5. Paul Brody, Blockchain lead at Ernst & Young

I believe the most important problem we are facing as a society is the huge impact from Baumol’s cost disease. Inflation may be low, but in fact many of the things are most important for people’s long-term happiness are the ones that are going up the fastest. It’s nice that smartphones are cheap. It’s terrifying how much daycare and health care cost. Even if inequality isn’t as bad as some fear, the sense that the most important things in life are becoming impossibly expensive may be hugely influential.

To me, one of the big mysteries is why manufacturing has done so well with technology while services like health care, consulting, and education have managed to achieve so little when it comes to productivity. The benefits to society from figuring out how to use technologies like machine learning or blockchain to bend these cost curves back in the right direction will be enormous.