The Future is Faster Than You Think summary

Flying cars aren’t the first example of technologies converging to accelerate change in an industry, and they’re far from being the last. For instance, artificial intelligence is set to become a fixed part of many aspects of everyday life – and not just in robotics and drone-piloting.

AI has experienced rapid growth in popularity in recent years. Just look at Microsoft’s AI chatbot Xiaoice. Unlike a lot of data-crunching AI applications, Xiaoice launched in China with a somewhat unconventional purpose. It was designed to establish a connection on an emotional level through friendliness, with a pinch of irony. Following her 2014 debut, Xiaoice became wildly popular – since her inception, the bot has logged over 30 billion conversations with 100 million people. But the project itself was only a test for Microsoft. In 2015, Xiaoice became so well known that she started doing live weather reports for a Chinese news station. 

Imagine you’re standing in a conference room. Looking around, you see the walls, the carpet, the lights. It is, perhaps disappointingly, completely normal. Then, suddenly, everything changes. Where the floor used to be, there’s now a vast chasm. Instead of standing on a carpet, you’re perched on a precarious wooden plank above a 30-foot drop. It’s breathtaking, but terrifying!

In 2001, a 60-year-old judge attending a conference in Washington, DC, found himself in exactly this situation. He made a misstep and fell. Luckily, the chasm wasn’t real. Neither was the plank. And though the fall seemed very realistic to him, he emerged uninjured. How? Well, just a few moments earlier, he had donned a set of virtual reality – VR – goggles, which were mapped to every detail of the room but could change at the click of a button. This VR technology had wasted no time: in an instant, it had tricked the judge’s brain into thinking his environment had transformed completely.

When you think of shopping today, companies like Amazon and Walmart probably come to mind. But long ago, there was the Sears catalog. One of the original disruptors, this catalog was the future of shopping for over a century.

Richard Warren Sears was working as a railroad station agent in 1886 when he recognized an opportunity to increase his income. The 23-year-old noticed that a jeweler had refused delivery of a crate of watches shipped from a Chicago wholesaler. Sears asked the manufacturer about selling the watches himself. The watches cost $12 to make, but they were usually sold for double that in stores. Then it dawned on Sears: he could sell the watches for less – say, $14 – but more quickly. He managed to make a profit of around 120 grand in current dollars. Then, he started expanding from selling watches to sewing machines and, eventually, almost everything else. The Sears catalog grew to offer 500 pages of products.

Think back to your school days. How was your education structured? For many people, school involved going from one class to the next. Each time the bell rang, students would have to start learning whatever the textbook served up that day. For much of the past couple of centuries, schools across the US have relied largely on a one-size-fits-all approach. This comes from a time when high-quality schools and teachers were hard to come by. And the goal was, as the authors put it, to educate future “obedient factory workers.”

But in recent decades, this dated model has become increasingly, well, outdated. To educate people in the future – and for the future – we need an approach that takes into account everything that’s changed since the Industrial Revolution.

Do you know where the food in your kitchen comes from? Whenever you sit down for a meal, some or all of the ingredients on your plate have probably been sourced from miles away. Perhaps your potatoes have come in on a truck from Iowa. This week’s bananas are from Costa Rica.

And while it’s possible to eat locally grown food, it’s not accessible to everyone. The vast majority of food we eat has been transported from around the world. Often, food is grown in one place, processed somewhere else, and then sold even farther away. In the US, the average meal requires around 2,000 miles of travel. It’s an imperfect system. It’s also inefficient: only 60 percent of food in the US actually gets eaten. The other 40 percent? Straight to the landfill – after growing a crust of technicolor mold in the bottom drawer of your fridge, that is.

So far, you’ve seen what just a few recent advancements in technology now have the power to do. Virtual reality can change your perspective, let you visit otherwise inaccessible places, and even show you how you look in an outfit without actually trying it on. Educational apps can provide students with the tools they need to commit to self-directed education and learn what’s most relevant to them. And food can be produced more locally to reduce environmental harm and increase overall food security. 

Other areas of society, including entertainment, health care, and finance, will also continue to be transformed as technologies converge in new iterations. But what does this mean for the bigger picture – for humanity as a whole?