The Future Is Faster Than You Think

In a ridesharer’s marketplace, the companies that collect the most data and assemble the biggest fleets are the ones that will offer the lowest wait times and cheapest rides. Cheap and quick are the two biggest factors impacting consumer choice in this kind of market.

“The Hyperloop exists,” says Josh Giegel, the cofounder and chief technology officer for Hyperloop One, “because of the rapid acceleration of power electronics, computational modeling, material sciences, and 3-D printing.

But all of this progress, however radical it may seem, is actually old news. The new news is that 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 biotechnol

consider that the more miles an autonomous car drives, the more data it gathers—and data is the gasoline of the driverless world.

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.

in 2023 the average thousand-dollar laptop will have the same computing power as a human brain (roughly 1016 cycles per second).

But conditions are not close to “normal.” Not only are a dozen exponential technologies beginning to converge, their impact is unleashing a series of secondary forces. These forces range from our increasing access to information, money, and tools, to our considerable uptick in productive time and life expectancy. These forces are another tsunami of

Studies done with fMRI show that when we project ourselves into the future something peculiar happens: The medial prefrontal cortex shuts down. This is a part of the brain that activates when we think about ourselves. When we think about other people, the inverse happens: It deactivates. And when we think about absolute strangers, it deactivates ev

“In the U.S., we have the honor of being home to ten of the world’s twenty-five most congested cities, costing us approximately $300 billion in lost income and productivity.