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The Future is Faster Than You Think summary

Name: The Future is Faster Than You Think
Rating: 4.1 (117 reviews)
Author: Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

4.1 (117 ratings)

23 mins

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Change & Evolution Artificial Intelligence Digital Transformation Learning

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The Future is Faster Than You Think
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What’s in it for me? Learn how converging technologies are accelerating future growth.

Flying cars. Quantum computing. Hyperloop transportation. These were all once considered futuristic pipe dreams. But now, they’re becoming a reality – sooner than anyone expected.

Things like 3D printing and virtual reality are available to a wide audience. Entrepreneurs and scientists are constantly exploring the possibilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning. And blockchain technology could give millions of people access to secure identity verification and otherwise inaccessible banking services.

From shopping to education, health care to food availability, technologies are converging to accelerate the future and change everyday life. In these blinks, you’ll take a deep dive into several of these technologies before zooming out and exploring what they mean for the bigger picture.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how virtual reality can help teach empathy;
how educational apps can increase global literacy; and
why vertical farms make locally grown food more accessible.

When multiple technologies converge, they create exponential growth and innovation.

The year 2018 marked the sixth time in a row that Los Angeles, California, was voted the most gridlocked city in the world. It was also the year that Uber Elevate, the ride service’s aerial vehicles branch, hosted its second annual conference on flying cars. Hundreds of CEOs, venture capitalists, and designers gathered at the Skirball Cultural Center in L.A. to present their ideas. By then, aerial cars already existed. This conference wanted to figure out how to scale production and adoption so that by 2023, both Dallas, Texas, and Los Angeles would have fully functional aerial ridesharing capabilities. It was exciting stuff, but it did beg the question: Why now?

Humans didn’t go straight from nothing to flying cars; there were a lot of steps in between. What makes today different from the 1920s, or even the 1990s, is how quickly new technologies have continued to advance. And when combined, they’ve sparked exponential innovations – groundbreaking developments that would’ve never been possible on their own.

Take helicopters, for instance, which have existed since 1939 but have one fatal safety flaw. If the single engine or rotor stops working, the helicopter – and everyone in it – ceases to be airborne. As flying technology improved, materials got lighter and stronger, and the converging developments paved the way for a more recent invention: aerial drones.

Drones rely on multiple smaller rotors and can carry more weight than helicopters. If one rotor dies, the others can keep the thing in the sky. But drones present another challenge: the task of constantly adjusting their many rotors at microsecond intervals is beyond the capabilities of any one human pilot. This requires yet another convergence of technologies.

Enter artificial intelligence and machine learning. In these fields, recent advances have enabled huge amounts of data to be processed in real time. So instead of relying on a pilot’s hand-eye coordination to fly the drone’s distributed electric propulsion system, or DEP, other technology can step in to fill the gap. For example, GPS, advanced visual imaging and sensors, and microscopic accelerometers work in harmony to keep everything up and running – or rather, flying.

And the result? An industry that used to be relegated to sci-fi films has started attracting some of the biggest names in the business. By 2019, 25 different flying car companies had collectively raised over a billion dollars in investments – and were already test-flying prototypes.

Artificial intelligence is being combined with myriad technologies to supercharge innovation.

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.

Virtual reality technology is being used for more than just video games.

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.

The future of shopping will continue to be shaped by technologies like AI, VR, and 3D printing.

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.

The future of education will be more individualized and make greater use of technology for self-teaching.

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.

Converging technologies aim to make food more accessible, long-lasting, and efficient.

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.

Exponential technologies offer solutions on a global scale.

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?

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What is The Future is Faster Than You Think about?

The Future is Faster Than You Think (2020) examines how converging exponential technologies (AI, robotics, 3D printing, CRISPR, Blockchain) are reinventing every industry this decade. Starting with flying cars and artificial intelligence, it explores and predicts the future of industries including retail, manufacturing, transportation, health care, education, finance, and insurance. It also offers a vision for how these technologies can be applied to address many of the world’s most pressing problems.

Who should read The Future is Faster Than You Think?

Futurists hungry for big-picture technology visions
Anyone interested in AI in the real world
Innovation geeks

About the Author

Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is a physician and entrepreneur. He has founded and cofounded numerous organizations including Singularity University, the XPRIZE Foundation, and Human Longevity, Inc. A New York Times best-selling author, Diamandis’s other books include Abundance and Bold, both of which he cowrote with Steven Kotler.

Steven Kotler is the cofounder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. His works have been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes. Kotler’s other best-selling books, which include The Rise of Superman and Stealing Fire, have been translated into over 40 languages.

Categories with The Future is Faster Than You Think

Technology & the Future Science Education Health & Nutrition Society & Culture

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