In the global millennium goals, we're on track to beat and eliminate severe poverty. So there are lots of positive trends. I think the world in 25 years could be a much better version of the world we have today. But the role of humans would still be fundamentally at the center of that.

But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.

Before information age, living standards basically were flat. Since then, they've been growing 2 percent a year were about 30 times richer. So technology, machines is really, you know, arguably the most important thing that's happened to humanity in terms of our living standards. You could look to the introduction of digital computers in the 1950s.

We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.

The economy in the next 20 to 25 years is going to change more than they did in the last 20, 25 years. And that's because exponential trends are affecting a bigger and bigger share of the economy. So we have some huge disruptions in store, and I can't predict exactly what the innovations are going to be. If I did, I would have already invented them. But I think they'll be comparable to the innovations we saw in the past 20, 25 years if not greater.

Going a little further into the future, we'll start literally connecting to machines. Some of my colleagues at MIT here - some of them are working on a neural mesh that connects directly to your brain, and they've already done it with some disabled people and allowed them to move objects just by thinking.

The heart of science is measurement.