🔮 The bio revolution; machines & the new normal; Roman digits, Tunguska, gifs++ #270

I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies—and, of course, Covid-19.

To catch up on my previous writing on Covid-19, see:

• Enthusiasm needs coordination, too

• The three cleavages: shaping the post-pandemic order

• What Dr Doom told me about the coming recession

The near future

🧬 McKinsey has a good survey on the “bio revolution”. “As much as 60 percent of the physical inputs to the global economy could be produced biologically [and] could have direct economic impact of up to $4 trillion per year over the next 20 years.” (For more of our view on these issues, please see Dig Deeper below.)

🕳️ We aren’t the only ones struggling with the “new normal”. Machine learning models, especially in fraud detection and stock management, have broken. “Most are fragile; they perform badly when input data differs too much from the data they were trained on.” (This reinforces the impor…