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

by Peter H. Diamandis

Uber’s mission is to solve urban mobility.…

While we were sipping our lattes and checking our Instagram, science fiction became science fact.

In 1909, rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard proposed a vacuum train concept similar to the Hyperloop.

turning sci-fi into sci-fact required a series of convergences.

sagas

“the Six Ds of Exponentials,” or the growth cycle of exponential technologies: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization.

Digitalization: Once a technology becomes digital, meaning once you can translate it into the 1s and 0s of binary code, it jumps on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially. Soon, with quantum, this will be on the back of Rose’s Law and an even wilder ride. Deception: Exponentials typically generate a lot of hype when first introduced. Because early progress is slow (when plotted on a curve, the first few doublings are all below 1.0), these technologies spend a long time failing to live up to the hype.

Think about the initial days of Bitcoin. Back then, most people thought crypto was a novelty toy for übergeeks or a way to buy illegal drugs online. Today, it’s a reinvention of our financial markets. This is a classic example of the deceptive phase. Disruption: This is what happens when exponentials really start to impact the world, when they begin disrupting existing products, services, markets, and industries. An example is 3-D printing, a single exponential technology that threatens the entire $10 trillion manufacturing sector.

Demonetization: Where a product or service once had a cost, now money vanishes from the equation. Photographs were once expensive. You took limited numbers of pictures because film and developing that film cost a lot of money. But once photos became digital, those costs vanished. Now you take photos without thinking of them, and the difficulty comes in sorting through too many options. Dematerialization: Now you see it, ...

systems, calculators, paper, matchmaking as we knew it, etc. These once independent products are now standard fare on any smartphone. Wikipedia dematerialized the encyclopedia; iTunes dematerialized the music store. Etc. Democratization: This is when an exponential scales and goes wide. Cell phones were once brick-sized instruments available only to a wealthy few. Today, almost everyone has one, making it nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world untouched by this technology. So what does this mean for quantum computing? Wel...

a lot of people think social media is making us dumber, but it’s definitely making AI smarter.

Artificial intelligence χτίζεται από τις καθημερινές μας προτιμήσεις αυτη τη στιγμή που μιλάμε. Ειναι στο χερι μας να το αξιοποιησουμε για να αγοραζουμε χρονο και ποιοτητα ζωης.

VR’s ability to produce behavioral change.

the most expensive supply chain in history leads to the most exotic junkyard in the cosmos.

blockchain is an enabling technology, one that began its life by enabling digital currency.

A blockchain is a distributed, mutable, permissible, and transparent digital ledger.

scientists can take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into super-strong carbon nanofibers for use in manufacturing. If we can do this at scale—powered by solar—a system 10 percent the size of the Sahara Desert could reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels in about a decade. The applications are endless. And coming fast. Over the next decade, the impact of the very, very small is about to get very, very large.

“You know,” he continued, “I’ve been thinking. How many people are going to use this Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million.… Well, let’s say you can shave ten seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and that’s fifty million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved over a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?” Over the coming months, they did manage to shave ten seconds off of the boot time. And Jobs wasn’t wrong: Those extra seconds did manage to save people time. But this wasn’t an isolated incident. There’s a pattern here, as “saved time” turns out to be one of the major benefits of technology. Put differently, it’s not just startup times that have shrunk.

Consider the search engine, one of our most widely used technologies. Prior to its arrival, if you wanted to know something, you went to a library—which took time. How much? Back in 2014, University of Michigan behavioral economist Yan Chen gave participants a bunch of questions, provided half of them with internet access and the other half with a library. Then she started the clock. Online inquiries averaged seven minutes an answer, offline required twenty-two, meaning every time we type a query into a search engine, technology saves us fifteen minutes.

Over the past hundred years, labor-saving devices—a term that once meant electricity, running water, and appliances—have managed to reduce housework, our agreed upon least favorite activity, from fifty-eight hours a week in 1900 to 1.5 in 2011.

What this actually means is that saved time isn’t just a benefit of technology, it’s also a driver of innovation—another force accelerating our acceleration. And the time we’re saving today pales in comparison to what tomorrow will bring. In the late 1800s, New York to Chicago was four weeks by stagecoach. A few decades later, trains reduced that to roughly four days. Airplanes shrunk it to four hours. But a few years hence, the Hyperloop will be doing that trip in under an hour, and virtual reality and avatars have the potential to take that to zero.

Nothing accelerates technological development like money.

While new technology has always meant new ways to make money, digital technology gave us a critical variation on this theme: new ways to raise money.

The Experience Economy was about the sharing of experiences—so Starbucks went from being a coffee franchise to a “third place,” that is, neither home nor work, but a “third place” in which to live your life. Buying a cup of coffee became an experience, a caffeinated theme park of sorts. The next iteration of this idea is the Transformation Economy, where you’re not just paying for an experience, you’re paying to have your life transformed by this experience. Early versions of this can be seen in the rise of “transformational festivals” like Burning Man, or fitness companies like CrossFit, where the experience is generally bad (you work out in old warehouses), but the transformation is great (the person you become after three months of working out in those warehouses).

business as usual is becoming business unusual.

To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.”

1896, Congress passed the Rural Free Delivery Act, opening up this new territory.

the act of turning desire into purchase.

“Welcome to the Experience Economy,” an article for the Harvard Business Review, author Joseph Pine tracks two hundred years of economic development via a curious metric: the birthday cake.

By replacing premade ingredients with premade experiences, the experience economy is a new kind of disruptive

business model satisfying a new kind of need. For most of history, we didn’t want prepackaged experiences because life itself was the experience. Just staying safe, warm, and fed was adventure enough. Technology changed that equation.

nothing makes money like money,

dispirited

functional illiteracy isn’t a barrier to computer literacy.

empathy, the emotional foundation of ethics.

dexterity

Prosper, Funding Circle, and LendingTree are three examples in a market expected to grow from $26.16 billion in 2015 to $897.85 billion by 2024.

Dean Kamen

Enter BioCarbon Engineering, a British company founded by ex-NASA employees that has developed AI-guided tree-planting drones. These drones first map an area to identify prime planting locations, then fire seed pods tucked inside of biodegradable missiles into the ground. The pods contain a custom-designed gelatinous growth medium that acts as a shock absorber to cushion impact, then a nutrient-dispenser to speed plant growth. A single pilot can fly six drones at once, planting a staggering one hundred thousand trees a day. A global army of ten thousand drones, which is what BioCarbon intends to build, could replant a billion trees a year.

mangrove

technological fluency and agility will replace deep skills mastery.

Existential Risks: Vision, Prevention, and Governance

Exponential technology, in his opinion, had a bad habit of becoming existential risk.

Vision is about time horizons, how far we choose to look into the future. Our brains emerged in an era of immediacy, so we’re a shortsighted species. How to avoid being eaten by a tiger—today. How to find enough food to feed my family—today. If there was any long-term thinking, it was of the how do I find someplace warm to winter variety. In other words, evolution shaped our time horizons to see about six months into the future. Of course, we evolved ways to extend this perspective. Delayed gratification is the psychological term, and one distinguishing characteristic of our species is the ability to delay gratification beyond the limits of lifespan. Religions that shape behavior today by promising an afterlife tomorrow rely on this mechanism. No other animal can do this. But we seem to be losing this talent. “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span,” writes Stewart Brand in an essay for the Long Now Foundation. “This trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed.”

Long Now Foundation,

We tend to think linearly about the dangers we face, trying to apply the tools of yesterday to the problems of tomorrow.

“the Mediterranean countries currently trying to cope with migrants from other parts of the world may eventually have a migrant crisis of their own. One day there could conceivably be Italians and Greeks in Calais, as their own countries become even hotter and more arid.”

hither and yon,

And when the masses move, they move masses.

bifurcate

loss aversion.