The utopian future of Earth anticipated by shows like Star Trek may be mere decades—or years—from becoming a reality.
Not only is there likely to be a functional, medical “tricorder,” a handheld instrument used to digitally diagnose and treat illness, in the coming months, but humanity may be on the verge of such an abundance of energy and information that the old rules of economy and finance no longer hold true.
“We’re going to end up in a much better place,” said Salim Ismail, founder and CEO of the exponential consultancy eXo Works on Friday at the 2017 TD Ameritrade National LINC conference in San Diego. “We’re entering the most disruptive point in the history of humanity. We’re entering an inflection point.”
Computers are a huge reason for that inflection point, said Ismail in his featured keynote, explaining that Moore’s Law, an observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, states that the density of transistors on integrated circuits tends to double every two years. In other words, a computer’s ability to read and write information is increasing exponentially with time, and has been for almost 100 years in a smooth progression.
Ismail believes that human progress, reflected in a small subset of companies, moves exponentially, not linearly—but humans struggle to recognize exponential progress and often greet its results with hostility.
“A lot of our training and intuition teaches us linear extrapolation,” Ismail said, juxtaposing a straight line and an exponential curve on a graph. “We’re bad at spotting this pattern and distinguishing linear versus exponential.”
Yet inevitably, once any industrial domain is powered with information technology, it starts doubling, said Ismail. Drones, for example, are doubling in their carrying capacity and range almost every nine months. The “internet of things”—appliances and furnishings connected to the internet—doubles in size every 18 months.
The result of all this doubling, said Ismail, is a disruption to major industries and a shift in social paradigm from scarcity to abundance. Photography was offered as a good example. Prior to the late 19th century, photography was rare and expensive. Even as recently as the 1990s, photography was limited by hardware, film, developing time, and cost.
“When you move to digital, marginal cost goes to zero, you can take 1,000 photographs and the cost base is the same,” Ismail said. “The domain explodes: now we’re taking billions of times more photos. You also shift the problem space from scarcity to abundance. In the scarcity space, I might still offer high-end cameras or teach courses on photography, but in an abundance problem space, we all have eight copies of our photographs on ten devices and we can’t find any of them.”
Now other industrial domains like cars, hotels and taxis, are facing a disruptive shift from scarcity to abundance, said Ismail, but in the future almost every industry dependent on physical scarcity will face similar disruption.