A Distant Future No More

I remember when I was growing up in the 70's, I would often encounter the phrase "distant future". I guess it was a reinforcement of the perception that tomorrow is always a long time coming. Things were moving at a placid pace, and the rush of seeing new things invented and become mainstream in a short period of time was a rare occurrence.

At some point things started to accelerate. Technology started climbing at an exponential pace and it was now proceeding at blinding speed. The infographic above is a comparative graph of how long it took a particular technology to reach 50 million users. Of course, it can also be argued that population has been growing so it is not inconceivable that adoption times would progressively be getting shorter but the overall effect is still one of accelerating pace.

Today, the record holder for the fastest rate of adoption in terms of getting to 50 million users is, guess what? It's the augmented reality game Pokemon Go!?It reached 50 million users in just 19 days!

In 2017, Tech Insider published a video about a survey conducted by The World Economic forum of about 800 experts and executives about how they envision the future to look like. It came up with 7 amazing technologies they predicted would become mainstream by 2030, with some being predicted to be available by 2024 and 2025.

1. Robots – They believe robots will start disrupting white-collar jobs and predicted there could even be robot pharmacists by 2021.

2. Sensors – IoT or the Internet of Things will continue to expand with 1 trillion sensors connected to the Internet by 2022.

3. Medical – 3D Printing is seen by some experts to revolutionize the medical industry. The year 2015 already saw a cancer patient being the first recipient of a titanium sternum and rib cage that was designed, manufactured, and 3d-printed by the Melbourne based medical device company Anatomics. [2]. In 2018, doctors in Korea also successfully performed an artificial chest transplant using 3D-printing technology. Experts are predicting that the technology can be used for organ transplants by 2024.

4. Internet – 79% of the respondents believe that the Internet will be a basic right by 2024. Reports about the UN declaring the Internet as a human right has been around since 2011 and the experts believe that it is just a matter of time when the right to access the technology becomes concretely embodied in a universally accepted declaration.?

5. Phones – As the rate of increase of power of mobile phones continues exponentially, 80% of the survey’s respondents expect implantable phones to be commercially available by 2024. This development will allow users to communicate thoughts via brain waves using the implanted devices.

6. Cars – The advent of car-sharing and its accompanying apps have changed people’s perception about car ownership. The respondents predicted that by 2026, there will be more car-sharing rides than privately owned cars. Part of what will drive this development is the parallel improvements that are happening in driverless or self-driving cars. Although this may have been a bit elusive up to now, it is not anymore a matter of if but of when.

7. Artificial Intelligence – As more and more human intelligence attributes are acquired by machines, the experts believe that an AI machine will join a corporate board of directors by 2026.

*Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52290273-the-future-is-faster-than-you-think

In 2020, a book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler entitled "The Future is Faster Than You Think" was published. It was talking about the same thing, that technology is accelerating faster than what most of us think. It posits that in the next ten years, we will experience unprecedented acceleration of technology that will create not just major disruptions but also the creation of more wealth than what we have seen in the past one hundred years.

The authors of the book present a world where technology is accelerating at a pace faster than anyone could have imagined. The growth of technology is exponential. Most revolutionary technologies that we are experiencing today, like the ones that are mentioned in the survey of the World Economic Forum, started developing in a slow manner until it reached a critical point where the cumulative discoveries of the past led to better and greater understanding which consequently led to faster and accelerating improvements.

Truly we are seeing more and more a future that is distant no more.

*Cover Image by?tunnelmotions?from?Pixabay?

** Note: This newsletter comes out every Wednesday and Saturday (PhST).