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| Mixing Apples, Oranges, and Floppy Disks . . . | |
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| We are beginning to acquire direct and deliberate control over the evolution of all life forms . . . on the planet | |
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| The 390:1 Gap | |
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| The disparity in wealth between the richest and poorest nations used to be around 5:1 | |
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| It is now 390:1 and increasing | |
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| The New Rich . . . and the New Poor Why wealth is now based on knowledge...and how one person can generate more wealth than that produced by all people living in Israel, Malaysia, or Chile over the course of a year | |
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| Empires of the Mind | |
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| The Singapore Law . . . | |
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| Why the future belongs to small, clustered populations who build empires of the mind and ignore the temptation–or do not have the option of–exploiting natural resources | |
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| Data Drives Empires | |
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| The world’s dominant language is no longer English, nor does it have a twenty-six letter alphabet . . . | |
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| The way a country, region, or group becomes dominant is by transmitting knowledge faster and more widely . . . | |
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| This is now done with two letters | |
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| Genetics . . . the Next Dominant Language Societies that don’t understand genetic discoveries or the challenges and opportunities that arise from these discoveries are functionally illiterate in the language that codes all life on the planet | |
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| VII | |
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| Is . . . a Hockey Stick | |
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| A revolution that may be 50 percent faster than the computer revolution | |
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| The Most Powerful Information System | |
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| Biocomputing could make genomes the world’s most powerful and compact coding and information systems | |
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| Nano World Big changes . . . on a small scale . . . | |
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| Biorobots the size of a virus | |
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| Revolution . . . in a Few ZIP Codes | |
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| The knowledge revolution is taking place in small, sharply defined areas | |
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| One company generates more U.S. patents than 139 countries do together . . . | |
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| This generates new Empires and new ghettos | |
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| Technology Is Not Kind . . . | |
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| It Does Not Say “Please" | |
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| It slams into existing systems and destroys them while creating new systems | |
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| Countries and individuals can either surf new and powerful waves change–or try to stop them and get crushed | |
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| Sleepless...(and Angry) in Seattle | |
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| Many people, even some of the heads of megacorporations, feel that the world is moving too fast as companies, even industries, disappear | |
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| High Tech . . . | |
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| High Pay . . . | |
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| High Mobility . . . | |
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| Wealth is concentrated and portable | |
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| MIT faculty and alumni produce as much wealth as all but twenty-two countries in the world | |
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| The United States keeps its leadership not by educating its own but by importing more and more brains | |
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| The Digital-Genomics Diaspora Three-quarters of the world’s countries did not exist fifty years ago | |
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| We are likely to soon breed a further hundred states | |
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| Flags, borders, and anthems survive only where citizens are treated like shareholders . . . | |
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| Otherwise they leave, and take much of the country’s economic future with them | |
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| Time Warp | |
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| We are in a time warp | |
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| Technology accelerates trends, be they positive or negative | |
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| We are just beginning to glimpse how profoundly different our children’s lives will be in a post-genomics world | |
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| Postscript | |
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| Notes | |
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| Credits | |
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| Index | |