It was more than half a century ago that the starship Enterprise first started exploring the final frontier on our TV screens. The following, decades-long journey across countless Star Trek films held millions of fans in thrall, while titles such as "The Future Begins" from 2009 offered a visionary glimpse of how the world in the 23rd century could look. Although we are still a long way from "Beam me up, Scottie", given the rapid progress of technology no vision now appears just a fantasy. On the contrary, today big data, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, genomics and bioinformatics are already setting the points for a new future.
In the view of experts at Zukunftsinstitut GmbH, the futurology institute, such mega-trends have long been present and highlight changes that will have a lasting impact on humanity. They also cover all levels of society: business and politics as well as science, technology and culture. There are many examples from practice: in 2004, for instance, Facebook introduced a new kind of communication in the form of its social network, which since counts an impressive 2.5 billion monthly users. Meanwhile, Apple gave the initial spark for the now omnipresent smartphones in 2007 with the first iPhone, and Amazon has long since completely revolutionised people's shopping habits. Nor should one forget digital currencies, new gene therapies, alternative drives and even autonomous driving – the list could go on and on. In short, these are essentially disruptive technologies, in other words innovations that break up establish markets and changes the rules of play of whole industries.
One such "game changer", in the view of PwC, is artificial intelligence. According to an analysis by the consultants, global gross domestic product in 2030 could be up to 14% greater – an added value of USDtn 15.7 – than it would have been without the use of intelligent systems. Digital transformation and the industrial revolution are already leaving their mark on the economy, however. A recent analysis by US advertising agency Millward Brown suggests that nine of the world's ten most valuable brand names belong to technology groups, their brands together weighing in at more than USDtn 2. The market capitalisation of the leading tech companies is many times higher, with Apple alone having a stock market value of some USDtn 2 after its share price more than doubled with the space of a year. A model example of the extent to which the old and the new world are diverging can be seen in the automotive sector, where Tesla, the electric car pioneer, is now worth more on the financial markets than all US and European manufacturers put together.
The outperformance of the tech sector can best be highlighted by a comparison between the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500. Whereas the first index advanced more than 400% over the last 10 years, the broader market did not even manage half of this rise. In the medium term, too, i.e. within 5 years, the Nasdaq 100 has its nose in front with an increase in value of 160%. A much faster rate of growth was posted by the ETFs managed by ARK Invest, a specialist in the many different mega-trends. Its ARK Next Generation Internet and ARK Innovation products, which are oriented to technologies of the future, posted an almost fivefold increase over this period. The ARK Genomic Revolution ETF also achieved an outperformance, in this case around 230%.
