Where are the shovels, tents, and jeans?

Arnaud Blandin
4 min readJul 6, 2019
https://www.outbackfamilyhistoryblog.com/2016/12/28/merchants-v-miners-theres-gold-rush-sell-shovels/

If you have been reading my articles for the past year, you understand that I tried to give a vision of the world we are currently living in and describe what’s ahead of us.

We glanced through the polarized world, the need for trust and collaboration, we analyzed the new capabilities offered by AI (here and here) and reflected on the foundation of future technology platforms. Let’s now look at two technology trends that we didn’t cover yet. Those two technologies will be extremely important when we look at the challenges facing us.

Energy

The goals are clear: let’s make energy clean, affordable and reliable. It is essential for fighting poverty and climate change. You can expect a lot of interest and investment in cleantech.

Renewable energy and storage will grow. New elements and new sources will be found such as Thorium forcing to keep pushing

Generating energy coping with the limitations of natural resources and population growth will be important as it can be a source of conflicts in the mid to long terms. See for instance the example of developing atomic power station at sea.

Biosciences

There are massive opportunities to help people live longer and have healthier lives. The two main sectors to watch are Genomics and Advanced Materials.

Advancements in Gene Editing — It is very hard these days to avoid news and articles on CRISPR and it is only the beginning — could lead to breakthroughs in human health by eliminating diseases (malaria) or cure genetic or autoimmune diseases (cystic fibrosis, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and perhaps some cancers). Some microorganisms also could supplement treatments for depression, bipolar disorder, and other stress-related psychiatric disorders). It will also have an impact on reducing food insecurity and improving people health in the developing world.

Optical monitoring of neurons and optogenetic modulation of neural activity promise to help neuroscientists observe brains in action, with the aim to prevent or cure diseases like dementia, Parkinsonism, and schizophrenia. The procedures could also yield insights into the construction of brain-like systems for artificial intelligence.

Nanomaterials are increasingly used for medical-device coatings, diagnostic contrast agents, sensing components in nanoscale diagnostics, and advanced drug delivery. Digital medicine and other new medical procedures will likely contribute to improved global health. Improved tools to characterize, control, and manipulate the structure and function of living matter at the nanoscale could inspire biology-based approaches for other technology development and new fabrication techniques.

Don’t look for the Gold

With all the changes in front of us, it is tempting to search for Gold or rather look for the shovels, tents, and jeans.

Given the global trends I described in my previous articles, what profitable businesses can we build to solve problems we collectively face?

We are torn between the Western world capturing still the vast majority of wealth, growing at a slow pace, aging and the rest of the world being young, growing very fast in mega-cities, dreaming of a better life. Several global issues are threatening everyone: climate change, human mobility, health, security. Humanity is facing new problems, more global and powerful than anything it confronted before while the traditional way society has been organized is facing its limits (education, political systems…). New technologies provide new platforms for people to address those problems. It is not clear where solutions would come from today. There is a clear need to leverage the new platforms to unleash the best in our potential.

How to be Impactful with Technology?

Looking for shovels, tents, and jeans is not actually the right way to look at being impactful as we would just be applying traditional thinking to new problems.

We need new solutions and we need to be guided by people we trust and share common humanist values. Let’s not judge the problems people try to solve but go with the flow to discover new ideas that we wouldn’t have considered. Let’s trust our intuition to avoid working on projects we don’t feel good about. Let’s not over-complexify and analyze things, let’s get ready to trust our intuition. Let’s bring art to science. We need to agree to be challenged as well to confront viewpoints and not end up carrying the same vision.

Just like the Startup Matrix for B2C and B2B by @ericstromberg, let’s start building a new matrix: one axis would list the problems being tackled (and possibly aligning them on the Sustainable Development Goals) while the second axis would classify how those problems are tackled.

Let’s be optimistic and trust progress.

“Truth may be found in the heart of philosopher but seldom in the figures of a statistician; it is far too delicate a thing to be pinned down to column of numbers on ruled papers”. Louis Bromfield

Do you share my views? Have you considered applying technologies to solve real-world problems?

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