Year Ahead: Pay attention to the S-23 investment horizon (Hint: that’s 2045)

Welcome to 2022 just 23 years from 2045. And we are off to another year in the Covid war. The virus continues to mutate but we have developed into a functioning economy which operates in the face of massive continuing uncertainty.

Covid has changed our lives and accelerated the technological thrust in our economy, making online meetings as much of a convention as Googling a word. The need for rapid growth in tech now seems pervasive. Technology is overtaking cars. For example, it would have been unthinkable to imagine that the availability of computer chips would have limited GM sales a few years ago.

This acceleration of technology points to the convergence of human and machine intelligence somewhere around 2045, a commonly cited date. For investors not all the inventions we see today are equally important. But those that leverage the human machine interface are at the core of the world’s future growth. So, instead of counting down like a rocket going into space, T-1, T-2, T-3, I suggest investors think about an approach like S-23, S-22, S-21, ticking our way down toward an integration of human and machine general intelligence. S stands for Synergy or Symbiosis although not in the usual futuristic sense. Investors should see this countdown through a financial lens.

The integration of Human and Machine Intelligence

Today, as Covid rages on, we are seeing a confirmation of an old hypothesis – that human and machine intelligence would come together to make a higher intelligence than we now see in people or machines. I do not believe we need to have machines dominate human intelligence, which is part of the idea of technological Singularity. Futurists believe that we are facing the creation of super machines which will dominate people. But we do not need super machines to benefit from the integration of machine and human intelligence. The integration itself will produce lower cost and higher value reasoning abilities.

I have referred to the confusing information we receive every day on technology and medicine and Covid protocols as the fog of the Covid war. And it truly is a fog. But the merger of machine and human intelligence is happening in that fog with its offshoots and noise.

Follow the Trends

There are core tech developments that can provide a guide us to in our learning and investing. Here are three areas which deserve special focus.

Improving Humans

By today’s standards it took a long time from the discovery of DNA in 1869 until the first map of the human genome in 2003. That mapping time, however, is a heartbeat in the period of our species. The map set the stage for the work we saw this year, improving human biology so that it can deal directly with machine intelligence. An example of this comes from Elon Musk who is installing electrical connections in human beings.

Here are two other recent developments to consider.

a. Protein folding: Shape in human chemistry is terribly important and we can now predict what essential chemicals will look like in the cell. This technology provides a leap forward in our ability to control human cell processes. Companies involved in this level of genetic manipulation are on the path to intelligent interfaces and represent potentially extremely valuable companies.

b. Yamanaka anti-aging factors: old cells still remember how to be young. We now have some of the keys to unlock that memory. Extending the age of a person is a factor in improving the economics of connecting a human being with a machine. Longer lived individuals can benefit for extended periods from the higher intelligence that may be involved. For now, we have a hint of what some of this may look like from tech titan Jeff Bezos and his peers. As biohacking to achieve age reduction and health improvements becomes more widely known and accepted, we can expect explosive growth in the category.

Improving Machines

Both software and hardware are making a synthesis of humans and machine possible as machines grow smarter. AI and Machine learning continue to disrupt industries at an accelerating pace and quantum computing is just beginning to have its day. We could see quantum computer move into the mainstream over the next few years in business, speeding up certain types of calculations by orders of magnitude.

Expanding the Human-Machine Interface

Interaction of the brain with a computer is increasingly invasive with wire or electromagnetic interactions. However, less invasive methods to improving the interface are, however, coming fast in computer vision and the metaverse, for example.

a. Computer vision: Computers have gotten vastly better at reading people.

b. Metaverse: We have all read about this. It is not hype but a kind of substrate to carry machine/human interactions.

As these technologies catch on, and others like them, they will go far beyond gaming and into the mainstream of life.

The S-23 Investment Countdown

Machines do not have to dominate humans in 2045. It is just that the greater integration of the two most powerful technologies on earth – the brain and the computer – is a powerful force.

Economics will force them to work closer together in an inexorable drive to achieve the lowest cost intellectual power available. So, 2045 minus this year of 2022, leaves us with 23 years as the difference. Putting them together, S-23, gives us a logical horizon for this investment cycle.

Technologies along the mind/tech collaboration will have powerful forces at their back and S-23 is a reasonable investment horizon. Investing like this clears some of the fog.

“Initiating launch sequence:”

S-23

S-22

S-21

. . .

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