All of this changed in 1993, when Marc Andreessen, a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, coaut… - Peter Diamandis

Uber’s goal,” explained Holden from the stage, “is to demonstrate flying car capability in 2020 and have aerial ridesharing fully operational in Dallas and LA by 2023.” But then Holden went even further: “Ultimately, we want to make it economically irrational to own and use a car.

Pneumonia, a disease we’ve been able to treat for almost a century, still accounts for 19 percent of all deaths in children under five.

Even when there's automation, this doesn't always create the dire results we expect. Consider automatic teller machines (ATMs). When they were first rolled out in the late 1970s, there were serious concerns about bank teller layoffs. Between 1995 and 2010, the number of ATMs in America went from one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand, but mass teller unemployment wasn't the result. Because ATMs made it cheaper to operate banks, the number of banks grew by 40 percent. More banks meant more jobs for human bank tellers, which is why bank teller employment actually rose during this period.