The Future of Disruption

At RethinkX, we predict technology disruptions

We predicted the rise of Google, Netflix and Apple.

We were correct.

Ten years ago, we predicted the rise of electric vehicles, and solar, wind and battery power. These technologies are on track to disrupt their sectors faster than expected, transforming our societies in new and unimaginable ways...

For 15 years, our co-founder Tony Seba has been working on a framework to understand and anticipate technology disruptions. We call this the Seba Technology Disruption Framework. It underpins all of our predictions.

Explore the Seba Technology Disruption Framework

Our framework accurately forecasts the speed and scale of change

Mainstream forecasts consistently assume that change happens linearly or exponentially in complex systems.

This is incorrect.

Change is not slow or incremental, but non linear and rapid. There is usually a long period of equilibrium where nothing seems to happen. Then suddenly, everything changes.

Explore our predictions

Disruptions bring profound and extraordinary possibilities

Our work is a call to leaders to see what is really happening, to understand the implications, and to redefine the way we all do business, invest and organize society.

We aim to bring light to the change we will experience thanks to emerging modern technologies.

Disruptions & transformation

Throughout history, advancements across foundational sectors have driven the emergence of a new and vastly more capable civilization than any which has come before.

Every leading civilization, from Çatalhöyük and Sumer to Babylonia and Rome, has fallen as it reached the limits of its ability to organize society and solve the problems created by its production system. Today, our government and industry leaders are making the same mistake.

Race to the top

Emerging technologies across the foundational sectors have the potential to drastically change our societies and improve our economies. Their cost improvements are consistent and predictable, and each of the technologies will continue to traverse its remarkable experience curve throughout the 2020s.

Incumbents that do not take drastic measures to adapt to the disruptions happening across our energy, transportation, and food & agriculture sectors will be wiped out.

Witness the transformation

The disruptions of information, labor, materials, energy, transportation and food & agriculture will have incredible impacts on our societies as a whole. Disruptions change the very fabric of how we live our lives, and these disruptions will be no different.

The intervening decade will be turbulent. If we hold strong, we can emerge together to create the wealthiest, healthiest, most extraordinary civilization in history. If we do not, we will join the ranks of every other failed civilization for future historians to puzzle over.

Explore Disruption in greater depth

it is possible to predict when a disruption will take place.

By understanding technology cost curves of a disrupting product, it is possible to predict when a disruption will take place.

Understand how RethinkX makes predictions

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Rethinking Humanity (2020)

For an in depth understanding of disruption, read our report 'Rethinking Humanity'

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ENERGY REPORT

Understanding Stellar Energy

This groundbreaking report from RethinkX explains how solar power, wind power, and battery energy storage can deliver a superabundance of clean energy at near-zero marginal cost to create Stellar Energy systems, that will fundamentally transform our world and help build a future where all people in all societies everywhere can flourish as never before.

The SWB Trinity—Solar, Wind, and Batteries: Solar and wind make up the majority of new electric supply coming online in the US (and elsewhere).

Like stars, once a critical mass of SWB is achieved, something extraordinary happens: the system reaches an ‘ignition point’ after which its output of superabundant clean energy becomes self-sustaining. RethinkX’s founders, Tony Seba and James Arbib, call this Stellar Energy.

SWB Superpower and Stellar Energy systems are the key to unlocking prosperity all over the globe...an electrified transportation system, a new food system, artificial intelligence and robotics. The potential is limitless...

In a Stellar Energy system based on SWB, the marginal cost of producing power plummets to near-zero and clean electricity transforms from a scarce commodity with costly side effects, into a superabundant resource that is available and affordable to virtually everyone, virtually everywhere.

Read our report

TRANSPORTATION REPORT

Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030

In Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030 (published 2017) we showed how the TaaS disruption will have enormous implications across the transportation and oil industries, decimating entire portions of their value chains, causing oil demand and prices to plummet, and destroying trillions in investor value. TaaS will also create trillions in new business opportunities, consumer surplus and GDP growth.

Using TaaS, a modern transportation technology, the average American family will save more than $5,600 per year in transportation costs, equivalent to a wage raise of 10%.

This will keep an additional $1 trillion per year in Americans’ pockets by 2030, potentially generating the largest infusion of consumer spending in history.

The TaaS transport system will reduce energy demand by 80% and tailpipe emissions by over 90%. We may see a largely carbon-free road transportation system by 2030.

By 2030, individually owned combustion engine vehicles will still represent 40% of the vehicles in the U.S. vehicle fleet, but they will provide just 5% of passenger miles. The geopolitical importance of oil will also diminish.

Read our report

FOOD & AGRICULTURE REPORT

Rethinking Food & Agriculture 2020-2030

Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030 (published 2019) shows how the modern food disruption, made possible by rapid advances in precision biology and an entirely new model of production we call Food-as-Software, will have profound implications not just for the industrial agriculture industry, but for the wider economy, society and the environment.

The disruption of food and agriculture is inevitable.

The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper than existing animal proteins by 2030, and 10 times cheaper by 2035. Eventually proteins will be nearly as cheap as sugar.