The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series)

by Peter H. Diamandis

Also worth pointing out is that every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Taking advantage of these opportunities requires adaptation—which demands workforce retraining—yet the end result is a net gain in jobs. Look at the internet itself. According to research done by McKinsey, in thirteen countries stretching from China and Russia to the US, the internet created 2.6 new jobs for every 1 it destroyed. Overall, in each of these thirteen countries, the Web’s rise contributed 10 percent to GDP growth, and that number is still increasing.

Modern ideas about government emerged about three hundred years ago, in a post-revolutionary world, when a desire for freedom from tyranny went hand in hand with a desire for stability. Thus, modern democracies are multi-house systems, a redundancy created to provide checks and balances. To fight tyranny and instability, these systems are designed to change slowly and democratically. Our exponential world demands much faster reaction times.

Encouraged by Estonia’s example, governments around the world are going digital. And startups are trying to help. OpenGov turns the morass of government finance into a series of easy-to-read pie charts; Transitmix allows for real-time, data-driven transportation system planning; Appallicious created a disaster-assistance dashboard to coordinate emergency responses; Social Glass makes government procurement fast, compliant, and paperless.

First, technological empowerment. Five hundred years ago, the only people capable of addressing these sorts of global, grand challenges were royalty. Thirty years ago, it was large corporations or big governments. Today, it’s all of us. Exponential technology gives small teams the ability to tackle large problems. Second, opportunity. One of the central points we made in our last book, BOLD, was that the world’s biggest problems are also the world’s biggest business opportunities. This means that every one of the risks we face, whether environmental, economic, or existential, is the basis for entrepreneurship and innovation. Third, convergence. We tend to think linearly about the dangers we face, trying to apply the tools of yesterday to the problems of tomorrow. But we’re going to experience a hundred years of technological progress over the next ten years. In fact, many of the most powerful technologies we’ll have at our disposal—artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology—are only starting to come online.

Migration, as Golding and Cameron recount, isn’t just people on the march, it’s ideas on the move. It is, as it has always been, a major driver of progress. Migration is an innovation accelerant.

In others, we’re crossing borders we’ve never crossed before. Moving off world and into outer space; moving out of regular reality and into virtual reality; moving, if the cutting-edge of brain-computer-interface development continues apace, out of individual consciousness and into collective consciousness,

In 1950, only New York and Tokyo housed 10 million residents, which is the figure required for “mega-city” status. By 2000, there were over eighteen mega-cities. Today, it’s thirty-three. Tomorrow?

no matter the city studied, as population density increases, so do wages, GDP, and quality-of-life factors like the number of theaters and restaurants. And, as cities grow, they require less, not more, resources. Double the size of a metropolis, and everything from the number of gas stations to the amount of heat needed in the winter—only increases by 85 percent.

More and more—as this, and so many of the discoveries discussed in this book illustrate—the once slow and passive process of natural selection is being transformed into one rapid and proactive: evolution by human direction. This means, over the next century, technological acceleration may do more than just disrupt industries and institutions, it may actually disrupt the progress of biologically based intelligence on Earth.