Technology to turn scarcity into abundance

Wherever you see scarcity, think of abundance, and the key to turning scarcity into abundance lies in technology, said entrepreneur and futurist Dr. Peter H. Diamandis at the inaugural Abundance 360 Summit in Dubai.
The event is being hosted by the Dubai Future Foundation, and is held under the patronage of Shaikh Hamdan bin Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, chairman of Dubai Executive Council, and chairman of the Board of Trustees at Dubai Future Foundation.
In his opening remarks, Diamandis, said that the world is accelerating faster than ever before. "There is no region or country which, I believe, has shown more exponential growth than the UAE over its 50 year journey. We are going to make more progress in the next 10 years than we have in the entire past century. We are also going to see the ability to create more wealth in the next 10 years than over the entire past century. People tend to fear the future, because they don't have a sense of what is coming. There is no single industry that is going to remain untouched by emerging technologies."
He also noted that because of emerging technologies things are going to go from "deceptive to disruptive." Organisations, he said, need to understand the disruptive potential of exponential growth and educate their workforce accordingly.
"We might just be aware of certain emerging technologies, before they are going to be disrupting industries," he said. "There is a tsunami of change that is coming; today our world is global and exponential. There are companies out there that are jumping on the exponential growth curve. The cost of launching an internet tech startup is decreasing; and it only takes one out of about a 100 or a 1,000 of these startups to succeed to transform an industry. What we are seeing right now is a rapid period of exponential growth; the number of crazy ideas that are being tried around the world are exploding right now."
Emerging technologies will help to digitise an idea, which at first will begin to show a deceptive period of growth; this, in turn, will turn disruptive, and then eventually lead to dematerialisation, and finally demonetisation. "Look at how you can digitise your product, because if you don't do it, someone else will," Diamandis said. "As we connect the world thorugh technologies such as 5G, we will see more ideas funded and an acceleration in new businesses created."
Ahmad bin Abdullah Humaid Al Falasi, UAE Minister of Higher Education, followed up by speaking about the importance of teaching students to be ready to tackled the challenges of an increasingly digital world. He believed that the workforce was going through an evolution of skills rather than jobs. "An Uber driver still has the same job, but what he needs to be is tech savvy because the nature of his job demands it. In addition, he also needs to work on his customer service, because he will be rated for it at the end of the ride. This is an example of what we need to look at when teaching our students today; we need to predict the skills and sub skills that will be needed. Technology is definitely disruptive, and I think that we have only scratched the surface of what it can do in the education sector."
Already, he noted, that technology is helping to improve access to content for students. "We need to focus on teaching our students empathy, creativity, social responsibility, and cultural sensitivity to reinforce the topic of tolerance."
- rohma@khaleejtimes.com