Diamandis called it "the new Kodak moment." He also made a bold prediction: "In the next 10 years, 40 percent of today's Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist," he said.

"If you started a company in the 1920s, your average time on the S&P 500 was 60 years. You could sit back and relax and enjoy the ride. The rate of change was slow enough that you weren't disrupted. Today, if you start a company, you've got 15 years."

Similar disruption is coming to medicine, he said. "There's going to be tremendous change ahead in the healthcare industry."

Every time you throw your old iPhone in a drawer, you're throwing away a supercomputer the government would've killed for just a few decades prior, he said. That exponential growth of computational power over time is just starting to be felt in palpable ways across the industry.

We're going to see "an explosion of biometric sensors," said Diamandis, who notes that, despite the recent popularity (fad?) of wearable trackers, "our refrigerator is better wired than we are."

That's going to change, "and change drastically," this next decade, in our hospitals and our homes, he said. "Every major device company coming out with biometric sensors."

Robots, too, are on the rise. "We're going to start seeing robots in every aspect of our world, and in no place more so than in the biomedical space," said Diamandis.

"Something interesting happened last year," he added. "Google bought eight robot companies." Considering that the mammoth of Mountain View has never been a company to look to the past, it's a safe bet that robots will figure heavily in our future.

Synthetic biology and genomics are also set to transform care in the coming decade or so. "We're about to have the most massive explosion of data ever," said Diamandis, who, alongside human genome sequencer Craig Venter and neurosurgeon/entrepreneur Robert Hariri, MD, recently launched Human Longevity Inc., a genomics and cell therapy company focused on extending the human life span.

HLI is building what it touts as the world's largest genotype/phenotype database, "sequencing 40,000 Human Genomes each year, along with microbiome, metabolome and other clinical data.

"The only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing," said Diamandis. "We've seen just 1 percent of the innovation we'll see over the next 10 years."

[See also: Watson dives into genomics data]

After all, any industry that becomes digitized – whether it's healthcare, manufacturing, biology or finance – goes through what he calls the "The 6 Ds of Exponentials."After digitization comes a period of deceptive growth, before it suddenly emerges do disrupt the field. (See Sasson's digital camera, which in 2015 is "a billion times better on a cost/performance ratio" than it was in 1975, says Diamandis.)

Once that happens, there's a pattern of dematerialization, de-monetization and democratization, he said: Things that were big an unwieldy now fit in your pocket; things that were rigidly priced and controlled by old-guard corporations are disrupted; things that were unique are now easy to download, copy, change and disseminate.

That's happening to healthcare, in ways large and small, even though it may be hard to notice it. Diamandis rattles off a list: "infinite computing, sensors, networks, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, digital medicine, nano materials, AI."

All of these are "riding on top of that computational power curve and getting more powerful." Once upon a time, IBM's Watson was a room filled with 3,000 core processors, said Diamandis with a wry laugh. "That was so two years ago."

And "it doesn't stop there," he said. "All these things are accelerating – reducing exponentially in cost, increasing in capabilities. And no place more than in healthcare."