Editor

There is a future after lockdown that promises to be better than the present. The power of the private sector to make wealth – unfathomable amounts of it – is still there. Technological know-how has enduring power to survive the worst political attacks. The engine of entrepreneurship can be unleashed in an instant; it only needs the boot off the neck. These are the kinds of issues I work on daily, attempting to find and flag the great innovations that define our future. I will be speaking at what looks to be a great event: COSM Technology, November 11-12, 2020, at the Bellevue, Washington, Hyatt Regency. Anyone can attend; you can get your tickets here.  I explain further, in this special note Read More ›

Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance. Instead, by inventing new technologies we rewrite the plan of the world. Peter Thiel, Zero to One And we were off, for a three-day tour of the COSM, rewriting the plan of the world in time-money theory, 5G communications vision, artificial intelligence (AI), and crypto-internet architecture. It was my COSM conference at the Westin hotel in Bellevue, across the water and an ideological gulf from downtown Seattle. The conference began with the incandescence of Peter Thiel, declaring his belief in a fully human future that we choose and endow rather than in a machine singularity that chooses us and shunts us aside. Read More ›

I want to tell you more about the COSM — our technology summit last month outside Seattle. Among many high points, several Mount Rainier moments stand out a week later. And I’ll get to the TikTok threat soon enough. First, I recall Microsoft’s former Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie’s report of a major AI breakthrough just a month ago in mastering the exquisite complexities of protein folding. This advance opens the way to huge biotech gains in custom-built protein molecules adjusted for particular people with particular needs or diseases. It is the most significant biotech invention since the complementary CRISPR method for editing strands of DNA. Our biotech portfolio companies from Matt Scholz will benefit, as will the entire industry. Read More ›