12 Reasons the Future is not what it Seems

The Exponential Convergence of the Singularity 

The post on-demand economy, is an automated economy. We've yet to really scrape the surface of what this means. It's not thirty years we'll have to wait, it's fifteen, for some of the first radical changes to take place and hit the job market, services and the like. 

The Definition of Innovation is Itself in Flux 

I was reading Wingee Sin, whom I admire and her article, Reflections on the Singularity. I found myself moved by her optimism of exponential thought and the work she does on innovation.

Innovation then, is not just in the entrepreneurial sense of the word, in these startup incubators who inspire young people or fund startups. Innovation is something that humanity will not forever have ownership of and over. Innovation is also, at least, in the way that it matters most to me, essentially about the future of technology and that society, coming closer and faster than ever. The acceleration towards a more transhumanistic reality. A world where what it means to be disruptive will in effect, transform in decades where the speed of change itself will be compressed. 

This is the world of your children, a world where you will likely be completely out of touch with technology itself and cut off from the future. 

Disruption is not a company that scales to put an ecosystem of blue collar workers out of a job a la Uber, disruption is when exponential technological evolution kinda takes over society.  If algorithms are tickling us now, just wait.

As such, I'm interested in things like what apps will be enabled and empower us to do with quantum computing and how artificial intelligence will mature well beyond the scope of human intelligence itself. 

As many future technologies converge, something unprecedented begins to happen, human beings become more empowered with the ability to engineer their future evolution by extraordinary means. Terrifying to some, beautiful to others, inevitable to those of us versed in Moore's law. 

While I may be an optimist about humanity's ability to transform itself, I'm a pragmatist when I see even our current inability to keep up. The majority of society isn't even remotely aware of the natural course of events that these technologies entail.

Let's rediscover some of the so called disruptive technologies & stages (if you will) that may continue to impact us increasingly so over the next decades, so long as we embody some form of consciousness. Let your mind wander a bit and while who knows what the future holds, some technological advances are well on their way. 

Exponential Technologies Revisited

-1- Design Thinking

Pre 2025 we are still in an age of entrepreneurship, where innovation merely means scaling our technology, moving to the cloud, integrating a bit of machine learning, etc... Society is in slow motion here, more is happening but it's nowhere near any noticeable exponential speed of change.

Humans still at this stage, have the illusion of control, we believe we (they) are making their own destiny, outsmarting other humans and the like. Building a better world together with new solutions. Still competing in a prehistoric economy for status, power, meaning, bragging rights.

Pre 2025, it's business as usual. Big Data is not yet fully actualized, IoT is not pervasive, machine-intelligence is juvenile, the the pre-convergence era is immature. Even our view of what comes next is half hazard, the limitations of our collective intelligence are in full view. Still, hundreds of millions of humans and getting access to the internet for the first time, the world is slowly waking up. Some economic upheaval is taking place, but remember, things are still in slow-motion. 

-2- Connectivity

In less than 10 years from now, there will be a hundred billion connected devices. The analytics of everything, the true Big Data age begins to take shape. 1 trillion devices amounts to another kind of infrastructure upon which technology will advance, progress and embed intelligence within matter itself and our environments. 

-3- Free Open Source Economy

Steven Kotler calls this demonetization of services. As society becomes more automated, more stuff will be accessible for free. Healthcare, education, information, droids, smart bathrooms that diagnose you in real-time, you name it. 3D printer free blueprints, etc...

-4- Automation of Society 

Increasing numbers of tasks, industries and segments of the workforce made obsolete via machine-learning, robots, AI, etc... The full scale age of automation doesn't quite begin officially to sometime in the late 2020s. 

-5- Augmented Humans

Humans with technological and bioengineered enhancements, scaling generations of these, the economic elite get the perks, technocracy caste system among humans.  

 -6- Artificial Intelligence Modified (AIM) Educational 

Predictive analytics that tutors children and people to learn in a customized way completely automated and independent of the need for institutions, the next generation of MOOCs, may include augmented reality settings, virtual reality field trips, etc...Quantum computing based software that can teach better than any teacher, where each student's personality is fully taken into account with curriculums that update themselves and lessons that adapt themselves nearly perfectly to the individual. 

-7- Self-Learning Artificial Intelligence 

A day will come when deep learning or something else disrupts machine-intelligence. The moment SLAI is born, the quasi Sky-net silicon based organism starts to reach humanity what exponential really means. This marks the end of the age of convergence when technological advancement is more or less perpetuated and directed by human beings. 

-8- Genetic Self-Manipulation & Digital Biology 

A bit like how hacking is taboo now, a day will come when genetic engineering is not taboo. In such a world, a whole new age of intersection of digital technology, genes, biology and free-will will come into being. This heralds the start of the transhumanistic age. 

-9- The Post Industrial Age

As 3D printing and other technologies such as drones, droids and androids come to fruition, the distribution of physical things, the need for manufacturing, humans being implicated in transportation will more or less cease with increasing dematerailization of many human communities. Physical space will become "smarter" and the web will become more "livable". Sustainability, automation and the age of nano-tech begins. 

-10- Descendant Divinity 

Since the advent of the personal computer in 1974, merely 50 years later, it will start to become apparent that it's not our children who alone will inherit the Earth. Human beings may come to realize they have spawned a whole other species. The possibility does exist what will evolve one day out of AI, will come to differentiate itself from humanity with an independent collective mind.

Will we evolve with it or it will diverge from organic biology completely. In all probability, it will be a bit like the Borg form star-trek, (resistance is futile), though somewhat more intelligence and far better looking! There will be groups of human beings for or against such an occurrence, the usual optimists and pessimists about certain aspects and periods of evolution. 

-11- Convergence 

Technologies that will converge quite rapidly include Internet of Things, 3D-Printing, machine-learning, robotics, quantum computing with predictable increases in computational power, miniaturization, processing speed and orders of magnitude increasingly above the levels of human intelligence. The way capitalism is set up means all of this is already set in motion. Super corporations such as Alphabet, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and who knows who else, will disrupt and break barriers for profit. From 2035 onwards, convergence has sped up to another level entirely. 

If Millennials must adapt to the on-demand economy, Gen Z must cope with a more profound changing workforce of an age of automation, It's estimated between 30-40% of jobs in Retail and Finance for example will be gone by 2025. By 2020, you won't have had to grow up on Alan Turing or Ray Kurzweil to see this coming, it will be all perfectly self-evident.  

The invention of the internet, the mobile revolution, the advent of the cloud, VR/AR will all seem and be prehistoric one day very soon. It's such a day we have to think about now and adapt for as soon as possible, if truly care about innovation in any serious way. The irony is of course, human beings are incapable of truly doing so in any coordinated way. The very notion of exponential waves of technological disruption, will prove to new levels that it's the young who will push human evolution and human progress further. 

-12- Space Exploration 

An automated world, where the environment has been balanced, cities are smart and a bit perfect, will mean nomadic humans or what have become of humans will now have the energy and resources to turn their attention on what really matters. The stars. Meeting other life, exploring other planets, the works, the real future of a species that matures and makes it into the information age. 

Generation Gap 

The generations gaps that will appear will be more about adaptation to exponential technology than physical time. As there were once digital natives (native to mobile), there will be v-natives (VR/AR natives), q-natives (quantum computers) and a-natives (augmented) so forth. 

There will be new kinds of AI-human hybrid interfaces, neural implants, new kinds of wearables that will give rise to truly transhumanistic entities. What your children will experience, will be unprecedented and outside the scope, quite literally, of your experience. Those won't just crave immersion (gamified addiction), they may crave union with technology at a level our own parents may have been mortified with.