People often ask us how we can be so positive about the future when the headlines are full of depressing news.
You only have to look at the front page of the Bloomberg News website on any given day to see what they mean.
More often than not the top story involves the latest mess involving central banks or governments. Most of the time it’s a story about how they’re trying to head off the next disaster.
What a sad state of affairs. And yet if you strip away the gloomy headlines and look at what’s really going on in the world, you’ll find that today is perhaps the most exciting and potentially rewarding period in the history of the Earth.
And we’ve got the picture that proves it…
You’ve probably heard of compounding returns in the context of investing.
If you put money in the bank it will earn interest. When the bank credits that interest to your account it also begins to earn interest. When the bank credits that interest to your account, that interest earns interest too. And so on.
That’s compounding your investment returns. Your initial investment helps you earn a return. That return then ‘works’ with your initial investment to produce an even bigger return.
What you may not realize is that you can apply the same compounding principle to technology.
Progress Hundreds of Thousands of Years in the Making
Compound interest is one of the investing world’s under-appreciated investment tricks. It’s investing for the super-patient. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. The fact is that making money from compound interest takes time…a long time.
It can take 20 or 30 years before the earned interest reaches a level that makes the returns truly spectacular.
But if that seems like a long time, it’s nothing compared to the time taken to reap the rewards from technological compounding. We’re not talking about two or three decades. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of years.
Through most of history technology didn’t change. And when it did change the improvement from one technology to the next was hardly noticeable.
That was fine for the people living through those times. They didn’t expect things to change. So they weren’t disappointed when things didn’t change for the better. The way of doing things was the same throughout their entire life. It had been the same throughout their parents’ entire lives too, and their grandparents’.
Any yet, that’s not to say that things weren’t changing. It’s just that the changes were so small that those at the time couldn’t see the change happening.
That’s the way things went for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. That was until big changes started to happen around the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Change and advances in technology became more noticeable. But still, these changes were tiny compared to the advances in technology we’ve seen in recent years. And if the trend continues, the advances will only become more spectacular.
That’s where we’ll show you pictorial proof of how the advance of technology is happening at a rate that surpasses all innovations in the history of mankind.
The Trigger Point for Technological Advance
The chart below shows how technology has taken off over the past century. The chart only goes back to 1400. But in reality you could extend that almost flat line to the left and keep going until it went back to the dawn of humanity.
As we mentioned above, things really began to change after the Industrial Revolution. That was when technological advances really began to ‘compound’. It was the trigger point, the ‘bend in the knee’ as the world began an exponential rise in technological advancement unseen in history.
The compounding of technology occurred as ‘new’ technology could help develop an even ‘newer’ and more sophisticated technology. From here the advance of technology would continue at an ever increasing rate of knots.
A Limitless Opportunity in Technology
Now, a mathematician or physicist may look at that chart and point out that an exponential gain can’t go on forever. They’ll say that in a world of finite resources there is a limit to how much anyone can produce of anything.
They’ll use the example of the rice and the chessboard. If you start by putting one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard and then double the amount on each subsequent square (eg. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc…) the total amount of rice on the chessboard would rise to the height of Mt Everest and equal more than 1,000 times the world’s annual rice production! (Do the maths if you don’t believe us.)
That’s exponential growth. You don’t notice the change early on, and it seems incomprehensible that the number could grow so big. But it does. And the same thing is playing out in technology.
Of course, we’re not about to fly in the face of maths. But what if there was a circumstance where the resource was infinite? What if there was no limitation to what technology and humanity could achieve?
This is something technology analyst Sam Volkering and your editor have followed in Revolutionary Tech Investor, the premium technology investing advisory service.
We call it the ‘Sixth Revolution’ where future advancement in technology (where the exponential growth rate really takes off) happens at the molecular level. Part of this shift involves the development of ‘immersive’ technology.
We won’t go into the details here as it’s a subject we’re still exploring for Revolutionary Tech Investor subscribers. But we will say that the potential growth in this sector and in technology are limitless.
Of course finding and recognising this change is one thing. Getting into a position to profit from it financially is another. That’s exactly what we’re doing now as we take investing down to the molecular level and look for the potentially infinite opportunities.
Cheers,
Kris+
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