Friday, 16 September 2011
“In the 21st century we won’t experience one hundred years of progress—we will experience 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate.” – Ray Kurzweil
By 2020, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level “strong” artificial intelligence well before 2030. By the time we get to the 2040s, we will be able to multiply human intelligence a billion fold. Computers will keep shrinking until ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains to make us healthier and smarter.
Consider how much the world has changed recently. Just a few years ago, people did not use social networks (Facebook, for example, was founded in 2004 and now has over 500 million active users), wikis, blogs, or tweets. Most people did not use search engines or cell phones in the 1990s. Imagine the world without these. That sounds like ancient history, but that was not so long ago. The world will change even more in the near future.
The landscape is changing exponentially. If you are unaware of the rate of change in emerging technologies (artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, embedded computing) you will inevitably miss opportunities to leverage these technologies. Traditional linear thinking will cause the demise of companies unable to cope with the coming decades of disruptive innovation.
It is feasible to predict precisely the capabilities of each form of information technology in future periods and to factor these projections into entrepreneurial plans. Plotting the basic measures of the price to performance and capacity of information technologies they follow produces remarkably smooth — and foreseeable — trajectories. What’s predictable is that these measures grow exponentially, not linearly, though our intuition about the future is linear. This makes a tremendous difference. Thirty steps linearly get you to thirty, whereas thirty steps exponentially get you to a billion.
Exponentials seem slow at first. The genome project was controversial because half-way through the fifteen-year project we had succeeded in collecting only one percent of the human genome. But that is actually right on schedule for an exponential progression. If you double one percent seven more times – which is exactly what happened – you get 100 percent. So the project was done on time. This is why people persistently underestimate what is feasible in long periods of time. People think linearly whereas the actual course of progress is exponential.
Disruptive Convergence inspires executives and strategic decision-makers to contemplate the future through an exponential lens to illuminate trends that are creating new industries and destroying traditional static companies.
