Billionaire Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who got kicked upstairs to the post of executive chairman, knows a thing or two about disrupting existing markets with new technology. Now consulting giant McKinsey & Co. is publicly picking Schmidt’s brain to share his thoughts on tomorrow’s most disruptive technologies.
Here are a few of his cooler points. Or you can watch Schmidt’s interview on video here.
— Data changes everything: “We’re going, in a single lifetime, from a small elite having access to information to essentially everyone in the world having access to all of the world’s information,” says Schmidt. “That has huge implications for privacy, communications, security, the way people behave, the way information is spread, censorship, how governments behave, and so forth.” He says it will also disrupt business, education, the media and intellectual property.
— The next revolution will come from biology. Scientists are now introducing the same thinking and analysis that produced the data/computer revolution into the world of living materials. “As we begin to say, ‘We’re going to take the analog world of biology — how genes work, how diseases work — put them in a digital framework, calculate for a while, do some machine learning on how things happen,’ we’ll be able to not only help you become a better human being, but predict what’s going to happen to you physically, in terms of your health, and so forth.”
Schmidt believes that as we better understand the mysteries behind the brain, DNA and protein folding (the process by which a protein structure assumes its functional, 3D shape), each of these breakthroughs will rank as “a serious step-change for humanity.” One key outcome will be the ability to instantly diagnose individual health problems: “There are now firms and foundations building databases of DNA to use, to move to a model of individual diagnosis of disease, where you literally just press a button, the sequences occur, and it tells you what’s wrong.”
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