But is fusion ever going to be practical?

  Recently I spoke to a brilliant investor in this field who told me the challenges for fusion power have moved out of the realm of science and into the realm of engineering. By that I mean fusion reactors work on paper, and it should work in the real world too, so long as we can engineer a sufficiently powerful set of magnets to contain the plasma, or some other engineering work-around. And there have been big breakthroughs in materials science that should allow us to experiment our way to a stable engineering solution. There are a number of other engineering obstacles, but at this point they all seem to be in the realm of the solvable. At this writing, ten funded startups are pursuing different paths to what they see as the best fusion engineering solution. Would you bet against all ten, knowing they are staffed by some of the smartest people in the world?

  Generation IV Nuclear Power

  We might not need to wait for fusion technology. So-called Gen IV nuclear reactors are designed so there can be no meltdowns even if nearly everything goes wrong at the same time. Bill Gates called attention to the potential of these “new-wave” reactors in his 2019 list of breakthrough technologies.5

  Meanwhile, in 2019 the U.S. Department of Energy announced a Versatile Test Reactor site for rapid testing of new nuclear fuel solutions. One of the biggest problems with nuclear power designs is that it is impractical to iterate from poor designs to good designs—the way nearly every other technology evolves—because of the risk, cost, politics, and long planning cycles of anything involving nuclear power. The new rapid-testing facility will address some of that problem.6

  But what about storing all the nuclear waste from those Gen IV nuclear sites, you ask? Some of the Gen IV designs convert that spent fuel into power.

  Anecdotally, I don’t know a single smart person who understands the nuclear industry and who also opposes Gen IV nuclear plants. And that includes people who are concerned about climate change and those who are not. Gen IV nuclear seems to be the smart path in either case. And the obstacles to it are falling away quickly.

  Air-conditioning

  One of the bigger risks of climate warming is that more people will die from heat. Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson has teamed up with the Indian government to offer a $3 million prize to whoever can invent a better air-conditioning system—meaning a less expensive one. This sort of concentrated effort has produced good outcomes in the past. In a few decades, we might see new forms of low-cost air-conditioning at the same time as cheap electricity from fusion or Gen IV nuclear power. And more generally, eighty years is a long time in which to figure out how to beat the heat. Humans are good at solving problems they can see coming for decades. The smart money says fewer people will be dying from the heat in eighty years, even if temperatures rise as predicted.

  CO2 Scrubbers

  Climate change skeptics remind us loudly and often that CO2 is good for plants, and science agrees. Greenhouses use CO2 generators to improve plant yields. The big question is how much CO2 is too much, warming-wise or otherwise. I’m not qualified to address that question, so for our purposes here I will describe some technologies under development for cleaning CO2 out of the air. I take it as a given that, should we become so good at removing CO2 from the air that the plants start gasping for it, we will see that problem coming with plenty of time to avoid overshooting the mark. No matter what you believe about the dangers of CO2, it can’t hurt to have technologies that can scrub it out of the air should we feel it is necessary. Here are some things coming our way.

  Carbon Engineering

  Carbon Engineering is a Canadian company funded in part by Bill Gates. They report having a breakthrough technology for scrubbing CO2 out of the air and converting it to a type of jet fuel. Their technology already works in a pilot plant, and their big claim is that they have reduced the cost of the process to the point of being economical.

  One must be appropriately skeptical of any claims coming from new companies and new technologies. But Bill Gates’s involvement suggests the company’s ambitions are solidly in the not-so-crazy category.7

  Climeworks

  Climeworks is another company working on scrubbing CO2 out of the air using giant air-sucking engines and controlled chemical reactions. The company can build these relatively small facilities today, but obviously at a higher cost per unit than if they were implemented on a larger scale. And one assumes the efficiency will improve over time. Adding some cheap nuclear energy to the cost structure would help a lot.8

  CarbFix

  CarbFix is a project run by an international consortium, led by Reykjavik Energy and with funding from the EU. They claim to already be able to scrub CO2 from the air and store it permanently in rocks. Here again, we must be skeptical about the economics of this sort of thing. But with multiple projects operating to scrub CO2 out of the air, and an assumption of improved efficiency and lower cost per unit over time, this could be promising.9

  Global Thermostat

  A company named Global Thermostat has developed technology for using the heat generated by existing industrial processes, such as metal smelting, cement production, and petrochemical refining, to collect CO2 out of the air. The CO2 can then be used by indoor farms, in oil well rejuvenation, and to make carbonated drinks, for example.

  Now imagine using inner-city land that has been cleared of blight and is available at almost no cost because cities own the foreclosed land and want to use it productively. There are tens of thousands of blight-cleared urban properties available across the country. Now imagine you build a data center that generates lots of excess heat and put it next to an indoor farm. Use that excess heat for the indoor farm in the winter, and perhaps also use the heat to warm sidewalks and parking lots so they don’t need to be shoveled. Then add the Global Thermostat technology to use the heat from the data center to generate CO2 for the connected indoor farm. Greenhouses already pipe in CO2 because it is essential for healthy plant growth.

  I won’t claim this particular idea is a winner, but it might help you see how unpredictable the future is. Humans have an exceptional track record of solving big problems they can see coming from a long way off. And a “systems approach,” in which you design neighborhoods and businesses to work in harmony with each other, has tremendous potential for solving a wide variety of society’s problems.10

  Strata Worldwide

  Strata Worldwide also makes a stand-alone commercial product for scrubbing CO2 out of the air.11 By now you get the idea. Capitalism is doing its thing.

  * * *

  —

  I’M NOT QUALIFIED to compare any of the CO2-scrubbing technologies, or to predict which, if any, will be commercially successful. But I liken this situation to the dawn of personal computing. In those days, you couldn’t easily predict which companies would come to dominate the market for personal computers, but you could predict with confidence that personal computers were here to stay, and that they would improve dramatically over time. Given the high priority of climate change, and the huge amounts of money that will be funneled in that direction, an optimist such as myself would predict that direct scrubbing of CO2 from the air will be economical and scalable in time to make a meaningful difference in CO2 levels on the planet.

  In February 2019, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced $24 million in funding to support eight identified projects in the field of carbon capture. We can’t know that any of those projects will succeed, but the energy and attention being applied to carbon capture tells us that plenty of smart people see this as potentially productive.

  END OF UNEMPLOYMENT

  Most futurists see a world ahead in which robots take all the low-skilled jobs, and even many of the high-skilled jobs, creating massive unemployment. That’s one way the future could go, but humans are plucky and adaptable, especially when the problem is so clear and we all agree it’s coming. The robot-caused employment crisis is easy to see coming, and I observe some helpful trends that could save us from runaway unemployment.

  The first trend is that we are likely to see big innovations that could lower the cost of living. I predict big strides over the next two decades in lowering the cost of healthcare, transportation, energy, education, Internet access, and housing. And that means lower-paying jobs will be sufficient for enjoying a quality life.

  I’ve mentioned that energy costs could drop fast when fusion or Gen IV nuclear power becomes doable. And the energy industry keeps improving its efficiency in every domain. New homes with efficient solar panels and lots of green construction methods will approach zero-net-energy use, on average, in the coming decades.

  Self-driving cars will someday make individual car ownership unnecessary. The cost of owning a vehicle could be spread across multiple families as efficient ride-sharing apps are developed. And self-driving cars will be almost accident-free, which means insurance costs will eventually drop.

  Education will continue to move online and improve in effectiveness, and that means the cost of training workers will drop. It will soon be practical and easy to retrain unemployed people.

  As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been looking into low-cost home construction trends, and there is a lot happening in that field. The next five years will see inexpensive homes built by 3-D printers, robots, and even homeowners doing construction themselves using snap-together kits.

  Collectively, these trends suggest that a worker who loses a high-paying factory job to robots could have a perfectly good lifestyle on half the income working at a different job. That might require relocating from an expensive location to one that has been developed for low-cost living, but that can be done.

  Low-cost living is also critical for senior citizens on fixed incomes. That demographic can’t rely on the government to tax its younger citizens enough to give everyone a safety net forever. As an optimist, I expect capitalism to do what it does best: namely, identify a market opportunity and rapidly innovate to create low-cost living options.

  The biggest advantage job seekers will have in the future is the ability to find work anywhere in the country—or perhaps in the world—and move there on demand. At the moment, physical mobility is deeply limited for people who have no money. But you can expect normal continuous improvement in that area, just as we see in every other field. Future employers are likely to offer job relocation solutions for low-income people, including better matching of people to jobs, video interviews, inexpensive transportation, and low-cost housing upon arrival. For companies to do otherwise would mean not having access to the best workers.

  I also predict a massive job market for renovating existing buildings to make them more energy efficient and more suited for modern living. Robots will soon be able to build new homes by following directions, but they will have a tough time navigating all the decisions that go into a renovation. The renovation market should produce an increasing number of jobs for humans for a long time.

  HEALTHCARE INNOVATIONS

  The healthcare field is too massive to cover in this sort of book, but we see incredible breakthroughs happening in every area. I’ll describe a few trends that promise to lower the cost of healthcare, which addresses one of the biggest problems in the United States.

  Telemedicine

  My healthcare provider was one of the first to allow patients to do doctor “visits” by email. About 80 percent of the time I get a full solution, including drug prescriptions, within an hour of emailing my doctor. Other healthcare providers are offering similar services. Using email obviously lowers the cost of doctor visits while being more convenient and efficient at the same time.

  If email isn’t fast enough, or you want a more personal touch, you can now contact a doctor on short notice via a video call on your phone, at a discounted cost to an in-person visit. For people with no healthcare insurance, this is often a big money saver compared to visiting an emergency room for something that isn’t an emergency. My startup’s app, called Interface by WhenHub,12 is one of a growing number of platforms for connecting to doctors (and any other kind of expert) by video call. By the time you read this book, I expect the number of telemedicine options will be far greater.13

  Smartphone Health Tests and Lab Tests

  Devices for testing your health are shrinking in cost and size and becoming consumer products. Startups are making smartphone accessories that can test your urine, blood, blood pressure, hearth rhythms, temperature, and blood oxygen, to name a few. You can even diagnose your own mole. By the time you read this book, I expect startups will have announced dozens more inexpensive health sensors that work with your phone.

  I’ve invested in startups that use technology recently developed by government military labs to test skin and blood samples on tabletop devices in the doctor’s office and give results in minutes. That eliminates a lot of the cost of sending samples to labs. Meanwhile, medical lab startups are looking to disrupt the lab-testing business and dramatically bring down costs. All indications are that the cost of lab testing—at least for the most common tests—will plummet in coming years.14

  Innovation and Technology

  In 2018, Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and J.P. Morgan teamed up to create a better healthcare solution, at a lower cost, for their U.S. employees.15 That effort is in its early stages, but it looks like it is the right team to innovate and attack some of the toughest cost problems in healthcare. You can expect some or all of the innovations they come up with to eventually benefit the country at large. Amazon’s expertise in online selling, data management, and efficient delivery are the obvious places to expect improvement. But I would expect far more from this team. I don’t believe a more qualified and well-funded group has ever focused on the problem of healthcare expenses.

  MRI Scanners

  In the United States, MRI scans are expensive procedures, costing anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on the type of scan. Newly developed technologies for making MRI scanners are expected to lower the cost of the devices by half. This is part of a larger trend of startups targeting high-cost medical device markets and building low-cost devices to compete.

  Removing Regulatory and Legal Obstacles

  The healthcare situation in the United States is burdened by a tangle of rules and regulations that have evolved over time to choke out the benefits of free markets and competition. One assumes that healthcare lobbyists, the natural complexity of the topic, and an inefficient government are the base problem. But there is reason for some optimism, as the Trump administration is making a major push to modify federal laws and processes to improve competition in all areas of healthcare. It is too early to know how all that will shake out, but efficient market competition is generally good for consumers.

  We might also see some benefits coming from the competition among major political parties in how they propose to address healthcare. Democrats want some sort of taxpayer-funded universal healthcare while Republicans favor improving market competition to increase access and affordability. From a political perspective, the Democrats have the stronger case because their plan is easy to understand and the average voter isn’t concerned that the rich will be overtaxed to pay for it. Here I am intentionally oversimplifying, because that’s how voters will see it.

  Republicans are in a weaker political position on healthcare because their preferred approach of improving market competition probably sounds to voters like vague promises. And it is hard for Republicans to get credit for changing laws and regulations that voters didn’t know were problems in the first place. Still, I expect Republicans to push hard at streamlining regulations and laws to defend against the Democrats’ plan for universal healthcare. They need to show concrete results from their policies. Competition is good, even in politics.

  Big Data

  The more we know about the everyday choices and health details of individuals, the better equipped we will be for understanding which actions improve health and which ones do not. As a country, we already collect massive data from fitness sensors, personal apps, DNA tests, and healthcare records. The usefulness of that sort of data starts small but increases rapidly as you add data. I’ll give you a few examples to make the point, but don’t put too much stock in the specific examples. I’m making a broader point.

  For years I had been taking one baby aspirin every night before bed because doctors said it could help me survive a heart attack. But a recent study found that older people who do not have any special cardiovascular risk get no benefits from the aspirin and, on average, it might slightly increase your risks of other health problems. At the moment, we can only learn this sort of correlation (if not causation) by funding studies. But at some point in the near future, we might have enough patient health data in one database to know whether or not the aspirin takers have longer or shorter life spans, all other things being equal. Broadening the point, the more we know about people’s actions and health outcomes, the easier it will be to find out what combinations of things are good for you.