Unsupervised

CHAPTER 5Reinventing the Economy

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

—Albert Einstein

No sector of the economy is immune to technological change. The only issues are the speed of adoption and the degree of impact. These are some key areas that have already seen significant change and can expect further exponential developments.

Money, Banking, Spending, and the Future of Finance

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

—Albert Einstein

Once our various and diverse social systems and cultures are stripped away, the modern world is based on clearly identifiable fundamentals created and developed over the millennia. Among the most important is a financial system that has become largely accepted around the world—a major underpinning for the vast level of global trade.

Almost nothing works without finance. Blockchain and decentralization, combined with artificial intelligence, always-on communications, and quantum computing, have a real prospect of disrupting almost every sector by revolutionizing how and where transactions occur. Tokenization, challenger banks, plug-and-pay models, and automated finance are all becoming widely adopted—for better or worse—and we are still in their early stages. The movement toward dematerialization by removing the need for physical locations and people is changing the entire model of how finance will work in the decades to come.

Historically, the financial system was ...