{"id":36985,"date":"2015-02-10T11:10:12","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T11:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/?p=36985"},"modified":"2015-02-10T11:10:12","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T11:10:12","slug":"the-acceleration-of-acceleration-how-the-future-is-arriving-far-faster-than-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/the-acceleration-of-acceleration-how-the-future-is-arriving-far-faster-than-expected.html","title":{"rendered":"The Acceleration of acceleration: How the future is arriving far faster than expected"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
One of the things that happens when you write books about the future is you get to watch your predictions fail. This is nothing new, of course, but what\u2019s different this time around is the direction of those failures.<\/p>\n
Used to be, folks were way too bullish about technology and way too optimistic with their predictions. Flying cars and Mars missions being two classic\u00a0-they should be here by now-\u00a0examples. The Jetsons being another.<\/p>\n
But today, the exact opposite is happening.<\/p>\n
Take Abundance. In 2011, when Peter Diamandis and I were writing that book, we were somewhat cautious with our vision for robotics, arguing that we were still ten to fifteen years away from a major shift.<\/p>\n
And we were wrong.<\/p>\n
Just three years later, Google went on a buying spree, purchasing eight different robotics companies in less than six months, Amazon decided it was time to get into the drone delivery (aka flying robots) business, and Rethink Robotics released Baxter (a story explored in my new release Bold<\/a>), the first user-friendly industrial robot to hit the market.<\/p>\n And we\u2019re not the only ones having this experience.Baxter was the final straw. With a price tag of just $22,000 and a user-friendly interface a child could operate, this robot is already making the type of impact we were certain would show up around 2025.<\/p>\n Earlier this\u00a0year, Ken Goffman\u2014aka RU Sirius<\/a>\u2014the founder of that original cyberpunk journal Mondo 2000<\/em>and longtime science, technology and culture author\u2014published Transcendence, a fantastic compendium on transformative technology<\/em><\/a>. Goffman has spent nearly 40 years working on the cutting edge of the cutting edge and is arguably one of a handful of people on the planet whose futurist credentials are truly unassailable\u2014yet he too found himself way too conservative with his futurism.<\/p>\n You really have to stop and think about this for a moment. For the first time in history, the world\u2019s leading experts on accelerating technology are consistently finding themselves too conservative in their predictions about the future of that technology.<\/p>\n This is more than a little peculiar. It tells us that the accelerating change we\u2019re seeing in the world is itself accelerating. And this tells us something deep and wild and important about the future that\u2019s coming for us.<\/p>\n So important, in fact, that I asked Ken to write up his experience with this phenomenon. In his always lucid and always funny own words, here\u2019s his take on the dizzying vertigo that is tomorrow showing up today:<\/p>\n In the early \u201890s, the great science fiction author William Gibson famously remarked, \u201cThe future is here. It\u2019s just not very evenly distributed.\u201d While this was a lovely bit of phraseology, it may have been a bit glib at the time. Nanotechnology was not even a commercial industry yet. The hype around virtual reality went bust. There were no seriously funded brain emulation projects pointing towards the eventuality of artificial general intelligence (now there are several). There were no longevity projects funded by major corporations (now we have the Google-funded Calico). You couldn\u2019t play computer games with your brain. People weren\u2019t winning track meets and mountain climbing on their prosthetic legs. Hell, you couldn\u2019t even talk to your cell phone, if you were among the relatively few who had one.<\/p>\n During the process of writing and editing (with Jay Cornell) a book about these types of advances, I got to experience the head spinning vertiginous nature of technological and scientific acceleration.Over the last few years, the tantalizing promises of radical technological changes that can alter humans and their circumstances have really started to come into their own. Truly, the future is now actually here, but still largely undistributed (never mind, evenly distributed).<\/p>\n