“Prediction is difficult, especially about the future” – Neils Bohr, Yogi Berra,
and many others
The future isn’t what it used to be. In more optimistic times, futuristic visions predicted a stairway of progress to the stars. This flavor of futurism, found in gee-whiz Popular Science articles, promised a future of upside with marvelous labor-saving gadgetry and products. When the stock markets got caught in the internet hype cycle in the late 1990s, we got a Nasdaq at 5,000. But it was there before: Radio stocks in 1920s, uranium in the 1950s, technology stocks in the early 1980s.
At the other extreme, have been Cassandra-like prophets of doom, these days the popular laments are the end of energy (Peak Oil), our destruction because of too much of it (Global Warming), or other forms of pestilence and danger as we consume too much and create environmental disaster, or consume too little and end up in global depression.
While the extremes of hope for a future Tech-topia and fear of a coming Doom-agedon seem far apart, outrageous claims of either doom or paradise have a common theme of predicting Big Bold Change. Hyping either extreme is great for getting attention, but leads us astray from realistic
predictions. The predictions of Techtopia (Men on Mars! hydrogen cars for all! 90 minutes from New York to Paris!) or Doomagedon (inflation! starvation!) are generally exagerrated.
We make multiple errors in thinking about the future. We overpredict the short-term change and underpredict long-term change. We expect linear change and progress, but change is in fact chaotic – often exponential, sometimes accelerating, sometimes attenuating or even reversing. We tend to think linear in a world that is non-linear.
The path to really understanding the future lies in understanding the principles that create change, and recognizing that the drivers of change will work both the hopes for tech-topia and the risks for doom-agedon are rooted in those same driving changes.
We can start with this basic premise and principle: We are in an era of accelerated change, which is driving economic and social disruption. The ultimate drivers of both the positive and dangerous disruptive change is the same – technology.
Accelerating technological change is driving a confluence of global economic changes, which is accelerating economic change. Distance is becoming irrelevent in many forms of work. We are awash in information. The world is becoming more synchronized.
The above principle could have been stated anytime since the start of the industrial revolution.
It was true in 1900, 1968, 1984, and will be true in 2020. Ray Kurzweil has encased this
principle in his Law of Accelerating Change. Technological change is occuring along an exponential growth path. The implications are that the amount of change that will occur in the next 10 years will exceed the prior 10 years. This exponentially rising technology trend will continue to surprise us and run into ever rising levels of social and economic friction and dislocation.
In the 1960s, Toffler recognized that change created a sort of social friction, and introduced the term “Future Shock”, describing the social shock due to change. In prior eras, technological change was slow enough that for most humans they were born and died in a world that was both limited, and, to them, static. In more recent times, change has been disruptive, but measured. We walked on the moon, flew by jet instead of ride by train, found new ways to cook food (microwave), or listen to music (CDs).
Then came the internet. The internet and the global informational web it has spawned
have touched every industry, every activity, every part of our lives. The internet has been a technology and social accelerant.
We are now in a world of unlimited computing power: A single smartphone chip found in hundreds
of millions of cell phones has more processing power than a supercomputing of 25 years ago,
while a single supercomputer of today, consisting of tens of thousands of high-performance computing nodes, has more computing power than the whole world did at the dawn of the internet, just 20 years ago. Unleashing this power, turning large swaths of computing power onto specific problems, and allowing anyone to tap into unlimited information has unprecented impact on technology change itself.
We are now in a world of unlimited information: In a previous era books were a limited resource and it took the library of Congress to hold millions of volumes. Now you can store and hold such a vast collection on a cheap hard drive. You can get access to purchase millions of book online, but you won’t even need to, because the vast internet already has all that information at your fingertips.
We are now in a world of unlimited communication: Four billion humans now are connected and ‘always on’ via mobile phones. Communications is now truly global, reaching from the poorest villages and joining all of us in a vast communications network. Consider Sun’s corporate slogan: “The network is the computer” The internet is a network. The power of this computer network is, according to Metcalf’s Law the square of the participants. The internet of the year 2000 had over 100 million people connected. By the time this decade is out, practically every human being will have a more powerful access to the network, available anywhere via mobile platforms, giving us all access an internet that has grown in processing power and data size by ten orders of magnitude from a decade ago.
While we can appreciate the fact of this power and interconnectedness, less predictable are the eddies and ripples of change due to this rapid change. In our complex, non-linear world, as with any swift motion in a complex environment, turbulence happens. Technology changes re-factor the economy, eliminating some bottlenecks and creating others; tearing down some power centers and creating others. The globalization of economies and the shift of
jobs and industries to low-wage countries has been one part of that refactorization of economies.
The social consequences of this change are fundamental, and have yet to play out even for technologies that have already occured. Economic Government and social models are being disrupted by economic change and technology. What was merely inefficient a generation ago is dangerously obsolete today. Social and structural forces will resist change or try to control it, leading to fights over how to manage change due to technology. In recent times, the widening of information has been a force for reform.
While Kurzweil’s law predicts an overall exponential trend, the pace of technological change, adoption and acceptance is not a straight line. Specific technologies often follow an S adoption curve. Specific roadblocks end up creating dead ends.
For example, consider the root of this change, the semiconductor chip. For Forty years, Moore’s law has prevailed in the world of semiconductor chip scaling, predicting a steady doubling of the number of transistors per chip every 18 months. That trend has lead to computers that grow in power and capability by 1000X each decade. Within the next decade, the chip scaling trend, already hitting economic and physical walls, will end. Progress in cheaper computing won’t end, it will morph into a different trend. We may even see it accelerate.
So is our future Tech-topia or Doom-agedon? A bit of both will prevail. While the accelerating rate of change means that many of our expectations of what technology can or will do will be exceeded, the turbulence of that change creates losers as well as winners. The world will be better overall, but increasing social friction and economic dislocation will result from that change. In followup posts, I will discuss more specific technology trends and the changes they will spawn.