This week’s selection is “The Future Is Faster Than You Think” by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.
This is a book about the future, but when we think about “the future”, we often envision some distant date that won’t happen for a very long time. Nice to think about, but it doesn’t really affect me.
Au contraire, dear reader, the future is coming to you and I far sooner than expected. I recall years ago reading Alvin Toffler’s book, “Future Shock”, where the major prediction was that new developments will not only happen quickly, but they will happen with increasing frequency.
Today, some fifty years after the publication of that book we’re quite deep into the future Toffler proposed. Things are indeed happening very quickly, faster than anyone can keep up.
But there is a way to get a handle on the situation, and that’s what this book is about. The authors recognize this effect and talk about several specific technologies and how they may evolve and interact in the future, and thereby affect your life.
The technologies they examine include several you’ve no doubt heard of: blockchain, AI, widespread sensors, virtual reality, robotics, digital biology, networking, and of course, 3D printing.
But it’s not as if these technologies will merely affect the world each on their own. Certainly one can envision virtual reality providing some interesting applications, but what happens when it is combined with, say, AI and robotics?
The book’s tagline is “How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives”, and through the book they show a number of technology collisions could create entirely new paradigms we haven’t yet considered. They call this effect, “convergence”.
The book does not dwell on specific technologies, but rather explores the colliding effects on specific human practices, including:
- Shopping
- Advertising
- Entertainment
- Education
- Healthcare
- Longevity
- Finance
- Food
After reading how each of those could be affected, one can perform similar analyses on other areas, and very quickly you can see how the world will be utterly different in years to come.
The material in this book might have been considered a science fiction story some years ago, but that’s not the case today. It’s real, or rather, could be real in only a few years.
And some of you reading this will be the ones making those transformations happen.
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