The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives:
Most [organizations] think the key to growth is developing new technologies and products. But often this is not so. To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.
Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years.
The first real threat it faced, today’s ridesharing model, only showed up in the last decade. But that ridesharing model won’t even get ten years to dominate. Already, it’s on the brink of autonomous car displacement, which is on the brink of flying car disruption, which is on the brink of Hyperloop and rockets-to-anywhere decimation. Plus, avatars. The most important part: All of this change will happen over the next ten years.
Take the New York–based Lemonade, arguably the best funded of today’s crowdsurance startups. Via an app, Lemonade brings together small groups of policyholders who pay premiums into a central “claim pool.” Artificial intelligence does the rest. The entire experience is mobile, simple, and fast. Ninety seconds to get insured, three minutes to get a claim paid, and zero paperwork. Adding more technology to this arrangement, companies like the Swiss firm Etherisc sell “bespoke insurance products” on the Ethereum blockchain. Because smart contracts remove the need for employees, paperwork, and all the rest, all sorts of new insurance products are being created. Etherisc’s first offering is something not covered by traditional insurers: flight delays and cancellations. Individuals sign up via credit card, and if their plane is more than forty-five minutes late, they’re paid instantly, automatically, and without the need for any paperwork.
The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs—such as affordable aerial ridesharing—will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time. It
We’re heading toward a future where AI will make the majority of our buying decisions, continually surprising us with products or services we didn’t even know we wanted. Or, if surprise isn’t your thing, just turn that feature off and opt for boring and staid. Either way, it’s a shift that threatens traditional advertisers, while offering considerable benefits to the consumer.
Transformation Economy, where you’re not just paying for an experience, you’re paying to have your life transformed by this experience.
FQ—the frictionless quotient—in our frictionless shopping adventure.
Renewables, according to a 2019 report by the International Renewable Energy Agency, now account for one-third of the world’s power, and their cost has dropped below coal
Nothing accelerates technological development like money. More bucks, more Buck Rogers. More cash means more people experimenting, failing, and, eventually, driving breakthroughs. And this brings us to our next force: an unprecedented rise in the availability of capital.
3-D printing removes months and months from product fabrication, building construction
by allowing us to test new compounds inside a computer rather than a laboratory, AI collapses discovery times from years to weeks.
anything that can be measured will be measured, constantly.
Six Ds of Exponentials,” or the growth cycle of exponential technologies: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization
growth of both solar power and electric cars, there’s now a bigger need for better energy storage systems, resulting in a next generation of lithium-ion batteries with increased range, and, as an added bonus, enough power to lift flying cars.
once a technology becomes digital—that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeroes of computer code—it hops on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially.
How many of us die before we’re done?
Computers run our world and algorithms run computers, which begs the question: Where do algorithms come from? Fear of poetry, that’s where. Fear of the maddening influence of poetry.
This is why, according to Yale’s Richard Foster, 40 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be gone in ten years, replaced,
In the next century, planet earth will don an electric skin.
Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Think about the internet itself. While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished.
Passive media means information flows in only one direction. It’s traditional newspapers, magazines, television, movies, and this book. Active is the opposite. It means the information flows both ways, and finally, the user gets to have their say.
By 2007, the globe had crossed a radical threshold: Half of us now lived in cities.
From an economic perspective, cities are good for business. In 2016, the Brookings Institute examined the 123 largest metro economies in the world. While housing only 13 percent of the planet’s population, they produced almost one-third of its economic output.
London and Paris, for example, are significantly more productive than the rest of Britain and France. In America, our hundred largest cities are 20 percent more productive than all others. In Uganda, urban workers are 60 percent more productive than rural ones. Shenzhen’s GDP, meanwhile, is three times larger than the rest of China.
Density also drives innovation. Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West discovered that every time the population of a city doubles, its rate of innovation, as measured in number of patents, increases by 15 percent. In fact, in West’s research, no matter the city studied, as population density increases, so do wages, GDP, and quality-of-life factors like the number of theaters and restaurants.
It’s likely [that we’re] just another ten to twelve years away from the point that the general public will hit longevity escape velocity.
According to a recent Zendesk study, good customer service increases the possibility of a purchase by 42 percent, but bad customer service translates into a 52 percent chance of losing that sale forever—meaning more than half of us will stop shopping at a store due to a single disappointing customer service interaction.
MIT professor of urban planning Eran Ben-Joseph
So, while we will see a future in which the rich may be living on Mars and accessing the latest in longevity treatments, this goes hand-in-hand with a future where everyone on Earth has increasingly low-cost access to food, energy, water, education, healthcare, and entertainment.
