Tuesday, November 18, 2025

On Our Virtual Route 99 Around the World: On the Tech Scene


 

Our team presents the following courtesy of Al Jazeera on how Artificial Intelligence impacts jobs, and Peter Diamandis on Megatrends as China begins the World's First Mass Delivery of Humanoid Robot Workers and thoughts courtesy the Team at The Information 


Despite all the dystopian news stories on climate change, political polarization, and global conflicts, I believe that today is, by far, the single best time in all of human history to be alive.

Over the past three decades studying exponential technologies, I’ve come to understand a fundamental truth:

“The speed of exponential tech is accelerating, and these technologies are converging and reinventing everything in their path. There will be much change, but that change will uplift humanity, create Abundance, and give us a vacation from survival. In the process, we, all of us, are gaining godlike powers.”

The next decade—2025 to 2035—represents the most transformative period in human history. We’re not just experiencing isolated technological breakthroughs… we’re on the cusp of 10 simultaneous Metatrends that will transform every aspect of our lives: how we raise our children, run our companies, govern our nations, and live our lives.

I’ve just completed my comprehensive analysis of these 10 Metatrends, and I’m excited to share it with you today.

Download the complete 103-page report here

What Is a Metatrend?

Metatrend is the unstoppable, long-term transformation of an industry or domain—propelled by the convergence of multiple exponential technologies. It systematically digitizes, dematerializes, demonetizes, and democratizes the field, reshaping it at an accelerating pace and unlocking entirely new possibilities.

The Convergence Decade: 7 Key Insights

1. THE CONVERGENCE DECADE: 2025-2035 represents unprecedented convergence where AI enhances every other technology, robotics enables space exploration, quantum computing accelerates drug discovery, and networks create the data layer that makes everything smarter. This is exponential multiplication: a “Cambrian Explosion” of creative genius solving problems at the speed of digital superintelligence.

2. THE ABUNDANCE INFLECTION POINT: We’re approaching the moment when exponential technologies solve humanity’s greatest challenges faster than new problems emerge. By 2035, food, energy, and education will be democratized at scale through autonomous systems and AI.

3. INTELLIGENCE BECOMES SUBSTRATE: AI evolves from a tool to the fundamental substrate of civilization itself. Every person will deploy personalized swarms of AI agents, scientific discovery will become autonomous and continuous, and quantum-AI systems will solve previously intractable problems.

4. THE ROBOT REVOLUTION: Millions and then billions humanoid robots will integrate into daily life by 2035, handling 80% of household chores, providing 24/7 eldercare, and working in extreme environments including off-world settlements. This represents the greatest transformation of human labor since the Industrial Revolution.

5. BIOLOGY BECOMES PROGRAMMABLE: Medicine shifts from reactive to anticipatory and preventive, with aging becoming optional rather than inevitable. Continuous health platforms detect disease years before symptoms appear, and people in their 80s routinely start companies and train for marathons.

6. THE DEMONETIZATION CURVE ACCELERATES: The pattern of expensive-to-free is unfolding simultaneously across every Metatrend. Gene sequencing has dropped from $100 million to just $200. Advanced AI systems are now free to billions. Soon, longevity therapies, space access, and personalized education will follow.

7. NEW RISKS REQUIRE NEW WISDOM: Each Metatrend carries profound dark sides that demand proactive governance: from AI alignment challenges and job displacement, to privacy erosion and new forms of inequality.

The 10 Metatrends

  1. Abundance: Food, Energy, Education

  2. AI & Quantum

  3. Humanoid Robotics & Autonomous Systems

  4. Longevity, Medicine & Biotechnology

  5. Digital Currencies, Crypto & DeFi

  6. Robotaxis, Flying Cars & Drones

  7. Networks & Sensors

  8. Digital Manufacturing

  9. Metaverse and XR

  10. Space Exploration

For each Metatrend, the report provides:

  • A vivid “Opening Scene: It’s 2035, and...” narrative

  • A vision for 2035

  • 10 technology breakthroughs required

  • 10 business predictions and investment opportunities

  • Dark side risk assessments

  • Wisdom for navigating these transformations responsibly

Plus 50+ charts, visualizations, company landscapes, and appendices.

Your Role in Shaping the Age of Abundance

Technology is neutral. It will not, on its own, choose justice over exploitation, empowerment over control, or unity over division. That choice is ours.

This is our generation’s Moonshot: to ensure that the Age of Abundance benefits all of humanity.

By 2035, we can live in a world where aging is optional, space is accessible, every child learns from a personalized AI tutor, every home produces its own clean energy, and scarcity is an artifact of history.

The future is arriving faster than most realize. It will not wait for us to be ready.

This transformation from scarcity to Abundance, from expensive to demonetized, from the rich to everyone, is happening in every industry, everywhere on the globe.

The question isn’t whether these changes will occur. It’s whether you’ll be positioned to benefit from them, invest in them, and help guide them toward outcomes that serve all of humanity.

Next time you’re barreling down a highway and you get stuck behind someone driving at the speed limit, don’t honk or flash your lights. It might be a Waymo self-driving car! The Alphabet-owned robotaxi business announced Wednesday that its cars will now drive on freeways in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Phoenix, a major advance for the service. It’s a reminder that, while Elon Musk makes extravagant promises about the potential of Tesla’s robotaxi service, Waymo is actually living the dream.

Waymo has been operating in all three cities for quite a while, in addition to Atlanta and Austin, Texas, where its cars are available on the Uber service. It plans to expand to Dallas, Denver, Washington, Nashville, Tenn., Miami, San Diego and London next year, with several of those new markets operating through partners such as Avis or Lyft. That expansion should drastically accelerate the already rapid growth in paid rides. On Tuesday, Guggenheim Securities published a report partly based on new California DMV data estimating that Waymo had 4.3 million monthly rides overall in the third quarter, up from 3.5 million in the second quarter. 

Can Tesla catch up? It still hasn’t taken a human safety driver out of its cars, although Musk said recently he hopes to remove that person from its cars in parts of Austin in the coming months. And as my colleague Theo Wayt reported recently, Tesla hasn’t yet applied for the permits required for robotaxi service in a couple of states where it plans to begin offering service soon. Presumably by some point in 2026, Tesla will expand the markets where it offers robotaxi service, perhaps without a human safety driver, putting it on an equal footing with Waymo. But by that point, the Alphabet-owned unit could be operating in even more markets. 

Musk has a lot of incentive to make Tesla’s robotaxi a success. To collect his full $1 trillion pay package, Tesla has to put a million Tesla robotaxis into commercial operation. Anecdotally, the Tesla self-driving experience is on a par with Waymo’s, at least according to AI researcher Andrej Karpathy (a onetime top Tesla AI executive), who posted his views today on X. It’s possible Tesla could gain market share by undercutting Waymo on fares: Waymo’s cars, including the self-driving tech, are costly to produce—see this story for details. That translates into higher fares compared with Uber, at least. That should change soon, given that Waymo last year struck a deal to incorporate Hyundai vehicles in its fleet, which should bring down costs compared to the current Jaguar vehicles it currently uses. Then again, Tesla’s own studies suggest its robotaxi might never be profitable.

The rivalry between Musk and Waymo is simmering in the background right now. But once Tesla’s robotaxi service really gets going, that’s likely to change. Given that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software now has a “Mad Max” setting that allows the cars to drive at high speeds, you’re not likely to get stuck behind a slow-moving Tesla on a highway.

The Humanoid Bubble

Forget the AI bubble. What about the explosion of interest in humanoid robots? We broke news today that Andy Rubin, inventor of Android and a veteran of the robotics sector, has launched a new startup focused on humanoid robots. He’s jumping into a very crowded market, as our story noted.

Last week, for instance, Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng showed off its humanoid prototype, while Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot performed for shareholders at that company’s annual meeting last week. Despite the intense interest, everyone involved—Musk most of all—points out how complicated it is to make humanoid robots, particularly their hands. That hasn’t deterred investors from paying up in fundraisings by startups such as Figure AI. We’ll bet Rubin will take advantage of that interest to raise money for his launch.

In Other News

• Anthropic plans to invest $50 billion building its own data centers, in Texas and New York, the AI startup announced on Wednesday. Anthropic said it would partner with London-based cloud startup Fluidstack on the data centers.

• Stablecoin issuer Circle’s revenue jumped 66% in the third quarter, but its shares fell 11% Wednesday, weighed down by concerns over declining interest rates and rising distribution costs. 

• OpenAI has asked a court to reverse a ruling requiring it to hand over records of 20 million conversations between users and ChatGPT to The New York Times Co. OpenAI said the request was “an invasion of user privacy.”

• Skims, the apparel and shapewear brand co-founded by Kim Kardashian, has raised $225 million in new funding, the company said Wednesday. The funding round, led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, boosts Skims’ valuation to $5 billion, up from $4 billion in 2023.

Bitcoin has tumbled into a bear market, but the real damage is in the companies that have hoarded crypto, hoping to mimic the gains of Michael Saylor’s bitcoin stock, Strategy.

Strategy is down 44% since bitcoin peaked in early October. More importantly, it is now trading slightly below the value of its bitcoin holdings. Bitcoin is down 24% from its peak and has sunk below $100,000, weighed down by a market sell-off in risky assets and long-term holders cashing out.

Read the full article

Bitcoin Is Falling and Crypto Stocks Are Crashing

By Yueqi Yang

We’re heading into the last full workweek before Thanksgiving and plenty is going on. A short time ago, bets on prediction market Polymarket were giving an 88% chance that Google would release its much-anticipated Gemini 3 AI model this week. Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday fueled the speculation with this cryptic X post. Meanwhile, Microsoft holds its Ignite developer conference in San Francisco this week (more on that, see below).

But the focus is on Nvidia. On Wednesday, the AI chip behemoth reports its latest quarterly results, always a big event for Wall Street and tech. After weeks of debate about the rising costs of AI development, and signs that Nvidia rivals such as AMD and Broadcom are making headway in the AI chip market, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gets his chance to remind everyone just how dominant Nvidia remains. 

Nvidia projected in August that its October-quarter revenues would reach $54 billion, about 54% higher than a year earlier. That compares to the $9.2 billion revenue number reported earlier this month by Nvidia’s distant rival, AMD, for its September-ending quarter. AMD’s revenue was up 36% on the year-earlier period, so it is growing. But it is years behind Nvidia, whose growth has exploded since 2023. That’s when Nvidia’s revenues were around where AMD’s are now, as the chart below shows. It would be hard to find another company whose ascent has been so steady and so spectacular. 

And all evidence suggests that Nvidia’s ramp-up is likely to continue—at least for the near term.  At Nvidia’s GTC event in Washington in late October, Huang surprised Wall Street analysts when he said the company already had sales commitments for its new Blackwell and upcoming Rubin chips totaling $500 billion. Some of that has been recorded since the start of calendar 2025, but most will show up through 2026. To put that number into context, Nvidia reported revenue of $130 billion in the year to January 2025, and analysts expect it to generate $207 billion in the year ending this coming January, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. 

Not that Jensen Huang is content with this state of affairs: His frequent warnings about the threat China poses in AI—meant to underline why Nvidia should be allowed to sell its stuff to that country—have spotlighted the impact of Nvidia losing that market. It’s remarkable that the company has been able to report 50%-plus growth despite that loss, as our recent story (and Huang’s follow-up comments) noted. We expect Huang to talk more about China, as well as perhaps Nvidia’s spate of investments in potential customers, on the Wednesday call. Despite the various threats hovering over the company, the overall tone is likely to be triumphant as always.

Microsoft Ignites

Microsoft’s Ignite developer conference kicks off at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Tuesday. Speakers include Judson Althoff, recently promoted to be CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, as well as Scott Guthrie, a top executive in the company’s cloud and AI group. 

My colleague Aaron Holmes has heard Microsoft may have announcements about additional advanced features in its Office software and Copilot AI service that are powered by either Anthropic or OpenAI, building on what the company recently announced.

In Other News

• Apple’s succession plans for its next chief executive have accelerated, with its board and senior executives preparing for current CEO Tim Cook to step down potentially next year, according to the Financial Times.

• Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway purchased shares in Google parent Alphabet worth $4.3 billion at the end of the third quarter, a vote of confidence in the search giant after its shares have surged this year.

• XAI plans to release its next-generation Grok 5 AI model in the first three months of next year, CEO Elon Musk said on Friday. That’s later than a deadline he had previously set of releasing it by the end of 2025. 

• OpenAI said Friday it has begun piloting group chat capabilities in ChatGPT for people in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan. The move confirms The Information’s report from June about the feature.

• Walmart CEO Doug McMillon will retire in January, the company said Friday. He’ll be succeeded by John Furner, currently CEO of its U.S. business.

• ​​Shares of StubHub plunged 22% on Friday, the day after the ticketing company reported its first earnings result as a public company. The stock is now trading 38% below its IPO price, just two months after its debut.

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