Author: Myra Salzer
Not too many years ago – 20 to be exact – I was the proud owner of numerous gadgets like the ones shown in the photograph below. I worked hard to make enough money to purchase these items, and each had their own purpose and required space for storing and carrying around.
Now, I have the same capability as all of these machines combined, in one unit that fits in my pocket. And paying for that unit does not take much effort at all. What a change in just 20 years!
And that’s just the beginning, as there’s so much more to come! Visionaries like Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s Bill Gates are forecasting changes for a decade from now that we can’t fathom in 2015. “Moore’s law” – the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, and the impacts in technological changes are exponential – has proven to be true. (The observation is named after Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.)
I just returned from the “Abundance 360” conference, on the topic of emerging technologies and how they will change our lives and our businesses. Some of the items discussed included data mining and machine learning, robotics, artificial intelligence, human longevity, and virtual reality. While 20 years ago we couldn’t have imagined how the invention of the microchip would change our lives, these emerging technologies will have an exponentially greater effect on us in a much shorter period of time.
Of course, we expect naysayers to want to stop or slow down the progress. But I, for one, embrace what’s to come – particularly in the area of enhanced human longevity! 🙂
While change is always challenging, and industries will most certainly be disrupted, we have much to look forward to in terms of quality of life. Problems like water and shortages are likely to be solved. It is expected that there will be 5 billion additional people hooked to the Internet by the year 2020. We’ve been reading a lot lately about the increased disparity of wealth. I don’t see the problem being that the rich are getting richer; I see a future where the poor are getting richer in terms of resources and access. Who could argue against that?
Optimism, excitement, anticipation, eager acceptance: these are the words that describe how I felt when I left the conference.