The Wall Street Journal Future of Everything Festival earlier this month convened over 80 speakers attending twelve sessions over three days at Spring Studios in downtown Manhattan to examine how advancements in science and tech are revolutionizing business and society.
The festival formed part of WSJ’s Future of Everything [1]coverage, which includes a semi-annual magazine, weekly podcast, a newsletter as well as regular features on the transformative effects of innovation and technology. (WSJ and MarketWatch are both units of Dow Jones, owned by News Corp.) NWSA, -0.70%[2]
Podcast highlights of the festival are available online[3]. Here is a selection of panelists, ranging from actress celebrities to chess grandmasters, weighing on the latest developments in digital currencies, AI, space travel, food and wine, beauty and wellness and gender inequality.
The Future of bitcoin and digital currency:
Charlie Shrem, founder of Crypto. IQ:
“It’s not if but when that you’ll see large countries’ central banks start to accumulate and hold bitcoin as part of their sovereign wealth funds. I already know that is already happening in the United Arab Emirates. Some Eastern European countries that are doing it and some small African nations are doing it.”
Aaron Back, Heard on the Street Columnist, WSJ:
“Today the big cities [in China] Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen are virtually cashless and virtually walletless, in fact. You basically just use your mobile phone to pay for anything….the fundamental gatekeepers of the payments infrastructure in the United States have not been disrupted whereas in China they never really existed so it was much easier to cut them out…I think in five years the US will look like China in that people will not really be using cash or physical wallets at all in major metropolitan centers. I think it will be the same and I think it will probably be QR code- based because it’s the simplest, most efficient technology. But what I don’t know is what the economics of that are going to be.”
The future of artificial intelligence:
Garry Kasparov, Russian chess grandmaster and author of “Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins”:
“AI is neither magic wand nor “The Terminator”. AI is not a harbinger of utopia or dystopia... “Artificial Intelligence” sounds a bit frightening because the moment you say artificial, it correlates with alien and people get scared. I think it’s more precise to talk about “Augmented Intelligence” because at the end of the day it’s about human-machine collaboration as with every technology we had in the past it eventually helped us to move forward. Technology in the past made us stronger and...