The future is faster, and better, than ever
There’s plenty of reason to believe we live in an exceptional time, Diane Francis says.
LOS ANGELES Peter Diamandis is a friend who happens to also be a serial entrepreneur, medical doctor and aeronautical engineer who founded the XPRIZE Foundation, Singularity University, Human Longevity, Planetary Resources, Space Adventures, and biotech Celularity, among others.
“We live in the most extraordinary time in history,” he said recently at his Abundance360 annual conference for high-networth entrepreneurs. “The next 10 years will see more changes than occurred in the past 100 years.”
His latest book was released this week, The Future is Faster than You Think, and is a survey of how the world will be reinvented, industry by industry.
He draws historical comparisons to make the case for optimism: “In 1920, we could only find four innovations: the first commercial radio station, the hand-held hair dryer; the Band Aid; and traffic lights. By contrast, last year saw tens of thousands of technological and scientific breakthroughs.”
He believes the world is entering a “new Roaring Twenties” that will result in transformative goods, devices, services, business models and human behaviour. In a chapter called “the Acceleration of Acceleration,” he lists some principal accelerants that have been, and will be, behind ongoing and rapid change.
For example, huge savings for people in developed countries, in terms of time and money, occurred with the invention of Google search, iphones and massive data storage capability. This time and money has been reinvested to execute more of the same types of time- and money-saving innovations. For instance, the cost of sequencing the genome in 2001 was US$100 million and now it can be done for only US$100. And the value, in 2012 dollars, of all equipment contained in today’s iphone in 2012 dollars is US$1 million — the cameras for photos and video, storage, facial recognition, telephones, laptops, search, and artificial intelligence capability.
Crowdfunding, underpinned by block chain technology, is enabling the raising of billions for more research and development. And brain enhancement techniques to boost memory and concentration will also improve research outcomes.
Augmented reality will go mainstream and allow consumers to play, learn and shop via headsets, glasses or implants. Robots and toys or appliances will remember our faces and voices and preferences. Drones will babysit and take videos. Voice commands will replace typing and predictive algorithms will anticipate our needs.
By 2029, co-founder of Singularity University Ray Kurzweil says artificial intelligence will be smarter than humans. This will provide smart collaborative tools for workers, professionals, analysts and leaders to enable them to find smarter solutions to their challenges. Put another way, this decade will offer Alexa and Siri on steroids that will act as personal executive assistants to anyone at an affordable price.
Advancements in renewable energy, batteries and local power grids will accelerate leading to lower costs and higher performance, democratizing power globally.
Besides flying cars and the Hyperloop, space travel will become a tourism and commercial option. The future of food, finance, education, shopping and real estate will profoundly change. “As more people have access to technology, more problems can be solved and the more capital is available to find those solutions,” he said.
Diamandis is an inveterate optimist but realizes that technology in the wrong hands has and can create new problems.
“To be clear, there will still be terrorism, war, and murder. Dictatorship and disease won’t go away. But the world will quietly continue to get better,” he concludes in his book.
He also cites one of his favourite books, The Better Angels of Our Nature by Harvard’s Steven Pinker, whose figures demonstrate progress and that war, strife, disease and poverty are at historical lows.
To him, technology is part of “a continuous march toward abundance” to meet the needs of all humanity.