How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse

Silicon Valley's elite are hatching plans to escape disaster - and when it comes, they'll leave the rest of us behind

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk - about half my annual professor's salary - all to deliver some insight on the subject of "the future of technology".

I've never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I'm asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, Crispr. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.