An economic storm is brewing over the coming two decades that could leave the developing world in shambles.

Throughout our Future of the Economy series, we’ve explored how tomorrow’s technologies will upend the global business as usual. And while our examples focused on the developed world, it’s the developing world that will feel the brunt of the coming economic disruption. This is also why we’re using this chapter to focus entirely on the developing world’s economic prospects.

The future of Generation X. The future of millennials. Population growth vs. population control. Demographics, the study of populations and the groups within them, plays a massive role in shaping our society and it's a topic we discuss at great length in our Future of Human Population series.

Are we individualist or collectivist? Do we want our voice to be heard by our vote or by our pocket book? Should our institutions serve everyone or serve those who paid for them? How much we tax and to what we apply those tax dollars to says a lot about the societies we live in. Taxes are a reflection of our values.

A good deal of what you’re about to read will sound impossible given today’s political climate. The reason being that more so than the previous chapters in this Future of the Economy series, this final chapter deals with the unknown, an era in human history that has no precedent, an era many of us will experience in our lifetimes.

Traditional theft is risky business. If your target was a Maserati sitting in a parking lot, first you'd have to check your surroundings, check for witnesses, cameras, then you have to spend time breaking into the car without tripping an alarm, turning on the ignition, then as you drive off, you'd have to constantly check your rearview for the owner or police, find someplace to hide the car, and then finally spend time finding a trustworthy buyer willing to take the risk of buying stolen property. As you can imagine, a mistake at any one of those steps would lead to jail time or worse.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became international heroes after being the first humans to step foot on the Moon. But while these astronauts were the heroes on camera, there are thousands of unsung heroes who without their involvement, that first manned Moon landing would not have been impossible. A few of these heroes were the software developers who coded the flight. Why?

It's an abstract term that snuck its way into our public consciousness: the cloud. These days, most people under 40 know that it's something the modern world can't live without, that they personally can’t live without, but most people also barely understand what the cloud really is, let alone the coming revolution set to turn it on its head.

Whoever controls the future of computing, owns the world. Tech companies know it. Countries know it. And that's why those parties that aim to own the biggest footprint on our future world are in a panicked race to build increasingly powerful supercomputers.

Who’s winning out? And how exactly will all these computing investments pay off? Before we explore these questions, let’s recap the state of the modern supercomputer.

Human evolution takes a giant leap forward every time we gain control of a profoundly new source of elemental power. And believe it or not, we’re close to our next great leap.

Our ancestors looked much like today's modern ape—a relatively smaller skull, larger teeth and a far stronger jaw to chew through the pounds of raw plants that our oversized bellies would spend hours-to-days digesting. But then we discovered fire.

Deep into World War II, Nazi forces were steamrolling through much of Europe. They had advanced weapons, efficient wartime industry, fanatically driven infantry, but above all, they had a machine called Enigma. This device allowed Nazi forces to safely collaborate over long distances by sending Morse-coded messages to each other over standard communication lines; it was a cipher machine impregnable to human code breakers.