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

by Peter H. Diamandis

If you want to understand convergence, it helps to start at the beginning. In our earlier books, Abundance and BOLD, we introduced the notion of exponentially accelerating technology; that is, any technology that doubles in power while dropping in price on a regular basis. Moore’s Law is the classic example. In 1965, Intel founder Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit had been doubling every eighteen months. This meant every year-and-a-half computers got twice as powerful, yet their cost stayed the same. Moore thought this was pretty astounding. He predicted this trend might last a few more years, maybe five, possibly ten. Well, it’s been twenty, forty, going on sixty years. Moore’s Law is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is a thousand times smaller, a thousand times cheaper, and a million times more powerful than a supercomputer from the 1970s. And it’s not slowing down.

Despite reports that we are approaching the heat death of Moore’s Law—which we’ll address in the next chapter—in 2023 the average thousand-dollar laptop will have the same computing power as a human brain (roughly 1016 cycles per second). Twenty-five years after that, that same average laptop will have the power of all the human brains currently on Earth.

In simple terms, we use our new computers to design even faster new computers, and this creates a positive feedback loop that further accelerates our acceleration—what Kurzweil calls the “Law of Accelerating Returns.” The technologies now accelerating at this rate include some of the most potent innovations we have yet dreamed up: quantum computers, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, material science, networks, sensors, 3-D printing, augmented reality, virtual reality, blockchain, and more.

Enter distributed electric propulsion, or DEP for short.

My guess, within ten years, you’ll probably need a special permit to drive a human-operated car.”

The point is this: Being able to see around the corner of tomorrow and being agile enough to adapt to what’s coming have never been more important. And, in three parts, that’s exactly what this book will do.

A “qubit” is the newer version of this idea, or a quantum bit. Unlike binary bits, which are an either/or scenario, qubits utilize “superposition,” which allows them to be in multiple states at once. Think of the

All are surfing Moore’s Law, a six-decade wave of rising computational capacity. Transistor power—which is how you measure the size of this wave—is often calculated in FLOPS, or floating operations per second. In 1956, our computers were capable of ten thousand FLOPS. In 2015, this had become one quadrillion FLOPS. And it’s this trillionfold improvement that’s been the most important force driving technology forward. Yet, over the past few

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

Yet the real revolution lies beneath bitcoin: blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed, mutable, permissible, and transparent digital ledger. We’ll take

Today, going to the doctor is about sick care more than healthcare. It’s reactive, not proactive. Doctors make

The largest player around is the Bay Area–based Plenty Unlimited Inc. With over $200 million in funding, Plenty is taking a smart tech approach to indoor agriculture. Plants grow on twenty-foot-high towers, monitored by tens of thousands of cameras and sensors, and optimized by big data machine learning. This allows them to pack forty plants into the space previously occupied by one. It also produces yields 350 times greater than outdoor farmland, and uses less than 1 percent as much water. And rather than bespoke veggies for the wealthy few, Plenty’s processes allow them to knock 20 to 35 percent off the costs of traditional grocery stores. To date, Plenty has their flagship operation in South San Francisco; a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot farm in Kent, Washington; an indoor farm in the United Arab Emirates; and they have started construction on over three hundred farms in China.

On the other side of the US, in a repurposed seventy-thousand-square-foot factory in Newark, New Jersey, a company called AeroFarms has figured out how to grow over 2 million pounds of leafy greens a year with neither sun nor soil. Instead, inside their facility, rows of AI-controlled LEDs provide the exact wavelength of light each plant needs to thrive. Using aeroponics, nutrients are misted directly onto the plants’ roots, so no soil is required. Rather, plants are suspended in a growth mesh fabric made from recycled water bottles. And here too, sensors, cameras, and machine learning govern the entire process.

And this brings us to Dean Kamen. Dean Kamen is a kind of geek superhero, a nerd Batman in a denim work shirt. For starters, he lives in a secret lair—an island fortress complete with hidden rooms, helicopter launchpads, and after peacefully seceding from the United States, its own constitution. His résumé includes over 440 different patents, including insulin pumps, robotic prosthetics, and all-terrain wheelchairs. Because so many of his inventions have had such an impact, in 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Kamen the highest honor awarded to inventors, the National Medal of Technology.