I have spent much of my career trying to understand, analyze, and forecast how future technologies will change society, business, and our world. I have enjoyed helping entrepreneurs, government leaders, policy makers, and corporations understand what the future may hold. I have had the privilege of being at the forefront of many of the leading-edge technologies that have shaped our world—including computers, artificial intelligence, biotech, telecom, the Internet, neuroscience, and nanoscience. I remain as excited today about technology’s future to contribute to our world as I did when I started this journey decades ago.
I also have been known for forecasts that my clients did not want to see coming or even agreed with. I recall guest teaching at Wharton’s Advanced Management Program for a top financial service company based in New York City that had sworn in ads that they would never give their clients control of their own portfolios over the Internet.
A leading insurance company was furious when I suggested that the Internet was going to force a change in the competitive landscape of the industry. Or, when I forecasted the shift to the mobile Internet, my clients who had recently embraced the web found it difficult to now step into a new frontier of unknowns in mobile. Yes, I have not always been popular, but as I tell my clients, “You pay me to tell you the truth. So I shall here.”
As an entrepreneur working with start-up companies and advising global corporations, technological innovations continue to be the biggest game changers on the planet. Almost daily, technology changes the game of business, society, and our civilization. I expect that technological innovations and the new industries, business models, markets, and enterprises that will emerge in the future will continue to be even more amazing. The tools that will transform the world—increasing wealth, creativity, and quality of life—lay with what’s next in technology. My thirty-year journey to discover what’s next has shaped my life and work. My job continues to be to describe what’s coming and get you ready to navigate this New Future.
Apple Changes the Game
I was lucky. I had many early experiences with technology. I was involved with the beginning of the Internet, before the web. When Apple in Silicon Valley hired me in 1979 to work on the introduction of the new Macintosh computer, this really brought together all of my interests as a social scientist, entrepreneur, and novice futurist. I was in charge of business, and this meant managing the professions and industries as well as forecasting advanced tech trends such as AI. I was the first futurist to be hired at Apple or at any computer company who had the job of looking forward into the future. I had started my forecasting career before Apple, working as a policy adviser for the US government and in the private sector, but technology as an enabler of futures was completely new to me and everyone else.
I was working on my doctoral thesis on systems and global change, and the opportunity to work at Apple was too seductive. I figured I could do both. Little did I know that my life was about to change. Gene Senyak, the first creative director and a friend of mine, had asked me to join Apple. We had a business to reinvent education back in New York City a few years earlier before we met again at Apple.
Silicon Valley was all just starting up, and if the world was going to be reinvented based on technology, it was going to happen there. I was hooked. Here was a collection of outrageously creative folks all working together to change the world—really, that is how we thought at Apple in the early days.
We were convinced that we were going to change the world by bringing out the first personal computer that people would use as a personal empowerment tool—not just use or buy, no. We wanted people to love everything about our computers, from the design to the software to the way the computer talked. And they did.
My interactions with Steve Jobs were mostly insightful and bombastic. That’s who he was, but I admired and shared his vision of the future of technology. He was fiercely committed to his ideas about the future of tech. The thing was that if you understood Steve and shared his infectious vision of the future, it was much easier to get along with him. Big oversized egos in Silicon Valley—so what’s new about that? You have today a number of hugely successful and amazingly innovative Steve Jobs–types that continue to rule in Silicon Valley.
I realized that tech was going to be the major driver of global, social, business, and personal change, and I was hungry to understand what this global shift was all about.
Being involved with the Phone Phreaks, the original hackers, and the ideas that technology should be a personal tool to create more freedom, commerce, and creativity in your life had influenced both Jobs and me. The focus was to empower the individual. As the person in charge of business and professions at Apple, I realized that computers and the Internet would offer game-changing opportunities that would change our civilization by giving individuals the tools to shape their destinies as never before. That idea is perhaps more true today than ever before.
If you think about it, computers, smartphones, networks, and robots are creating an entirely new global culture. Computers are the linchpins to the Internet that is still transforming the planet. At Apple we had early access to e-mail, the Internet, local area networks, and all the computers we wanted in order to experiment and learn. It was a great time for me and firmly got me thinking about how tech would transform the future in dramatic and amazing ways.
At Apple we knew we were changing the world by creating personal computers for individuals first—enabling people with digital tools that we thought would create a better world by democratizing the one digital tool, the computer, that would give people the power to invent their future—not the future envisioned by government or business. This digital democracy at work was infectious in the culture of Apple; we all felt it. Other than the creation of the venture capital industry and the Internet, there is no other force had as great an impact in creating entrepreneurs on the planet as the personal computer.
I gave some of the first Macintosh computers to the National Institutes for Health for research, countless other medical and other professionals, and entrepreneurs so we could better understand how our customers wanted to use the computers, not unlike Google, Facebook, and Apple still do today. Those were exciting times at Apple that shaped my thinking as a futurist about what was possible for the future of civilization.
After Apple I worked with various start-up companies in telecom and the Internet and then became CEO of an early AI company, Umecorp. We designed expert systems, a form of AI for business and entertainment. We built hardware and software platforms to enable virtual reality (VR) for gaming entertainment, using our experience about AI and thinking systems. I recall working on the models for android brains and figuring out how virtual reality entertainment platforms in 3D might be designed. I worked with some of the early innovators in AI and VR and put into play ideas I had about creating new forms of enterprises based on advanced innovation.
Later experiences in global finance and merchant banking gave me another perspective on the worldwide market for technological investments. I realized that technology was changing the rules of business by creating new forms of enterprise that could not have been envisioned before. I have always migrated toward the new. Finally, in 1990, after a number of high-tech entrepreneurial enterprises I started, I formed the Institute for Global Futures to help my clients think about the future of trends and innovations that were creating both opportunity and disruptions.
The Innovation Economy
Prepare to be amazed. The Innovation Economy will electrify markets, generate billions of new jobs, catalyze new industries, and make for a prosperous future. Most of you will be changed—in good ways. Mostly. Smarter technology will give the individual more choices to be an entrepreneur and to embrace a new lifestyle enabled by smart technology. Are you ready to surf the changes that are coming?
This is the early stage of the Innovation Economy. Big innovations are emerging quickly. There is an artificial cell for synthetic biology, computers are only a few decades old, the smartphone was only just invented, the web is a new phenomenon that lives separate from TV, and electric cars are just now showing up. Stem cells will soon rebuild bodies. 3D manufacturing is just starting, and artificial intelligence is not very intelligent.
There is no teleportation or high-yield renewable energy. Nanotech is in its infancy. Humanity has not left the planet to go into deep space. Robots are clumsy and dumb. We have not unraveled the human genome to merge with health care, and where are those flying cars futurists have been promising everyone? When the flying cars show up, then we will know we are in the future.
As a futurist who is always looking into what’s coming next, I am positive about the future. I see many more opportunities that tech will bring to transform people’s lives for the better than I see for the worse.
I know it is fashionable to embrace the dystopian dream of Terminator-type robots crashing our world, and I have signaled caution where I think it is deserved, but overall I am excited about the potential of tech to help us make this a better, more productive, and peaceful world for our children and grandchildren as well as ourselves.
Nowhere is this proven more so than in what I forecast here for the tech impact on our future. There is not another more comprehensive wave than tech that will shape our future so deeply and offer such economic opportunity for individuals. Technological innovations shall be a great global equalizer of people’s quality of life, prosperity, and freedom. So there is my bias, upfront, so you know where I stand. We have the opportunity to meet all of our global challenges with advanced tech, if used properly, and I fervently believe we shall do so, as this is our destiny.
Are you looking for a new career? Perhaps you’ve noticed the huge wealth creation the game changers are shaping—the technologies, bio, web, mobile, and neuro that are, every day, bringing the future closer. The Googles, the Twitters, the Ali Babas, the biotech—what’s next is nano and quantum. Are you ready for the Innovation Economy where fast innovation and technology adaptation is the only competitive advantage?
There are major new changes coming from robots, Big Data, mobile business, digital health, cloud computing, nanoscience, and neuroscience. Are you ready for this explosive future of hypercompetition, global connectivity, and kinetic business opportunities?
The Innovation Economy, the convergence of key technologies that will shape the shape of business, markets, and society is coming. In this chapter you dive deeply into what’s coming and how to prepare your strategy for becoming Future Smart.
Technology has been an essential tool for transforming individuals and societies for centuries. From the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age and now onto the Global Innovation Economy, technology continues to be the essential driver of change and progress in civilizations. Technology has transformed our lifespans, communications, globalization, trade, and even war. It can be argued that technology has shaped both personal and geostrategic power, business productivity, and the competitive advantage of nations, organizations, and individuals in the past, and it will so in the future.
Technology’s impact on economics is undeniable. In the current US economy technology industries of biotech, IT, and industrial uses of technology constitutes more than one-third of the GDP. By 2030 over 75 percent of GDP will be innovation-based enterprises. It is the key driver of jobs, markets, industries, new products, services, consumerism, and quality of life throughout the world. A technology-savvy and successful society is a prosperous society. Societies that embrace open technology access are productive societies.
Entrepreneurs who harness technology will continue to be wealth multipliers, transforming themselves and our world with their innovations that make a difference in health, education, commerce, transportation, and finance. This exponential explosion of innovation will become fiercer in the future as the availability of smart tools, systems, and new cheap and smart technologies become available, as we shall explore.
Technology advances are also the central driver of not just societies but also regions and globalization as a whole. One of the advances in the quest for peace and prosperity today and in the future is the success of globalization, and technology is a key enabler and multiplier of this effort. Future technologies will enable globalization, especially global business, accelerating wealth and prosperity, opening new markets, forging new industries, and creating new jobs.
Access to technology is a powerful influencing factor in increasing prosperity, quality of life, peace, and security. Technology access, cell phones, the Internet, and computing will together create a communications infrastructure that can greatly support a nation’s efforts toward embracing modernity.
Additional technologies such as nano and neuro will, like communications, create massive new business and job opportunities. Technology applied to agriculture, health care, and commerce also stimulates economic growth, social stability, and peace. Technology is a driver of productive change at the individual, occupational, and society level.
The Early Stage of the Innovation Economy
This is the early stage of what I have been calling for twenty years the Innovation Economy. We just invented computing, the web, cell phones, and very few other innovations in less than thirty years. Technology is a very new invention in the long timeline of history. We don’t have one hundred years of DNA sequencing and robots behind us; we have a few decades or less. We happened to accidently invent the Internet. Genetics has not changed health care yet. We don’t really understand where disease comes from. We have not even left the planet to colonize space. And yes, flying jetpacks are not available as yet—I know.
This is still a very primitive time on the planet for technology, yet tremendous wealth, economic opportunity, and new products and services have emerged from the Innovation Economy to shape our world for the better.
As we step into the future all of this will change. Technology will disappear into things, biology will merge with matter, wireless health care will heal us, and energy will be something we generate without pollution or carbon to run cars and cities. The web will be tied to everything, and everything will be awakened to us humans.
Humans will have new choices to alter our minds and bodies, to extend our lives so as to create and do business with five times the amount of lifetimes to innovate, make a difference, play golf, and travel. Advanced technology solutions will bring the choices coming that will make our world and ourselves better and, perhaps, more fulfilled. Are you ready for this New Future and the lifestyle of the empowered? This idealistic future of endless possibilities will not come without risks, dangers, and threats. For with every new technology that brings benefits, there comes challenges that we must embrace as well.
Tech Shapes the Future
The futuristic technologies profiled here, the Tech Game Changers, will even be available to lift up entrepreneurs and nations because of inexpensive, rapidly evolving, powerful, and smart technologies of the future. We no longer need to string cables and telephone poles to provide telephone access—a wireless network can now be deployed. This is just the beginning of smaller, faster, cheaper, and smarter technology emerging.
Expensive computers will give way to inexpensive, smart wearable and mobile devices, wireless network-based software on demand and accessible anywhere in the cloud. Medicine delivered via smartphone apps and from the cloud or by Smart Things will simply change every aspect of life. We shall go from unconnected to connected, from disempowered to empowered.
Cheap, smart, connected Morphable Tools will enable us to be vastly more creative in our business, culture, play, and work. Morphable Tools are what we once called computers or networks. They are specialized tech capabilities in the cloud that we download to perform tasks and craft solutions that we use to operate our business and our world—Life Apps. We will be more fully human when smart technology figures out who we are and what we want.
There is just too much work to do this all now. This will change us and our world when Intuitive Technology that smells, senses, watches, searches, analyzes, predicts, connects, and produces for us what we need. I know this sounds intrusive and less than private and not for everyone, but it is coming in the near future. The Millennials will get it.
The next generation of distributed and inexpensive technologies such as nanotechnology will follow similar pathways—cheap, fast, smart, powerful, and easy to use. Tech-driven global prosperity will be possible over the next twenty-five years, as new breakthroughs in energy; medicine, and environmental management are expected from future technology.
The same future technologies that will enliven the future, providing more opportunity, will also pose threats. There will be private and public parties that view technology as wrongfully empowering individual self-determination and weakening efforts toward the ideological and social control of minds; freedoms and liberties will be challenged. Radical ideologies will be overthrown. The battle for individual privacy, the rights of the individual, freedom from coercion and control will all be major challenges in a globally connected future of too many eyes.
Technology access influences self-determination, freedom, openness, innovation, and access to tools. Competing ideologies, enemies of modernity and technology, are opposed to this ideology of technology. This risk should be carefully watched. For every benefit technology brings in the future there will be dangers from powers that would use it to repress individual freedoms and liberties. High-tech entrepreneurs are natural disruptors of repressive societies.
At the same time attacks on privacy and security will threaten even democratic societies. DNA profiling and video and web surveillance are everywhere. Will our minds be invaded someday? We must uphold our Cognitive Liberty in the future—our right not to be scanned. That is why the rise of the Tech Game Changers is dangerous to some and liberating to others. Most of us will benefit greatly.
The rise of prosperity brought by technology will enable billions to participate in free trade, commerce, and free enterprise who were not connected before. Globalization, enabled by technology and commerce, is a great equalizer of economies and individuals. A connected global economy where individuals have technology access and freedom of choice will drive the future quality of life on the planet. There are those who would stop the global expanse of technologies that empower the individual—we must guard against this in the future. This the major risk factor individuals face in the future.
Over the next twenty-five years technology will put the tools to create prosperity, peace, and increased quality of life into the hands of billions of more individuals than at any other time in the history of our civilization due to cheaper, more powerful, and smarter tools. Entrepreneurs should work to provide increased access to technology to the world’s markets and individuals. There is an unparalleled opportunity for entrepreneurs to build new enterprises around the world as all markets get connected through technology.
This is consistent with the history of innovation. These innovations enabled great progress around the world to the benefit of many. The Internet, computing, lasers, networks, nanotech, and biotech started in the United States. Investments made now around the world in these new technologies have created wealth and prosperity worldwide.
Digital capitalism will continue to empower individuals from any nation regardless of culture, religion, race, or belief—and the world will be better for it. A billion new entrepreneurs will transform the future. This trend will exponentially expand in the future. By 2030 the global GDP shall be over 7 percent, more than double today’s growth levels. A vibrant global market for entrepreneurs will erupt in the near future.
Over the next twenty-five years we should continue to invest in the miraculous waves of next-generation technologies, as these technologies will enable social progress, peace, and business for billions of people on the planet. If you want a peaceful world for our children and grandchildren, then investing in technology futures is one of the best ways to ensure in a better, more equitable, and more productive world. Technology is an enabler of this future, not a panacea.
Twenty-Five-Year Tech Forecasts
Moore’s Law—that transistor density on a chip doubles about each two years—is a general rule applicable for every technology forecasted here. Faster-than-Moore’s Law is the future norm—exponential 10 to 1000 times change. This means that bandwidth, genetic sequencing, nanotechnology, Internet penetration, and wireless penetration also increase exponentially.
Moore’s second law says that during this same period of time, when tech is doubling in power, it is also decreasing in cost by 50 percent. Supercomputers that are wearable will be here soon and, perhaps due to cloud computing, here today—they just need to turn themselves on.
Then there is the Smart Connectivity Law (this came from a client of my company who started using the term after hearing me talk, and it stuck). The Smart Connectivity Law refers to the hyperconnectivity of everything: what can be connected will be connected. Everything will be networked and wants to be networked. Smart things—sensors, cars, chips, devices—will desire connectivity. We are entering a future age of high connectivity and convergence, where connectivity is driving banking, financial markets, health care, communications, governments, and markets.
After 2030 new chips, which are the brains inside every technology, will evolve beyond silicon to quantum or other advanced materials. This will generate supercomputer speeds, memory storage, and calculation capacity that by 2030 will approach human cognitive rates. Nano-chips operating at the level of quantum physics will be able to manipulate time and space beyond our understanding today. The morphing of realities, the collapse of time, the phase shifting of time—this is in the mix.
Experiments with the teleportation of photons, or bits of light, demonstrate the potential of the quantum as potential technology. Entire quantum computers, quantum clouds, will operate in ways that make the speed and thinking capacities of today’s computers primitive in comparison. The convergence of most media, communication, security, and computing technologies will be fundamental to the future forecasts here.
The emergence of increasingly smarter technology—products that think, talk, and interact with humans and other machines—will be a given in the future. By or soon after 2030 the exponential power of technology will exceed human beings’ capacity to measure or even fully understand.
Geo-tagging, the location awareness of people and things globally, will change everything. The interoperability of technologies—to interact and collaborate beyond human communications or awareness—will become desirable.
The reliance on AI-distributed intelligence to manage technology, from security to the economy to food production to the management of cities, will emerge. Technologies will morph into other technologies: nano and bio will merge, and medicine will merge with biotech. This convergence of technologies is the next stage of development.
The Internet will become Always On and a pervasive mobile experience for the majority of the planet’s population. Open-source development is a global trend, making the tools of almost every future technology available for free on the Internet, where anyone can download and build almost anything.
Cheap smart technology is the future.
Disposable, downloadable, free, open source—cheap and powerful will characterize all technologies reported here. No more secrets. Assume that in the future, given the global proliferation of technology, intellectual property (patents), free information exchange, and global Internet access, maintaining secrets related to technology will be difficult.
Envisioning the future of technology can be hard to communicate and even harder to understand. Let’s start off with realizing that technology is going to change everything in fundamental ways—faster, smaller, smarter, and connected, to start with. That’s right—everything. This means both the important things in life such as relationships, work, business, government, freedom, culture, and war as well as things we are obsessed with such as devices, games, media, cars, music, and fashion will be forever changed in form and function.
Everything will change in the New Future of five to thirty years from today. In this chapter I am going to explore what’s interesting to me about this large subject and what I think you need to think about in order to become Future Smart.
The Game-Changing Tech Trends Coming
• The Internet of Things (IoT) will create a new world of smart products that are connected to everything and everyone.
• The mobile Internet will become the largest marketplace, connecting everyone to everything.
• Cloud computing will make available on-demand smart services and real-time Synthetic Intelligence anywhere and anytime.
• Big Data will transform how we understand ourselves and our world.
• Smart Machines will be pervasive, thinking and acting faster and perhaps smarter than humans.
• Tech will come to predict and understand you better than you.
• Social media will transform the way consumers and organizations communicate, trust, and relate.
• The five breakthrough technologies: nano, bio, neuro, info, quantum will lead the future technology revolution.
• Robots and androids will be a familiar part of our world.
• Innovation Ecosystems—vibrant connected global markets—will usher in a new civilization.
Grand Challenges
The future of technology will be shaped by innovations we throw at solving Grand Challenges, the big global problems humanity faces: managing climate, developing new pharmaceuticals to fight disease, educating more people, providing security, ending poverty, creating jobs, developing renewable energy, fueling, securing, healing, and feeding the planet. The implications of the coming explosion in the population from 7 billion to as many as 9 billion by 2050 means that we will need to apply technology faster to keep up with the demand of the challenges that are coming.
Here is the challenge: we will have to innovate faster, smarter, and produce breakthroughs sooner to keep pace with the needs of our connected planet. The social agenda of creating a sustainable planet is what is going to drive many of the future developments in technology. This forecast is a practical one—we have a growing mountain of challenges to our survival we must apply to technology.
Tech Solutions Coming
The good news is we will likely solve many of these Grand Challenges facing our world with technological innovations that provide solutions. I forecast that between 2015 and 2030 accelerated breakthroughs are coming. Many of these Grand Challenges, from poverty to health care to education, are on their way to being fixed today. The technologies of smarter supply-chain logistics can eliminate much of the poverty in the world, if applied with proficiency. Health care innovations are enabling better access to health care.
Diagnostic devices are getting smaller and smarter. They are being developed as fast as smartphones can get shipped, and the prices are coming down. Education is moving to the Internet. There, thousands of free courses (massive open online courses, or MOOCs) are offered as well as entire college programs from prestigious universities like MIT, which is posting its courses on the Internet.
Think about what technologies lay at the core of companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple. Digital business models that create value—not necessarily things—are generating billions of dollars and Euros. Companies that enhance and empower their customers with innovations will continue to thrive in the future. Here are the technologies that are shaping the future:
• mobile commerce
• digital media
• Big Data
• cloud computing
• analytics
• simulation
Your Reality Engineering
Can you be seduced into a world of Smart Technology that has as its purpose to understand you, facilitate as your agent, as your digital persona, create a better life for you? Who wouldn’t want to try this out as a Digital Experience Program to better engineer your life, your career, and your relationships and even help you become prosperous, creative, and successful or help you become a Nobel Prize winner for ending cancer or ebola? The Reality Engineering of You and your world is coming, and by 2030 or before it will become available. This is the Game-Changing Trend that will revolutionize your life and world because it will deliver capabilities that today would boggle your mind.
Imagine people with access to this Reality Engineering capability, brought by the convergence of Smart Machines, who traverse the web, interacting, negotiating, and transacting with other Smart Machines in a cloud computing world of Big Data that is programmed to optimize an infinite number of human needs, all with the objective of meeting your desires across an endless spectrum of possibilities, web networks, and markets where anything is possible. Nations will harness Reality Engineering as a massive networked driver of innovation to provide jobs and social services and to spur on innovation industries contributing to making the economy and society more sustainable and equitable—bringing up the quality of life on the planet. Where huge income gaps disappear, the gaps between the rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless and the haves and have nots, will disappear.
A New Future is coming when Reality Engineering will enable fresh and dynamic new economic opportunities to lift up nations and peoples, addressing needs of Reality Engineering, such as the next clean and cheap energy, enabling distributed health care and education, feeding the planet, as well as immersive entertainment. The possibilities are endless where ideas can take flight as we learn to Engineer our Realities.
Reality Engineering will evolve beyond this formative stage of reading your e-mails, analyzing your work or business, and acting to find, negotiate, or help to facilitate your success or desires in life. No, there is much more amazing explosions of innovation coming that defy the limits of our imagination today. When you consider that Reality Engineering will evolve, as a combination of human and synthetic intelligences that, by 2030, have access to not just information, locations, digital worlds, or web technologies but also to nanotechnology, neurotechnology, and even quantum technology, now it gets interesting. What will our world look like when nano, bio, neuro, and quantum technologies are Tools of Innovation Creation? What shall we build, create, fix, or do? What shall we invent that will transform the future?
Reality Engineering that can produce entire new industries, products, services, virtual worlds, synthetic entertainment, energy harvesting, and alternative realities will be developed. Reality Engineering will transform global supply chains—how we make things to how we deliver and sell things. An entirely new industry with new entrepreneurs, linking up manufacturing, design, distribution, customer service, and service sciences that are operated by Reality Engineers. This New Future is coming enabled by the best Neuro-Hacks that Smart Machines or humans can invent! We will move seamlessly from thinking to simulating to making to selling things—both virtual and physical in this New Future. Reality Engineering will become a global culture shift in how we live, work, and invent. Reality Engineering will shape our future as it will bring forth new Engines of Creation that will provide vast powers to transform society.
The harnessing of Smart Machines to pattern reality, to design reality, to program experiences will be a competitive advantage of business. The Reality Engineers will blend cognitive computer science with specialized industry skills. Even writing about this capability, what’s coming, may be impossible for some people to envision or conceive. Sounds like sci fi, but it will be real. You will hear the beginning of this capability called Augmented Reality. This is the hint of an entirely new innovation process that defies today’s logic but not tomorrow’s imagination, fueled by the game-changing technologies described here.
Harnessing Reality Engineering to enhance our health, end aging, personalize our entertainment, transact with other Smart Machines and Innovation Ecosystems to negotiate business, or create the next digital revolution in your industry, thereby enabling supply chains, finance, logistics, media, health care, is coming. Plug in your favorite business challenge you want to transform here: _________________.
Headlines from the Future: 2025
Smarter Than Humans? Design Your Smart Machines Here SmartMachines.com
In the New Future of 2030 Reality Engineering will become a way of life, the way to develop business for those that have access to this powerful new technology.
Reality Engineering—the harnessing of supercomputers, data, and network resources to invent products, services, and solutions—will design your health, work, relationships, wealth, and future. We have glimpses of this emerging technology today, such as the few who have access to high-speed computer trading on stock exchanges around the world, who earn billions in seconds by harnessing supercomputers process trades faster and smarter than the rest of the market. There are advanced stem cell and genetic medicines that enhance intelligence, mobility, and prevent disease, extending lifetimes by eradicating disease. Someday in the future we shall Reality Engineer even the end of disease and perhaps even end aging.
Up to now, well, technology has been fairly dumb, reactive, and marginally responsive to what we want. We have had to do something to get technology to perform. But we have to do something: turn on the TV that we cannot talk to, stop the car that is not a learning machine, pull up the phone that is unaware of us, search the web—often imprecise—to find things, examine all of the choices of products or sort through the services to find the right one. . . . That’s exhausting in a world of infinite choices.
Now imagine for a moment a different, smarter future. What if technology was smart and aware enough so that whatever or wherever the tech was, it could watch, sense, measure, adapt, and help intuit what we needed? What if all technology had Dynamic Prediction? Dynamic Prediction is a self-organizing capability that enables computer-based technology embedded in, say, our cars, homes, cell phones, personal cloud, and medical devices to anticipate our needs with accuracy? In that way true personalization could occur, even a type of intimacy that escapes us today. Now, that would be smart. And that’s what’s coming in the future.
This will be your connection to the Reality Engineering Future—where your mind (Neuro-Sync Now, to your wearable computer of 2020) and voice controls and visualizes what reality you want to engineer. Now, I am talking about a future capability to invent, innovate, and manufacture what does not exist today in one place. The convergence of many technologies will enable this New Future of Reality Engineering, but we are well on our way now. The simulation of realities with advanced next-generation CGI software tied to cloud networks of Smart Machines will be used for creating entertainment, health care security, and education in the future—for a price or for a higher purpose, as we shall explore.
Think about this. Smart Technology of the future will know that the milk is going bad in the refrigerator, sense that our car’s electric charge needs to download energy from the microgrid, alert us before a heart attack happens, or predict what we are going to look for on the web before we start. In other words, Smart Technology will define the future of our world. Smart Technology will empower, engage, and enchant us.
Reality Engineering, powered by the future web, an AI-based Internet of colossal intelligence, rich-media production tools, sensors everywhere (Internet of Things) transaction capabilities, and infinite knowledge access, will enable a New Future of dynamic markets, digital culture, and a new era of entrepreneurs who will harness this superintelligence on demand. You want to design a virtual world where your idea of a video multiplayer gaming world (a multibillion-dollar industry today) can be Reality Engineered in days. You want to invent a web TV show that is crowd sourced and a 100 million sign-up for the first season on their Everywhere Wearables. Move over Netflix.
Your new cloud-hosted digital medical device can be Reality Engineered and presold as a 3D simulation model in the nano-speed of a text message and go begin manufacturing in minutes. Maybe your dynamic predictive systems already decided and made the device? Let’s make that modular electric car just for the Indian market and crowdsource the design and features for delivery in three months. The potential for Reality Engineering is only limited by your imagination.
Will there be intrusions into our privacy? Yes, like the telemarketers who still call every day selling something. I turned off my land line—too much noise. There will be serious intrusions as well. Maybe we don’t want technology to know too much about us. Maybe we don’t want technology to be able to predict our needs. Maybe, but this is coming, and we had better be ready for a different type of world, where pervasive information can educate, inform, share, intrude, embarrass, and maybe even harm us. We will need systems to protect us from other systems that would do harm.
Let’s get back to this point that will be a gigantic shift in technology’s evolution and impact on humans: instead of doing all the work to get tech to understand us humans, tech will know, sense, and be aware of our needs, goals, and desires and then enable us to realize our goals, fulfill those needs, and satisfy our desires. That seems like a tall order, but that is where we are headed.
If you wrap your head around this idea—that predictive Smart Machines will adapt to you—then you begin to see the future differently. Every device, car, house, surface, product, and, well, everything starts to Get Smart and notices you, going from dumb to smart. When this shifts—and it’s starting now—walls will have ears, cars will have personalities, and technology will wake up to pay attention to us. This appears strange, but it’s happening in small ways now. In the New Future that’s coming this will be a way of life. In fact, we will wonder how we got along without this smartness.
The predictive recognition of people by machines—smarter and smarter machines—will shape a different type of civilization in which the coevolution of Smart Technology and humans will converge. Later this convergence will offer even stranger choices, lifestyles, and even types of beings that we will not recognize if they knocked on our doors today.
Predicting Desire
In fact, the prediction of our desires by Smart Technology embedded in robots, cars, buildings, smartphones, computers, clothes—all physical stuff and virtual stuff—web, networks, markets, and services will be the decisive difference in how smart Smart Technology will evolve. The shift from Dumb Technology that is reactive, that waits for us to call upon it, that stumbles around to find, locate, or transact what we want, compared to Smart Technology that has the power to predict, search with precision, adapt, intuit, and learn from us, what we want, will be the difference in the future.
For example, instead of figuring out by random, time-wasting searching using search engines to find the latest golf or soccer scores or contact information for the new running shoe, Smart Technology could anticipate, predict, and interact with us to identify and find what we want. Smart Technology will predict our desires, and it will be both spooky and amazing. We will feel intruded upon right up until the moment when we are not.
That’s when we decide that our security or Reality Engineering capability, for example, is more important than intrusion. A new language will be needed to understand this. For example, a Smart Assist will be acceptable; it is justified, such as when your daughter was late for an appointment and your Digital Agent, empowered by Reality Engineering, of course, texted you in your car to let you know. This was welcomed, as she was ill and had to be taken to the hospital. Authorized intrusions that are personalized and relevant will change our acceptance of intrusive tech.
Technology’s capacity to predict our desires and then help us realize these desires, fulfill our needs, and make our goals real will create a new type of technology that will fundamentally change our civilization. Imagine Smart Technology that recognizes commerce on the planet to find jobs for every person. Smart Technology that evolves—learns, self-organizes, has cognition, senses us, and embraces the three Laws: Empowers, Engages, and Enchants—is coming soon in the future, when the discovery of our desire and the fulfillment of that desire may be the central focus of the Smart Technology inside everything, including cars, homes, and devices and even embedded in nature. Smart Technology that seeks to serve us, help us, and fulfill our needs will awaken animate and inanimate objects.
We are at the edge of a Blended Reality in which intelligence is not only human, objects sense and interact with each other and humans, various neuroscience augments our perception, and Smart Technology morphs the fundamental structure of our lives, such as work, play, family, friends, and community.
But there will be a dark side to all of this new disruptive technology that connects those who don’t want it, predicts inaccurately, senses that which should be private, and damages those who would desire to not share their digital identities or be analyzed by Smart Technology. It will be hard to say No and harder to just turn off the Smart Technology that we have become merged with, embedded into, fused onto, and dependent upon. In fact, this is how this evolution and fusion of humans and machine cultures will start.
We will come to depend on Smart Technology to run our world, run our future, and better manage the agriculture, finance, climate, energy, and fundamental challenges that threaten our civilization’s future. Once we are reliant on this Smart Technology that was born of overdependence, a world of better design and management than one run just by humans—that is where the problems will emerge, I caution.
We need to make certain that we can turn off that which we have created. We need to build in safeguards so we are not so dependent on the world we manage so well with our Smart Technology that we betray the humans if things go wrong—and they shall. Smart Technology will go off the rails, have problems, and will need to be periodically shut off so we know we can do it. The Autonomous Economy of driverless cars, automated defense systems, bit-mining computers, virtual reality engines, nano–self-assembling devices, environmental scrubbers—and the list goes on—will pose threats to our existence.
If there is one universal principle that our civilization has learned it is that Darwinian evolution rewards the fittest with the prize—survival. Humans must retain the mantle of planetary leadership and hegemony by controlling the evolution of thinking machines, strong AI best summarized as Smart Machines. We have to curtail their intelligence or be subjected to the outcome that may follow.
Managing Complexity
Another marker of what is fascinating about technology is the immense complexity of it as phenomena that defies human understanding. Already we humans do not fully understand how technology is getting smarter, faster, merging deeper, and becoming more intimate with our world. We are coming to depend on Smart Technology that is smarter than us. Now, what I mean is that tech that is smarter in a different way from humans, not in the same way—not superior or inferior but a different form of intelligence.
This was the problem originally that few scientists understood about AI over the decades: we shouldn’t be trying for fifty years to build machines smarter than humans because our machines, if programmed to be smart, can build smarter machines—truly smart machines will build smart machines.
We shouldn’t be trying to emulate human intelligence but rather augmenting it with Mind Engines that are really Difference Engines that can do things we cannot, like merge big data to stimulate economic growth, develop clean energy, fix the climate, make drugs to end cancer, formulate high-yield crops to end hunger, and succeed where humans struggle and fail. (I would settle for finding all of those black socks that disappear from my closet.) Many would argue that in free societies those supercomputers should be used for pleasure and profit: creativity, music, art, and, yes, stock trading.
Intuitive Technology Knows You
The whole obsession with smarter-than-human machines is frankly off-purpose. We need a different set of intelligences that are complementary, different from human and, coevolutionary that can augment and enhance our intellectual capabilities to solve the Grand Challenges of our times. And we shall get these coevolutionary machines coming soon in the New Future.
This is what is coming in the future. Intuitive Technology will know you and understand you and your life and work goals. It is Intuitive Technology that will follow you from place to place, device to device, virtual to physical locations and forms—house, car, beach, hotel, or wherever you may go.
Intuitive Technology that is smart enough will design itself to enable and empower humans to survive and thrive in the complex future, the extreme future that is coming. There is a plan, and humans are only one part of the plan. Technology is waking up, becoming aware, turning into us to figure out what we want and then how to evolve to help us get it—minute to minute, day to day, challenge to challenge.
If this sounds too abstract, let me bring it back to reality. You’re looking for a new job today. This is a mostly hit-or-miss, chaotic process of random events and connections that may or may not work out with the result—a job, and one you like. Now imagine Smart Technology that knows what you want, your skills, your desires as well as the nuances of your personality and your hidden talents—maybe things that even you don’t know about yourself.
Now, this Smart Technology not only predicts what type of job and finds where this job is available but also creates this job opportunity through the interaction and transaction of numerous Job Bots, algos, Innovation Ecosystems, web brokers, company websites, and talent networks that stream across the web looking for talent and to represent employers or projects, all looking for the right fit for the job and the person. This will be the New Future—a shift from job hunting to job creation. Reality Engineering will create your next job or project.
Your Smart Tech, let’s call her your personal avatar, Monique, negotiates, finds, analyzes, and presents information that is a fit for you and a employer—a superior job fit. This cacophony of technology, all networked, M2M, this Knowledge Engineering is called into action, behind the scenes of the web where opportunities are created and destroyed in real time, in nanoseconds by a community of Smart Technology bots working on your behalf in ways you could never imagine.