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

by Peter H. Diamandis

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, now yo...