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.

All of those miles matter. As autonomous vehicles drive, they gather information: positions of traffic signs, road conditions, and the like. More information equals smarter algorithms equals safer cars—and this combination is the very edge needed for market domination.

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

“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.

Institutions are similarly suffering. The educational system was an eighteenth-century invention, designed to batch-process children and prepare them for a life working in factories. That’s not today’s world, which explains why this system is failing to meet our current needs— and it’s not the only institution under duress.

Converging Technology

Flying Cars

PART ONE THE POWER OF CONVERGENCE

once a technology becomes digital—that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeroes of computer code—it hops on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially.