The Future Is Faster Than You Think

the answer to “Why now?”—is the result of a dozen different technologies converging. It’s progress at a rate that we’ve not seen before. And this is a problem for us.

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.

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.

Flying Cars

The human brain evolved in an environment that was local and linear. Local, meaning most everything that we interacted with was less than a day’s walk away. Linear, meaning the rate of change was exceptionally slow. Your great-great-great-grandfather’s life was roughly the same as his great-great-grandson’s life. But now we live in a world that is

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.

This is why people have a tough time saving for retirement or staying on a diet or getting regular prostate exams—the brain believes that the person who would benefit from those difficult choices isn’t the same one making those choices.

Groupon—which is hard to remember as a disruptive enterprise today, but was then part of the first wave of “power to the people” internet companies.

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