that arise when this happens in future videos, things like novelty bias, where you assume that something new must be better. While this normally holds true for computing and we're all familiar with Moore's law, it very commonly isn't true in medicine, with many new and exciting therapies being quietly or occasionally loudly shelved years later for being useless or worse, harmful, or how Silicon Valley's motto of "move fast and break things" can be catastrophic for medicine. If you want to hear more about tech and medicine, then please do consider subscribing. But for this video, I want to focus on one aspect, the obsession with data. The belief that if we just measure more and more we can unlock the secrets of the human body. We can use 100% of our brain, become immortal, and transform into supernatural beings comprised of pure energy.

AI was already having an impact in healthcare before COVID-19 came along. Now the impact of AI in healthcare is accelerating. A harbinger of the impact of AI on the spread of COVID-19 came on New Year's Eve for 2020, when the AI platform Blue Dot registered a clutter of unusual cases in Wuhan, China. The Toronto-based company uses natural language processing and machine learning to track, locate and report on infectious disease spread. It sends alerts to its clients, which include entities in health care, government, business and public health.

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Diamandis predicts that the future of shopping will be "always on", thanks to ubiquitous augmented reality. Artificial intelligence is in position to streamline and personalise the process, while virtual reality shopping can be successful if it creates a more social experience. Brands should prepare for far more data collection by asking the right questions and using AI to correlate more details. SAN FRANCISCO-- Here's the future of shopping, as Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Peter Diamandis sees it: augmented reality glasses will present an "always-on" shopping mode, artificially intelligent digital assistants will know your taste better than you and clothing will be made exactly to your measurements. And it could happen faster than one might think, he says.

Alexa Jett has suffered some heavy blows in recent years. Now 28, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2016. Although she was given the all-clear, in August 2019 another crisis hit when her best friend and former boyfriend died of cancer at the age of 33. I started wondering whether I was next," Ms Jett says. She was unable to get out of bed and household chores piled up leaving the house in a mess. In desperation, she sought help online and from a mental health chatbot, called Vivibot. "Hey, why don't we make a goal?" the chatbot texted her on 10 September. She only had to paint her toenails for a start, but this simple task combined with the chatbot's "funny and friendly personality" and 24/7 presence, encouraged Ms Jett progressively to get more tasks accomplished. "She pulled me out of that really dark place and I started functioning again," says Ms Jett. Vivibot is offered through GRYT, an app-based social community for people affected by cancer. Dozens of similar services are available, which chat with their users on matters of mental health. They offer mood reports and tips on how to improve their mental and emotional state. "These chatbots are a great first step for people who may be experiencing sad or depressed mood or anxiety to reclaim their mental health," says Danielle Ramo, director of research at Hopelab, which designed Vivibot. She is quick to add that chatbots cannot treat clinical depression or clinical anxiety, and are not designed to replace a human interaction of any sort. However, clinical psychologist Noel Hunter says that some chatbots are not marketed that way and instead present themselves as a solution for mental health problems. "They're very careful to not explicitly say that because then they get sued.

Dreaming of sheep or hacking creativity for abundance?Depositphotos enhanced by CogWorld "We now live in a global, exponential world," Steven Kotler tells my coauthor Michael Ashley and I from his Santa Monica office. We're interviewing the New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur for our upcoming book: Uber Yourself Before You Get Kodaked: A Modern Primer on A.I. for the Modern Business. "You need to understand our brains evolved in a local, linear environment. But in the 21st century, according to research done by Ray Kurzweil, we will experience over 20,000 years' worth of change. To put it succinctly, over the next 80-something years we will go through the birth of agriculture to the industrial revolution -- twice -- in terms of our technological advancement."

In the future, they will determine the precise date when the traditional notion of privacy expired -- probably some moment in 1999. It will take a couple of decades at least for humanity to comprehend the abilities and reach of modern surveillance, and the unfathomable amount of data being generated and collected. For example, satellites can now identify objects as small as 50 centimeters across, according to X Prize Foundation founder Nick Diamandis. Diamandis is quoted by IDG News Service's James Niccolai in a September 24, 2015 article. The researcher states that data analysis systems such as IBM's Watson are the only way to extract useful information from the enormous stores of data we now collect.

For years, the X Prize Foundation has funded competitions that ask participants to make sci-fi a reality: a device to extract water from thin air, like Star Trek's replicator; a tool to instantly diagnose disease, like the Star Trek tricorder; a crime alert network, inspired by Minority Report. But for its latest competition, Seat14C, the organization is putting the fiction first--by asking writers to envision what humanity will need in the future. Starting today, 22 new science fiction stories go live on the Seat14C website, courtesy of genre luminaries like Margaret Atwood and Charlie Jane Anders. Each story details the future from the perspective of a different passengers on a plane that traveled through a wormhole 20 years into the future. Other writers will then compete to tell the story of the passenger in seat 14C.

Singapore has been hailed as one of the smartest cities in Asia. SINGAPORE has been getting a lot of positive press lately. In the last month alone, General Electric announced the opening of a high-tech service center in the city-state, while Proctor & Gamble launched a new digital innovation hub. While the tiny island nation has long been used by MNCs as a launchpad for Asia, it's clear Singapore has become the innovation cluster in the region to watch. The latest news from Tech in Asia confirms this, as Singularity University (SU) has officially launched a Singapore chapter last week.