Introduction: The Future is Faster Than You Think
The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler is the third installment of their Exponential Technology trilogy. Abundance and Bold are the first two books in the trilogy. The underlying theme for the three books is the world is substantially better than you think.
The Future is Faster Than You Think is about the rapid pace of technological advancement. And its implications for the future of society, economy, and daily life. Convergence of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, digital biology, and sensors is speeding up progress exponentially. This leads to changes that are happening at a faster rate than most people realize.
This book came out four years ago, therefore it's getting dated because it's about future trends.
The book covers several areas, including:
- Transportation: They predict flying cars, supersonic air travel, the Hyperloop, and drone technology and how these could revolutionize travel and logistics..
- Healthcare: They discuss the potential of personalized medicine, AI doctors, telemedicine, and advances in genomics, predicting a future where disease is detected and treated even before symptoms appear.
- Education: They explore the possibilities of personalized AI tutors and virtual reality classrooms, which could significantly change the way we learn.
- Entertainment: They examine the future of virtual and augmented reality in transforming our entertainment experiences.
- Food and Agriculture: They look at how vertical farming, lab-grown meat, and other technologies could solve food security issues.
Summary of The Future is Faster Than You Think
The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler is a prediction outlining how the world will change responding to the next 10 years of technological changes. The book presents an optimistic view of the future, where technological advancements lead to a world of abundance, solving many of the challenges we face today. Diamandis and Kotler authors talk excitedly about new technologies. They teach you how to imagine, invent, and disrupt.
The Power of Convergence
The notion of convergence, where diverse and exponential technologies intertwine, creates a profound impact on various facets of our lives. This convergence, often likened to the historical trajectory of Moore's Law, serves as the catalyst for breakthrough innovations.
To understand convergence, you need to understand the principle of exponentially accelerating technology. In 1965, Intel founder Gordon Moore first discovered this principle, which is also known as Moore’s Law.
Moore realized that every 18 months computers became twice as powerful while the price remained the same. The supercomputer in the 1970s became a thousand times smaller, a thousand times cheaper until it became the smartphone you have in your pocket.
Ray Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” states we use new technology to design even faster technology. Once any technology becomes digital, it grows exponentially. AI, robotics, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and blockchain currencies are all growing exponentially.
Convergence of different technologies makes the growth occur even faster. Uber wanted to introduce the flying car. The convergence of technologies like machine learning, material science, 3D printing to create new engines can make it a reality.
“Formerly independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology are beginning to converge with other independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology. For example, the speed of drug development is accelerating, not only because biotechnology is progressing at an exponential rate, but because artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and a couple other exponentials are converging on the field.”
Blockchain technology is a bedrock for trust and transparency across industries. It can verify identity. The technology helps us determine if our garments were made using child labor. Smart contracts, enabled by blockchain, reshape interactions, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) redefine the future of collaboration and governance. The blockchain smart contracts will enable Amazon to deliver our orders by drone.
New technologies can help us deal with and solve many of the biggest problems we're facing today. The most urgent problem is global warming. Top scientists say we need to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees by 2030, or else we'll face disastrous outcomes.
Each year, we release 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air by burning fossil fuels. This is like burning an area of forest the size of Africa, plus another third, every year. Thankfully, wind and solar power have improved over the years and can help us stop burning so much fossil fuel. They're now even cheaper than using coal for energy.
Thanks to quantum dots, solar panels are now three times better than before. In the past, they could only turn 21% of sunlight into energy. Now, that number has improved.
Job Displacement and Creation
The main reasons companies want to automate is because of productivity. Contrary to what many think, the largest increase in productivity comes from machine augmenting humans. When a technology goes exponentially, it comes with an opportunity. To capitalize on the opportunity means adapting. This could be workforce retraining.
“Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Think about the internet itself. While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished.”
Five Great Migrations
Our species is migratory. People have been crossing borders for eons. When you migrate, you bring along your ideas, technologies, and cultures. It’s about how all of us got to now. Migration speeds up innovation. We need new ideas to tackle old and new problems. And mass migration can help with new thinking and different ways of doing things.
In the next century, you’re about to see mass migration on a massive scale. People are moving for economic reasons and to avoid a climate disaster.
“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, a technologically enabled hive mind.”
There are five types of migrations: economic relocations, climate-change upheavals, virtual worlds explorations, outer space colonization, and hive-mind collaborations.
Economic Relocations
In a research study, economist Petra Moser found:
“In every field entered by German Jews, she found a 31 percent increase in patents. Back then, as anti-Semitism was rampant in the United States, a great many of these immigrants were prohibited from working in their chosen professions. When Moser and her team adjusted the data to account for this fact, they found that émigrés actually accounted for a stunning 70 percent patent increase.”
Another study achieved the same results:
“A 2012 study by the Partnership for a New American Economy, for example, found that three out of four patents issued to America’s top ten patent-producing universities have at least one foreign-born inventor.”
Immigrants create jobs. They are twice as likely to start a business as natives. And they create a quarter of all new jobs.
Climate-Change Upheavals
When the weather shifts, people will shift with it. Climate migration will be forced migration. It will force many to migrate to new places, and those places will likely be cities. The authors predict that by 2050, 66% to 75% of the world will comprise cities.
Virtual Worlds Explorations
The next migration is at the flick of a switch. The strangest mass exit will be migration from normal reality into virtual reality. Research shows that the immersive nature of the virtual environment spikes dopamine to new heights.
While video games can drive users into flow, the immersive nature of VR makes the technology significantly better suited for it. This means, as flow science and virtual reality continue to converge, people will soon gain the ability to create an alternative reality that is both more pleasurable and more meaningful than regular reality.
With people spending more and more time on the internet, with new AR and VR technologies, humans could very well migrate into the virtual world.
Outer Space Colonization
With convergent technologies, the space race is likely to progress faster than ever before, and space migration will likely take place in the coming century. The two leaders in the space race are Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. Bezos is aiming for the moon, Elon Musk is aiming for Mars.
Hive-Mind Collaborations
This is a world in which humans are linked via the cloud into one giant collective consciousness. The technology for hive-mind collaboration is already here.
Chemist Charles Lieber created a nanoscale meta-mesh that can be injected with a syringe and that then unfolds around the brain. This has been tested on mice, and the mouse’s neurons did not see the mesh as an invader. Instead, it connected to it. This allowed Lieber to monitor the mouse’s brain activity in real time.
Brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) are the ultimate tale of convergence. They sit at the intersection of nearly everything in this book, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, and materials science. For now, BCI comes as headsets. Using a transcranial magnetic stimulator, magnetic impulses are sent to the brain. This helps stroke victims to recover.
Combining BCI’s and Lieber’s brain mesh, the technology is there to upload our consciousness into the cloud. It promises to augment the human brain's capacity. Diamandis and Kotler believe the only way humans can take part in a future AI-dominated world is by creating this collective consciousness.
Conclusion: The Future is Faster Than You Think
The Future is Faster Than You Think paints a vivid picture of the accelerating pace of technological advancement and its transformative impact on various aspects of our lives. As we stand at the precipice of a future shaped by convergence, innovation, and unprecedented migrations, there are key takeaways to guide our understanding and actions.
Next Steps
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