This week Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan revealed their plans to dedicate $3 billion to leverage artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies to solve a seemingly impossible challenge. ‘Can we cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of this century?’ asked Zuckerberg. He is not the first billionaire to wonder whether technology can extend and preserve life, but maybe one of the few willing to undertake it on behalf of others.

It is fashionable these days to speculate about robots taking jobs. Less well-observed, is the fact that seemingly great companies are being built today with far less jobs to start with. What if you only needed a small number of people to do extraordinary things?

Deep in the heart of the pink city of Jaipur, there are a remarkable set of astronomical instruments known as the Jantar Mantar. Built in the early 18th century, these observational tools were designed to divine not only the movement of the stars and the passage of time, but more importantly the direction of one’s life.

Why do some companies survive and others simply crumple? And stranger still — for star-crossed brands such as Yahoo and Blackberry — why did major investments in innovation not save them from being blindsided by the future? In my view — it is all a problem of scale. Big leaders favour big solutions for big problems. But just like the search for the Higgs Boson particle, sometimes in order to understand how dramatic transformations happen, you have to start by looking for things that are very small.

Now that robots look like they are in fact serious about taking some of our jobs, us humans can at least reassure ourselves that we are better at creative tasks like design. But is that, in fact true?