Pushing the limits

Connecticut, US – General Electric (GE) has launched Invention Factory, a groundbreaking YouTube series exploring the duplicitous relationship between technology and humanity as one helps the other to grow.

• By 2020 it is predicted there will be more than 50bn connected devices in the world – Invention Factory
• ‘Today it costs less than £6,695 [€9,075, $10,000] to map a person’s genes’ – Zhiyu Peng, scientist, BGI Shenzhen

Led by technology journalists in the US and Asia, the series explains how technology is being used to optimise our sense of the world around us. ‘We don’t just want to make machines more powerful,’ explains Lin Guanzhu, engineer in Shanghai’s SVW333 Racing Team in How Will Everything be Intelligent? ‘We want to use machines to make people more powerful.’ From pre-emptive healthcare and quantifying the feat of falling in love to programming our minds to push beyond our perceived limits and how the Internet of Things will make our lives ultra-connected, Invention Factory relates to our Whole-system Thinking macrotrend, and how commerce must think vertically from the stratosphere down to the consumer.

The Big Picture: Start researching how your consumers want to push their own boundaries using our macrotrend The Optimised Self.