Markman - Fast forward investing how to profit from artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technologies reshaping our lives

Copyright 2019 by Jon D. Markman. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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I dedicate this book to my children, Joseph and Janie, who will see many of the exciting technologies described in this book move from the fringe to the norm, and will help shape the next generations view of the future. I would also like to acknowledge the contributions of my excellent researcher, TB, and my wife, Ellen.

T he world is accelerating at an exponentially brisk pace toward a future in which cars drive themselves, software writes itself, faulty human genetic code edits itself, and the computing power helping all of this happen is virtually limitless.

It is an era when fast forward is not just a button on a remote control; it is a description and an aspiration for entrepreneurs, workers, government officials, programmers, and physicians.

The stretch of time that lies ahead has the potential to create the greatest economic boom that the world has ever known, surpassing the periods that featured the discovery of fire, the discovery of electricity, the magic of flight, or the invention of computers themselves. Every impressive technology we have seen up to now has just been a prelude.

Fast forward: It is a dream and reality at the same time, as yesterdays science fiction becomes toys for children today, and crazy ideas like robotic trucks, Mach 1 ground transportation, drone armies, and highly intelligent and adaptive home furnishings are becoming a plausible reality.

All of this is going to make entrepreneurs and their backers very wealthy, but public shareholders will benefit too, and grandly. And thats the subject of this book.

This book chronicles how all of the building blocks are coming together, each augmenting the previous ones, enabling visionary entrepreneurs to build truly transformational businesses. I will show how powerful cloud networks democratized supercomputing, leading to groundbreaking changes in genomics and artificial intelligence. I will show how the rise of inexpensive sensors helped researchers turn the physical world into ethereal digital bits, and how information scientists are harnessing that data to build revolutionary software that is changing how products are built, and how services are delivered.

Also I will show the applications that are possible when all of these blocks come together. Get ready for self-driving cars, gene editing, and advances in life sciences that will bring microscopic robots, human organs generated in labs, and medical treatments tailored to our specific genomics.

Most important, along the way, I will show you how to take advantage. Im going to show you which trends are important, and which you should ignore. Im going to lay out the fast forward movers and shakers, the companies building integral platforms and competitive advantages that will be difficult to reproduce. In short, I am going to show you which companies are most likely to make investors rich as they hurdle to the very edges of practice and possibility.

I n the late 1800s, the proliferation of cheap industrial electricity changed commerce. It led to vibrant new ecosystems that fostered further innovation.

Cloud computing is serving the same role today. It is transformational.

In this chapter I will show how Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos created this new era with a stroke of rare insight, carving a path for a new generation of entrepreneurs to follow. You will also learn how two other entrepreneursMark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reed Hastings of Netflixwould cleverly leverage cloud computing to become legends in their own right. And you will see how companies are still racing to move their business to the cloud two decades after these pioneers lit the pathway.