The Future Is Faster Than You Think

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.

The Flying Cars Are Here. And the infrastructure’s coming fast. While we were sipping our lattes and checking our Instagram, science fiction became science fact. And this brings us back to our initial question: Why now? The answer, in a word: Convergence.

PART ONE THE POWER OF CONVERGENCE

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.

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

When a new innovation creates a new market and washes away an existing one, we use the term “disruptive innovation” to describe it.

Hyperloop