anything that can be measured will be measured, constantly. - Peter Diamandis

small groups of dedicated DIY innovators can now tackle problems that were once solely the purview of big governments and large corporations.

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you’d need to be the chairman of MIT’s computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. “By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries — cell phone, Internet — that we all seem to take for granted.

our early warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Things have changed since. Many of today's dangers are probabilistic — the economy might nose-dive, there could be a terrorist attack — and the amygdala can't tell the difference.