Limitless everything.

1.     Limitless clean energy with fusion reactors

There are 39 companies in Nuclear Fusion which include CFS, Helion, General Fusion, TAE Technologies and Tokamak Energy. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, run by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are lead investor in Type One Energy that seeks to provide clean energy to the developing world with fusion energy. It is still about 15 years away.

2.     Limitless computing power with quantum computers

Quantum computers can do some tasks in seconds that would take a classical supercomputer thousands of years to complete.
Dr Thomas Monz is leading a project to develop a fully scalable quantum computer. The project is part of the EU’s €1 billion initiative to kickstart a competitive European industry in quantum technologies. Quantum computers already exist but suffer from errors. Dr Monz thinks we are only a year away from a reliable quantum computer.

3.     Limitless knowledge with artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence already knows more than any human and is improving at a rapid rate. It has aced law, medical and other exams and recently Google Deepmind AI “found” about 800 years’ worth of new materials. Its GNoME tool discovered 2.2 million new inorganic crystals, and identified 380,000 of them as the most stable, giving researchers a pre-filtered list of new materials to synthesize for experimental research.

Limitless future?

Big companies, especially tech companies, will have limitless energy (perhaps their own fusion reactor), limitless computing power and limitless knowledge, all instantly available to clients at low cost. Many jobs will become irrelevant and the main guy in a future firm could be the “AI guy” boosting the company’s productivity while reducing head count.

My particular interest is financial planning, currently mired by high costs, cumbersome process, and onerous compliance requirements. I test AI (ChatGPT and co-pilot) on a weekly basis to see if they can perform a relatively complex retirement planning query and none of them can, although ChatGPT-4 comes close.

Some new businesses can see the future and are moving in that direction. Our own SMFP (https://www.smfp.au/) offers voice-based financial planning using Amazon’s Alexa. Just talk to the device as if it were a human.

If it is only “delegators” who demand a real human adviser, then over 80% of the population will prefer AI, immediate answers and lower costs.