The Future Is Faster Than You Think By Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Flying Cars
Today, the marginal cost of car ownership—that is, not the purchase price, but everything else that goes with a car (gas, repairs, insurance, parking, etc.)—is 59 cents per passenger mile. For its 2020 launch, according to Holden, Uber Air wants to reduce that per-mile price to $5.73, then rapidly drive it down to $1.84. But Uber’s long-term target is the game-changer—44 cents per mile—or cheaper than the cost of driving.
Why, in the late spring of 2018, are flying cars suddenly ready for prime time? What is it about this particular moment in history that has turned one of our oldest science fiction fantasies into our latest reality? The answer, in a word: Convergence.
In simple terms, we use our new computers to design even faster new computers, and this creates a positive feedback loop that further accelerates our acceleration—what Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns.
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 biotechnology is progressing at an exponential rate, but because artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and a couple other exponentials are converging on the field. In other words, these waves are starting to overlap, stacking atop one another, producing tsunami-sized behemoths that threaten to wash away most everything in their path.
To answer that, let’s examine the three basic requirements any Uber eVTOL will have to meet: safety, noise, and price. Today, even Helicopters don't meet any of these requirements.
Since 2009, Waymo’s vehicles have logged over 10 million miles. By 2020, with twenty thousand Jaguars doing hundreds of thousands of daily trips, they’ll be adding an extra million miles or so every day. 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.
Hyperloop
In 2013, in an attempt to shorten the long commute between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the California state legislature proposed a $68 billion budget allocation on what appeared to be the slowest and most expensive bullet train in history. Musk was outraged. The cost was too high, the train too sluggish. Teaming up with a group of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX, he published a fifty-eight-page concept paper for The Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation network that used magnetic levitation to propel passenger pods down vacuum tubes at speeds up to 760 mph. If successful, it would zip you across California in thirty-five minutes—or faster than commercial jets.
Musk saw overwhelm. He was irate enough to publish a whitepaper but way too busy to start another company. So Pishevar, with Musk’s blessing, decided to do so himself. A couple of years after that, the Virgin Group invested in the idea, Richard Branson was elected chairman, and Virgin Hyperloop One was born.
These convergences are why, in various stages of development, there are now ten major Hyperloop One projects spread across the globe. Chicago to DC in thirty-five minutes. Pune to Mumbai in twenty-five minutes. According to Giegel: Hyperloop is targeting certification in 2023. By 2025, the company plans to have multiple projects under construction and running initial passenger testing.
The Boring Company
On July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Musk tweeted: Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins. In the spring of 2018, with $113 million of Musk’s own money, the Boring Company began boring. They started construction on both ends of the line in DC and New York, while also starting on a 10.3-mile Maryland stretch that will eventually connect the two.
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 is extinguished.
according to Yale’s Richard Foster, 40 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be gone in ten years, replaced, for the most part, by upstarts we’ve not yet heard of.
Why are divorce rates so high? One reason is that marriage was created over four thousand years ago when we got hitched as teens and death came by forty. The institution was designed for a twenty-year maximum commitment. But thanks to advances in healthcare and lifespan, we’re now looking at a half-century of togetherness—which puts a whole new spin on ’til death do us part.
In Part One, we’ll explore nine technologies currently on exponential growth curves, examining where they are today and where they’re going.
In Part Two, focusing on eight industries, we’ll see how converging technologies are reshaping our world.
In Part Three, we move to the bigger picture, looking at a series of environmental, economic, and existential risks that threaten the progress we’re about to make.
Quantum computing
Unlike binary bits, which are an either/or scenario, qubits utilize superposition, which allows them to be in multiple states at once. Think of the two options of flipping a coin: heads or tails. Now think about a spinning coin—where both states flash by at once. That’s superposition, only it requires super-cold temperatures to achieve.
in 2013, when a physicist named Chad Rigetti decided that quantum computers were a lot closer to prime time than many suspected and that he wanted to be the one to push the technology over the finish line. So he left a comfortable job as a quantum researcher at IBM, raised over $119 million in funding, and built the coldest pipe in history. Over fifty patent applications later, Rigetti now manufactures integrated quantum circuits that power quantum computers in the cloud. And he’s right, this technology does solve one great problem: the end of Moore’s Law.
Kurzweil’s point is that every time an exponential technology reaches the end of its usefulness, another arises to take its place. And so it is with transistors. Right now, there are a half-dozen solutions to the end of Moore’s Law. Alternative uses of materials are being explored, such as replacing silicon circuits with carbon nanotubes for faster switching and better heat dissipation. Novel designs are also in the works, including three-dimensional integrated circuits, which geometrically increase the available surface area. There are also specialized chips that have limited functionality, but incredible speed. Apple’s recent A12 Bionic, for example, only runs AI applications but does so at a blistering nine trillion operations a second.
In 2002, Geordie Rose, the founder of an early quantum computer company D-Wave, came up with the quantum version of Moore’s Law, what’s now known as Rose’s Law. The idea is similar: The number of qubits in a quantum computer doubles every year.
Right now, if you go to the website for Rigetti Computing (www.rigetti.com), you can download Forest, their quantum developer’s kit. The kit provides a user-friendly interface to the quantum world. With it, almost anyone can write programs that can be run on Rigetti’s thirty-two-qubit computer. Over 120 million programs have been run
In BOLD, we introduced the Six Ds of Exponentials, or the growth cycle of exponential technologies: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization. Each represents a crucial phase of development for an exponential technology, one that always leads to enormous upheaval and opportunity.
Emerging out of the cryptocurrency realm, ICOs are a new form of crowdfunding underpinned by blockchain technology. Startups can raise capital by creating and selling their own virtual currency—called either tokens or coins. These tokens give you ownership in the company (or, at least, voting power) and the promise of future profits, or can take the form of security, representing fractional ownership of a piece of real estate or the like. The number of ICOs per quarter has also ballooned, from roughly a dozen during the first quarter of 2017 to over a hundred by the last quarter of 2017, and there’s been even more activity since.
In 1913, Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy received an unusual letter in the mail. Dear Sir, it began, I beg to introduce myself as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of 20 pounds per annum. The letter went on to offer nine pages of mathematical ideas, including 120 different results in numbers theory, infinite series, continued if you are convinced there is anything of value I would like to have my theorems published.… It was signed by S. Ramanujan. Hardy showed the letter to a colleague, the mathematician John Littlewood, trying to figure out if it was a joke. It didn’t take long for them to figure out it wasn’t a joke. The philosopher Bertrand Russell ran into the duo the next day, finding them, as he later wrote, in a state of wild excitement because they believe they have found a second Newton, a Hindu clerk in Madras making 20 pounds a year.
Hardy brought Ramanujan to Cambridge. Five years later, he was elected to the Royal Society, making him both one of their youngest members in history and the first from India. Before dying four years later of tuberculosis, Ramanujan contributed over 3,900 formulae to math, including solutions to problems long considered unsolvable. Resoundingly, he’s considered one of history’s great minds, an unabashed genius
Consider the nine-dot problem, a classic test of creative problem-solving. Connect nine dots with four lines in ten minutes without lifting your pencil from the paper. Under normal circumstances, fewer than 5 percent of the population can pull this off. In a study run at the University of Sydney in Australia, none of their test subjects did. But then the researchers took a second group of subjects and used transcranial direct stimulation to artificially mimic many of the changes produced during flow. What happened? Forty percent solved the problem—a record result. The long-term approach takes a similar tack, using technology to improve cognitive function, only soon the technology will be permanently implanted in our brains.
The rise of the coffeehouse in eighteenth-century Europe became a critical driver of the Enlightenment. These egalitarian establishments drew people from all walks of life, allowing novel notions to meet and mingle By becoming a hub for information sharing—a network—coffee shops were foundational in driving progress forward.
A business model is the systems and processes a company uses to generate value. The basic rules of the game for creating and capturing economic value were once fixed in place for years, even decades, as companies tried to execute the same business model better than competitors did, explains a 2015 article in the McKinsey Quarterly.
In the twentieth century, this added up to around one major business revolution per decade.
We can now see seven emerging models that could end up defining business over the next few decades. Each is a revolutionary new way of creating value; each is a force for acceleration.
The Crowd Economy (crowdfunding, ICO)
The Free/Data Economy (e.g. Facebook)
The Smartness Economy (e.g. cell phones became smartphones)
Closed-Loop Economies: (recycling )
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (blockchain)
Multiple World Models (augmented reality, virtual reality)
Transformation Economy (experience economy e.g. Starbucks coffee vs normal coffee)
And for those of us on the outside of these disruptive models, our experience will be better, cheaper, faster.
Author Jeremy Rifkin points out that all major economic paradigm shifts share a common denominator. At a moment in time, Rifkin told Business Insider, three defining technologies emerge and converge [emphasis ours] to create… an infrastructure that fundamentally changes the way we manage power and move economic activity across the value chain. And those three technologies are new communications technologies to more efficiently manage economic activity, new sources of energy to power the economic activity, and new modes of mobility… to more efficiently move the economic activity.
Three major shifts—call them who, what and where is underway. We’re seeing alterations in who is making content, what kind of content is being made, and where we’re experiencing that content. The combination of TV ad sales and box office revenue produce just shy of $300 billion a year. By hoarding a few scarce resources—tech, talent, financing, and distribution—a handful of Hollywood studios and TV networks have maintained a virtual stranglehold on those dollars.
In June of 2016, the extremely eerie short film Sunspring was released online, the end result of a neural net–powered AI being fed hundreds of sci-fi film scripts and allowed to take a crack at writing one of its own. Two months later, Twentieth Century Fox debuted the trailer for the upcoming thriller Morgan, also created with the help of an AI—this time, IBM’s Watson.
Facial expressions, hand gestures, eye gaze, vocal tone, head movement, speech frequency, and duration are all signals thick with emotional information. By coupling next-generation sensors with deep learning techniques, we can read these signals and employ them to analyze a user’s mood. And the basic technology is here
Lightwave, another emotional-computing startup, can capture not just the emotional state of an individual, but that of a whole crowd. It’s already been utilized by Cisco to judge a startup pitch competition, helped DJ Paul Oakenfold increase listener engagement at a concert in Singapore, and measured viewer reactions during a pre-screening of The Revenant.
But screens have an inherent limitation: place. Screens mean watching entertainment in a fixed location—your living room or your local movie theater. Certainly, we get mobility via our tablets and smartphones, but the trade-off is the size and, by extension, engagement.
What, exactly, is killing us? There are nine main reasons.
Genomic Instability - DNA doesn’t always replicate according to plan; genetic instability leads to genetic damage leads to a limit on lifespan
Telomere Attrition: as DNA replicates, telomeres get shorter. At a critical shortness threshold, the cell stops dividing, and we become much more susceptible to disease
Epigenetic Alterations - Exposure to carcinogens in the environment can silence the gene that suppresses tumors
Loss of Proteostasis - But proteins become less effective over time, so the body recycles them. Unfortunately, as we age, we can lose this ability
Nutrient Sensing Goes Awry - For everything to work perfectly, cells need to be able to recognize and process each of forty different nutrients. But this ability breaks down as we get older.
Mitochondrial Dysfunction - By converting oxygen and food into energy, they provide the basic fuel for our cells. But performance declines over time.
Cellular Senescence: As cells undergo stress, they occasionally become senescent, both losing their ability to divide and, simultaneously, becoming resistant to death
Stem Cell Exhaustion: As we age, our supply of stem cells plummets, in certain cases by a ten thousandfold decline.
Altered Intercellular Communication - For the body to function properly, cells need to communicate. Over time, signals get crossed. Some cells become unresponsive, others become inflammation-producing zombie cells. This inflammation blocks further communication
Origins of Insurance - The bankers who frequented Lloyd’s Coffee House, were willing to collect premiums in exchange for taking shipping risks. They dubbed this process underwriting, as bankers would literally write their names on the blackboard under the name of the ship and a list of the trip’s details: its cargo, crew, weather, and destination. Today, some 320 years later, this idea of underwriting has grown into a multi-trillion-dollar insurance industry.
Three major changes are underway.
First, by shifting the risk from the consumer to the service provider, entire categories of insurance are being eliminated.
Next, crowdsurance is replacing traditional categories of health and life insurance.
Finally, the rise of networks, sensors, and AI are rewriting the ways in which insurance is priced and sold, remaking the very nature of the industry. If you’re riding in an autonomous car as a service, and there is no driver, do you need insurance? Today, we insure the stuff we own. But autonomous cars shift us from car-as-property to car-as-service, removing the need for consumer-facing auto insurance altogether.
Insurance is a game of averages. The industry’s basic business model is to assess risk and set premiums—or, covering this much risk will cost this much money. With a large enough number of customers and long enough stretches of time, this averages out to a profit for the underwriter.
In both health and life insurance, the premiums of the healthy cover the costs of the unhealthy. But the healthy end up paying unnecessarily high premiums for this privilege, making them the consistent losers of this particular game. In the insurance game, when the lowest risk clients opt-out, the statistics stop working.
On average, we pay $360 a year in banking fees. The larger banks, meanwhile, average $30 billion a year in overdraft charges alone. But where things go truly sideways is what the banks do with our money.
Banks get to invest our money, typically at a significant profit, wherever they see fit. This often includes projects that don’t align with customers’ values.
But the largest mobile market is a third category entirely, the unbanked, those without any place to store their money. The issue is infrastructure, especially in poorer countries, where the cost of building and maintaining banks simply exceeds the value they can generate. Borrowing money is one of the largest problems faced by the unbanked
With blockchain, since trust is built into the system, the system is no longer necessary. Take a stock trade. Right now, to execute that trade, there’s a buyer, a seller, a series of banks that hold their money, the stock exchange itself, clearinghouses, etc.—roughly, ten different intermediaries. Blockchain removes everyone but the buyer and seller.
Denmark stopped printing money in 2017. Sweden, where over 80 percent of all transactions are digital, is almost there. Economists often point out that two of the main factors that drive economic growth are the availability of money—the stockpiles we can draw upon—and the velocity of money, or the speed and ease with which we can move that money around. Both of these factors are being amplified by exponential technologies.
The value of your home is partially measured in its proximity to a half-dozen locations: a central shopping district, the best schools, your place of work, favorite restaurants, the homes of your closest friends, etc.
All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants, author Richard Manning wrote in an essay for Harpers. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The food on our plates begins its journey some 93 million miles away, in the solar portion of solar-powered photosynthesis. Even though millions and millions of metric tons of hydrogen are fused every second, less than one-billionth of that energy actually reaches the Earth. And, of the total that does hit the planet’s surface, less than 1 percent is actually used for photosynthesis. The Bill Gates-backed RIPE Project at the University of Illinois has matched and improved those numbers.
In a few years, humans will become the first animals that get their protein from other animals without any animals being harmed along the way. Slaughterhouses will become a ghost story we tell our grandchildren.
So how do we protect biodiversity and preserve ecosystem services? There is no simple solution, but we want to highlight five developments that are helping turn the tide.
Drone Reforestation:
Reef Restoration
Aquaculture Reinvention
Agricultural Reinvention
Closed-Loop Economies
Productivity is the main reason companies want to automate workforces. Yet, time and again, the largest increases in productivity don’t come from replacing humans with machines, but rather from augmenting machines with humans.
Petra Moser, a Stanford economist, and her team turned to an old rumor—that German Jews who fled Nazi Germany had an outsized impact on innovation in the United States. If true, it was an outsized impact produced by an outsized exodus What did she find? That migration is an innovation accelerant on par with nearly every force we’ve so far discussed.
In America, immigrants are twice as likely to start a new business than natives and are responsible for 25 percent of all new jobs. Between 2006 and 2012, 33 percent of venture-backed companies that went public had at least one immigrant founder. Among Fortune 500 companies, 40 percent were founded by immigrants or their children. In 2016, half of all unicorns—those rare startups valued at more than $1 billion—were founded by immigrants, and each provided at least 760 new jobs.
By the numbers, the 12 million Africans uprooted by the slave trade, the 18 million people rerouted by the division of India and Pakistan, and the 20 million rearranged on Europe’s chessboard in the years following World War II were history’s three biggest forced relocations. Each was propelled by a familiar driver: economics (and depersonalization), religion, and politics, respectively. Each reshuffled the world. Yet their combined impact will soon be dwarfed by a new exodus, the first to be triggered solely by technology.
Yet dopamine is merely one of the brain’s major reward chemicals. There’s also norepinephrine, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin to consider. All are massively pleasurable. Digital media isn’t incredibly effective at producing any beyond dopamine, but the immersive nature of VR makes it able to trigger all six. It’s the full cocktail of feel-good neurochemistry, hard drugs delivered by headset—and only the start of this story.
Stanford emeritus professor of psychiatry Al Cooper, who conducted one of the largest and most detailed studies of cybersex, described the Web as the crack cocaine of sexual compulsivity. According to his research, two hundred thousand Americans are already digital sex addicts. Globally, that number creeps into the millions.
Added together, our three largest migrations—the slave trade, the bifurcation of India and Pakistan, and the diaspora of post–WWII Europe—produced a combined 44.5 million exiles. Yet 321 million Americans already spend eleven hours a day online, and VR’s neurochemical cocktail will definitely increase that figure. Now toss in serious human motivators like meaning, mastery, money, and sex, and the pull becomes much stronger. It adds up into another great migration, an exodus of consciousness, and one only now just beginning to get underway.
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