Techno-Futures:
Next Web, Nano, and Bio
There are many ways to look at the future of technology. You can examine technology rules like Moore’s Law or the exponential doubling of power, storage, and metrics like size—how small computer chips are becoming. There is not one way to grasp this, but here are eight Game-Changing Trends that will certainly transform technology over the next fifty years.
Convergence: the exponential merging or mash-up of all Strategic Technologies—nano, bio, neuro, info, and quantum; the artifacts of this merging, such as robots, pharmaceuticals, smart cars, and games—you name it
Connectivity: the global connectivity of devices, buildings, cars, markets, sensors, supply chains, products, chips, people, systems and information
Community: crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowd-enabling; communities’ needs for security, health care, food, water, jobs, and commerce are technology demand drivers of the future.
Coevolution: technology and humans are on a coevolutionary growth path of collaboration, adaptation, enhancement, competition, and enablement.
Cognition: a faculty for the processing of information and applying knowledge, AI—Brains in a Box—technology is getting smarter, more intelligent, moving toward autonomy, independent thinking, and action.
Consciousness: the growing capacity to experience Vibrant Awareness, a heighted self-awareness state; also embedded in technology about humans, of itself, and of the world. Someday Sentience and emotional intelligence in machines will emerge as a Game-Changing Trend.
Communications: the meaningful exchange of information, the ability for technology to network, to collaborate, to speak a common language of understanding across cultures.
Content: the production of personalized data, info, video, text, and pictures in the form of stories, shows, productions, and media that are created by everyone, every second, and uploaded to the mobile Internet.
Future Smart technology will take us into the future sooner and with more astounding breakthroughs than we can easily imagine today. Our world will never be the same. There will be no less than the complete transformation of our world. I am going to imagine for you what’s coming and the impact that future innovations will have over the next hundred years.
Warning: this chapter will disrupt your thinking in a positive way. New ideas for entrepreneurs and business will be available for creative people to harness the opportunities. New wealth creation, on a scale never seen before, is coming. This will bring billons into new markets, reaching new customers and developing and marketing new services, of which 90 percent don’t exist today.
The next one hundred years on the planet will be completely reshaped by what technology brings—not the cute stuff like social media, flying cars (really), or better smartphones or even the biology breakthroughs that will radically extend our lives. That is the small stuff. No, the big breakthroughs will be in the things we think are impossible today.
Certainly one of the themes of this book is that in order to survive and thrive in the future you need to learn how to predict, adapt, and take certain actions. I have called that being Future Smart. When it comes to forecasting technology’s future, the purpose of inventing technology, I would forecast, will be to address making the world a better place by increasingly meeting these Grand Challenges. Innovations that drive value and efficiency and solve big problems will find many entrepreneurs ready to take up the challenge.
Smart Machines Wake Up
• faster analytics • emotional intelligence
• diagnosis of complex data • sentience
• complex decision making • self-awareness
• capacity to learn
The Tech Game Changers
Game changers are those specific technologies that will create the most comprehensive impact and fundamental changes in society, economics, culture, communications, and business over the next twenty-five years. Tech game changers are disruptive. These are the wide-impact transformational technologies that will radically “change the game” on the planet and affect wealth, peace, jobs, and prosperity.
Game changers are the core technologies at the forefront of future change. They hold the most realistic potential for driving large-systems change across societies, business, and economies. These technologies will enable globalization, trade, peace, and security. A prosperous future is waiting for the entrepreneurs who apply now what’s in the minds and labs around the world. This is often where the future emerges first. Entrepreneurs who can sense, see, and extract it can make a difference and profit.
There will be winners and losers in the future. Control and access to these game changers will play a decisive role in the future. Those who have access will thrive and be at an advantage. Those who don’t will be ill prepared to meet the challenges that others will meet effectively. Access to education, innovation, and technology today has already demonstrated this competitive advantage.
By 2020 the sheer power of technologies such as cloud computers will level the playing field between the past have and have-not societies. Tech access, biotech, nanotech, and computing will be global and widespread to billions to invent and innovate to create their own prosperous futures.
These game changers will have geostrategic implications well beyond how tech affects societies, nations, and economies today. This forecast cannot emphasize more the immense power, both disruptive and opportunistic, that these technologies will have in shaping the markets, economies, industries, and power of the world by 2030.
The convergence of these fundamental technologies, to be used together in combination, will yield the most comprehensive large-scale influence on the planet over the next twenty-five years.
The future of technology will be about managing a high degree of complexity and convergence of tools and applications that defy traditional thinking. Entirely new paradigms of reality, unknown until now and radically unfamiliar, may emerge. We should be ready to be surprised by fast innovations from synthetic organs on demand, crowdsourced nations, robots that live with people, and radically different Posthuman lifestyles that defy the logic of today but thrive in the new future.
The Fast Future
Robots will have synthetic-biological parts and will be wireless extensions of human operators. Computers will be both virtual and physical, both invisible and seen systems. Cloud computing will render every surface “active and alive.” Geo-intelligence will “see” and “know” you. The Internet will be always on everywhere. AIs will augment our thinking, skills, and talent. Genetics will refresh, rebuild, and enhance our bodies and minds as well as extend our lifetimes. Superintelligence will provide economic growth to transform GDPs and enable billions to have incomes and jobs. This is your future.
The Internet will become a Blended Reality, with sensing and rich media rivaling our physical reality. Over the next twenty-five years an agile type of AI that invents itself, updates itself, self-heals, self-assembles, and even self-replicates will emerge. There will be many existential challenges that future technology will bring: Will humans be able to know when our creations make these “evolutionary jumps” that alter themselves? Fast self-learning evolving systems, from biology to AI minds to mobile robots and virtual avatars, will be an essential part of the future of 2030. The Blended Reality created by the convergence of game-changing technologies will amaze, empower, and challenge our civilization.
The Game Changers Up Close
• nanotech
• neurotech
• biotech
• quantum tech
• infotech
• robots
Each of these game-changing technologies by themselves offers a potent and powerful new set of radical tools and capabilities that will change the future of the next twenty-five years. These tech game changers are also the core of the Innovation Economy, as the convergence of these technologies will create wealth and power and will enable, most importantly, a higher quality of life for the 9 billion people living on planet Earth in 2050.
Conceived together, as a convergence, these six technologies represent a powerful explosive and radical New Future that will likely create a fundamental power shift that will alter markets, economies, even globalization, changing each nation and individual. They will affect every lifestyle on the planet in the future and create fantastic wealth and innovation—entirely new markets and industries shall arise that will take us to the stars and beyond.
Another way to appreciate the future impact of these game changers is to consider how global technological change has influenced both the present and past. Internet networks circle the planet, and computer and cell phones fuel communications, commerce, culture, and conflict. The pervasive and inexpensive bits that people move over networks, from images and video to data and information, are seamless. Tomorrow new and more radical technologies and new Building Blocks will emerge.
The New Future Building Blocks
• nanotech: atoms • neurotech: neurons
• biotech: genes • quantum: qubits
• infotech: bits
The Future of the Internet: Always Aware
The real story of what the future of the Internet will be is not about the cool social media of Twitter or how many Instagram pictures or YouTube videos there will be. It will not be about Google or Facebook’s new look—no, not that. It’s about how the Internet will become Always Aware, a fundamental innovation shift in culture that enables you to succeed in life, grow, learn, heal, and prosper, love and thrive.
There is perhaps no technology that has as pervasive an impact on our lives now and in the future than the Internet. The convergence of networks, sensors, websites, social media, and everything that is getting connected to everything else will make the increasingly fast and intuitive web an integral part of our reality. The Future Web will empower every aspect of our world—community, work, family, and play. It is the Uber-Tool of the future. Here are some of the aspects that are driving this future.
There are Six Waves that define the evolution and future of the Internet. We are in the midst of the early stages in which rudimentary search, transactions, and information is still in a primitive state. This will change very quickly between 2015 to 2025 due to the exponential convergence of technologies described here.
The Future Internet will be an all-encompassing network overlaid on people’s lifestyles and integrated into their consciousness, empowering them in commerce, health care, education, creativity, and communications. The Internet of the future will comprise billions of networks talking to networks, things, and us that are independently communicating with one other, “having their own conversation.” The emergence of Artificial Life based on the chips, computers, and network affects the evolutionary emergence of a New Synthetic Life Form, built by us in our image. It has a certain familiar ring to it.
The Internet will be embedded just about everywhere and in everything—in every imaginable kind of object, from TVs to phones to walls—and every product and device, home to cars, clothing, and even people, will have an Internet address. The Internet will embed itself into our reality, augmenting physical objects with digital intelligence and data. This will be a world where information is constantly streaming at and around us across physical and digital artifacts that are always on, always connected, and always aware. This will be a worldwide system of Intuitive Networks that pay attention to us, know our likes and desires, and proactively feed us the information we need to act on such preferences.
Now, I know this sounds creepy to many. But as we are already being videotaped, our phones geo-located, computers monitored, our cookies and online social media profiles being profiled by billions as well as government agencies and advertising companies, it is a bit absurd to think that in the future, with the advent of advanced technologies, that we will be more private than we are today. Living off the grid will not be possible or desirable for most of us. We have traded our privacy for entertainment, discounts, offers, careers, games, and, above all, security.
Knowing where we are, via our phones, computers, cars, homes, and the thousands of watching eyes in public spaces does offer more security, but at what price? For most of us we don’t care as long as laws that respect our rights are in place. All else, beware of the intrusion of the state and expect abuses of human rights. The Internet in the near and far future will be the ultimate double-edged sword, offering both meaningful value and abundance as well as a doorway to subversion and control.
We are on the cusp of this future now, the intuitively sensing of who you are and what your needs are. The Internet is learning, paying attention to your behavior and to what you think is important and what is not. The future Internet would travel with you everywhere. Each of us will have our own Personal Cloud that lives, learns, predicts, and deciphers “what’s next” for us in real time. The Internet is waking up.
This Future Internet will require a powerful new type of AI that has not yet made its way into consumer technology. This is not so far off. As much as 50 percent of the technology necessary for such concepts to be part of our everyday lives has already been built. And what’s in the lab today is in the marketplace tomorrow. The model for an AI-based Future Internet will be based on Cognitive Computing, just emerging now though it has a while to “grow” and “learn” in order to evolve and be useful.
The networks of the future will mimic human brains. Cognitive Computing is even referred to as Brains in a Box, but actually this will be more like Brains on a Network. These will be smart, connected, distributed cloud brains that are linked and think together to solve problems and deliver solutions—big or small. This is similar to how our neurons in our brains are linked and collaborate. In a nutshell, that is a fundamental shift that will shape the future of the Internet: the next generation of Smart Machines, what we call bots today, are a dim shadow of the immense, connected, and pervasive Superintelligence that will turn the Internet into a global ecosystem, best characterized as Artificial Life.
As a result, the Internet will be smart in a way we can barely imagine today and could finally help us solve global crises like health care, war, and poverty while creating thousands, perhaps millions, of new companies in the process—or even entirely new markets. You have to conceptualize the Internet as the web of supreme global connectivity that will link robots, supply chains, computers, transportation, security, hospitals, and, most of all, us. An intelligent, adaptive, and predictive Internet will anticipate and deliver a quality of service, care, and value that challenges the imagination today but will be routine to the people of 2030.
The First Internet Wave was the introduction of the Internet before the web in the 1970s. I was a researcher in the early stages of the Internet, the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). This was a slow and primitive state of the Internet, used by academics and researchers like myself who marveled at the ways we could network communications with an electronic e-mail of sorts. The availability of the Internet was very limited not only to a small group of people but also by the network nodes or connections. It was a geek’s toy at the time, with little functionality, search, and content.
The Second Internet Wave was the introduction of the graphic- and video-rich web, which is the front end of the Internet. The web evolved into an information resource that included search, and the data explosion that emerged started to connect not only millions of individuals but also businesses and nations, and a profound potential emerged that was changing the world’s understanding of people, culture, business, and innovation itself. It’s as if the web woke us up to a new reality for human potential in which trade, communications, and commerce could thrive in new ways not considered before.
The Third Internet Wave, where we are today, is driven by the social web such as Facebook, Twitter, and mobile e-commerce that has reached over 3 billion people, generating billions of dollars for business and, especially, entrepreneurs. E-mail, chat, apps, games, video, and smartphones dominate life, almost too much. The use of data to search, watch, produce games and content, stream music, and publish ideas has made the web an essential backbone of finance, telecom, business, education, and everything else.
The shift to embracing the mobile web, where geo-location services have created a new marketplace, is just beginning. The ubiquitous web is almost everywhere, connecting everyone to everything, just not at the same speeds or with the same functionality. Many nations restrict Internet access and speeds for various political agendas, often at odds with entrepreneurs and business, which need a high-performance Internet.
Also, the use of the Internet as a communications platform, Voice Over the Internet, VoIP, has transformed communications, bringing an agile, inexpensive, and fast network to life. The network as the platform for computing, communications, and publishing has had a transformative effect on commerce and culture.
The Fourth Internet Wave will be a Collaborative Web that will have at its root the dynamic intimate cooperation and deep learning between business, organizations, markets, people, and machines for work, learning, essential social services, and entertainment will mature in this stage. Big data, predictive analytics, cloud computing, and mobile web collaborations will define collaboration with more ease of use, value, high performance, and efficiency. We will learn to manage the Data Tsunami, the huge global deluge of data from every behavior, lifestyle, and pursuit from health, education, business, finance, security—the list goes on. The immense task of capturing, storing, and analyzing data to create more efficiency, discovery, and, essentially, value will be a distinct change in how the web will evolve. Internet speeds and new agile and powerful networks will stream media, information, and communications everywhere on the planet.
The Fifth Internet Wave will be Evolutionary Networking, which will be based on the advancement of cognitive computing, the beginning Always Aware Internet that predicts and interacts with a personality—with voice activation. Think the next-generation Siri, the AI on Apple’s phones. This global shift will result in an increase in speed, transactions, and complexity management of health, security, education, finance, and communications at a level of robustness that we have not seen before. Brains on demand, on the Net, will greatly enable humanity to progress in every way.
The Sixth Internet Wave will not just mimic living ecosystems but also become a Living Ecosystem, an Always-Aware self-realizing Artificial Life Network. Independent knowledge agents, working across borders, supply chains, and cultures in a endless sea of electronic converging virtual and physical worlds that have the capacity to self-organize and create will enable humanity to manage the big social and planetary challenges coming in our future, such as curing illness, providing health care, enabling economic prosperity, managing conflict, and moving into space, off-world. This Internet Wave will feature smart and aware physical spaces, embedded intelligence, and systems that can act as doctors, diplomats, scientists, teachers, companions, and enablers of commerce, security, and entertainment. This wave will propel millions of new businesses and entrepreneurs to prosper.
This Internet will become a Morphable Intelligence—moving in the cloud from device, to space, to downloading on demand to things like cars, habitats, wearables, even people—bringing animated Sentient Awareness to empower and help humans navigate the future in every lifestyle and endeavor, to act as partners with humans, co-evolving to create a better world.
Even the use of the words the Internet or the web will disappear. The Internet will become an invisible, ubiquitous enabler of embedded intelligence, awareness, and communication between us and our world, helping to enhance our health, work, education, and creativity.
• Geo-intelligence—knowing where you or a thing is; location awareness
• Synthetic worlds—entertainment that personalizes our experience
• Digital assistants—will help us navigate the chaos of information
• Transmedia content—new media across autos, tablets, phones, and wearables
• Cloud computing—data, apps, info, video, processing moves to the Internet
• Blended Reality—augmenting the blend of virtual/physical worlds
• Social media—digital communities identities, crowdsourcing everything
• Mobility—everything is wireless, from clouds to devices to media
• Predictive analytics—predicting what people desire before they themselves know
• Internet of Things—everything has an IP address, connected things and products that communicate with us . . . Things Wake Up
The Internet will become the first global knowledge and rich-video real-time network, connecting billions of people to an unlimited number of channels, media, and social networks within networks. The future of the Internet will be deep collaboration across global cultures, with real-time transactions and specialized rich-media worlds.
The Internet will enable anyone to become a digital publisher or broadcaster of information on any subject and potentially reach an audience anywhere on the globe.
The convergence of computing, digital TV, gaming, commerce, and wireless phones will transform global society, economics, and communications, creating a vibrant new communications platform.
Direct real-time voice and video communications with real-time language translation will break down barriers to culture and accelerate globalization and cross-border communications.
Telepresence: Feel Me, Touch Me
In the future of 2025 the ability to feel and sense 3D virtual places, objects, environments, worlds, and people will drive gaming and communications, reaching billions throughout the world. The force feedback of virtual to physical sensations will transform entertainment and communications. We will not just experience; we will Sense-Feel experience. We will become sensor-enabled and reach an intimacy with our machines we cannot imagine today.We will not just watch football or soccer; we will be engaged and feel the game.
Access to information on any subject will be available anywhere over the web and delivered by a variety of media appliances or in the network cloud. Internet devices embedded inside humans will enable direct human-to-human communications and wet-wearable applications.
The Internet will go away and become the universal connectivity platform, the Megaverse, and it will be the backbone of all communications, trade, learning, health care, logistics, finance, and social networking.
The convergence of information, geography, and DNA will create a new business landscape of many opportunities. Virtual cyber-societies and -nations will emerge and come to rival nation-states, establishing rights, commerce, culture, and defense. These may be state, nonstate, or rogue actors. Hybrid realities, part virtual and part physical, real and fantasy, are coming soon to your web portal.
Crowdsourcing Everything
Crowdsourcing, the use of collaborative networks of people who may be at any time customers, partners, or competitors who can connect with each other online and share ideas, working together to make solutions, is now a permanent part of the web. Crowdsourcing advertising, product design, charity, social issues, investments—you name it—is being used to mine the collective wisdom, resources, ideas, and capital of the billions of people online every day. This democratizing of the web, by using the wisdom of the crowd, will become a chief source of research into the mind of the customer for every enterprise.
What’s next is crowdsourcing energy usage, auto-sharing, climate change management, and sharing of products, services, and tools. The crowdsourcing marketplace will become a fundamental part of the Innovation Ecosystems, these dynamic new marketplaces where talent, technology, and the production of ideas and products collide as a new form of online commerce.
The future of the Internet represents a development that will bring an entirely new mode of communication, entertainment, and commerce to the planet. By 2030 there may be as many as 8 billion people on the Internet because the Internet will have become the essential utility, the communications backbone of the planet. All trade, commerce, communications, and entertainment will move to the Internet as the universal pipeline that reaches and touches each person on the planet.
Pervasive mobility via wireless communications will likely be the technology that brings the majority of people together online from around the block or around the world, from the physical to the virtual world. The future Internet will be a convergence of cell phone, television, and computing, where wireless collaboration throughout the planet will be routine.
Media, from games to news, drama, and trade, will be linked via this mobile device portal. The Future Web will provide universal features that can be scaled up or down. Games pictures, financial products, and pharmaceuticals will all be located in the rich TV-like digital interactive media space.
The Intelligent Web: Getting to Know You
“Getting to know you. Getting to know all about you.” Whether you like it or not. (We hope you like us!)
The radical personalization of technology is coming. The perfect evolution of computers, networks, content, and sensors will be the Intelligent Web. This is the connectivity network of the universe that will forge an electronic convergence of life, work, information, and community.
To set the record straight—yes, this technology will be intrusive, spooky, and seductive all at the same time. You will like it and fear it at the same time.
Today you have to do something to coax, find, search, and make the web understand what you want. Searching is an imprecise activity of hit and miss, mostly with a lot of information that is not quite right or often wrong. Though the web is getting better, it has a long way to go. It is a passive medium that you, the user, need to work hard at to identify what you want, and even then, you may have to settle for less than what you were looking for.
Imagine in the near future the Intelligent Web and how different it will be from today. It will know you. It will be a superfast, real-time, accurate, and predictive engine of discovery. It will be mobile, sensor-rich, geo-intelligent, pervasive Internet that is almost liquid in being every place and in everything. The Intelligent Web of the future will be every place, sensing everyone and everything and will have access to exabytes of data, video, music, pictures, and people to be able to not just respond but also anticipate your needs and desires.
The Intelligent Web will come to know you. It will learn and evolve an understanding of who you are—your dreams, goals, behaviors, disappointments, and desires. It will watch you get that job or be fired, watch that relationship bud and flame out. It will make sure you get where you’re going at first but then help you figure Where You Should Be Going. The Intelligent Web will learn, adapt, and empower you in your life and work.
It will be functionally Awake, Aware, and Predictive. It is Awake to being able to be attentive and responsive to humans and their environment, both physical and virtual. It is Aware of its objectives and can collect the data reporting and broadcasting of other intelligent agents, objects, humans, and information. It is Predictive, as it can analyze time, missions, values, and people’s behavior so as to anticipate.
We waste so much time because the web is so dumb. It will be vastly different in the near future. A smarter, faster, and more intuitive web is coming. The web is evolving. The web is learning, and the web is getting smarter.
In this future the Intelligent Web will find you. This will be the Global Shift, the Intuitive Web that senses, learns, adapts, and predicts what you need. Information will be Smart Tagged (geographic, semantic, sensor-rich, personalized knowledge) and will locate you regardless of where you are. Information-That-Finds-You, Personal-Location-Targeting Technology will create information packets that use the Internet as a targeting tool to automatically locate people who may be interested in feeds of information about specific topics of interest. The web will “know” what you need and then find it.
With the Internet freed from being in a place and now available wireless from anywhere and accessible everywhere, an always-on feature of the Future Internet access by billions, to billions, will be a common experience daily. These new features will cloak our reality with another layer of an alternative universe of information awareness and interaction that will alter our perception of physical reality. This will all be accessible in real time and on demand for the user.
Different levels of Information-Layering Intelligence will provide deeper access. Some will be a voice-activated “deep info dive”; other analyses may be driven by commercial or ideological objectives: “show connections,” “show beliefs,” or “show vendors.” Advanced Information Layering with decision support for Predictive Awareness and Information Mining to extract opportunities, threats, or relationships for fun and profit will drive the development of this powerful future Internet always-on service.
Embedded nano-neuro devices will engage us in Customized Wrap-Around Experiences to enhance learning, commerce, health, and, most of all, entertainment. We will Go Wrap-Around with the Future Web to play sports, go skydiving, visit foreign cities, go into space, or enter virtual fantasy worlds.
We will have intimate experiences with virtual humans and digital agents that extend beyond the limitations of our lifestyles of today. People will have alternative-reality relationships. ARRs with families and even love and fantasy adventures will be like dreams, but vivid, dynamic, and customized by your desires.
If this sounds strange, well, it will be for many who will look upon these alternative realities generated by the Future Web, the Intelligent Web, as perhaps dangerous diversions from normal reality. As an alternative to normal reality today millions play multiuser games and videogames almost 24/7. It is not so difficult to envision a future when Morphable Personalized Media, directed by your ambitions, desires, and curiosity will be produced in real time for you. No one is ready for this version of the future Intelligent Web that knows you and designs worlds for you, predicting desire, even earning you money or employing you.
This future is far from Twitter, Facebook, and Google today. So much effort. The future of Twitter will be dynamic media and immersive worlds. Facebook will bring people together over these Morphable Personalized Media, and Google will be a Big Data Prediction Machine, layered with AI, that uses algos to program the optimal experience to anticipate what you may need or even what you don’t know you need—More Human Than Human.
Google Glass (https://glass.google.com) is the first wearable computer offered by Google. It is an amazing easily wearable computer, phone, and media device all wrapped up into one experience. My experiments with Glass, as it’s called, have opened up my mind to the wearable lifestyle of being always connected. It connects with my Google ecosystem of software, calendar, and e-mail as well as my contacts. I have found this first version, the Explorer, to be an outstanding step forward, and it will get better.
There are a few other companies on the leading edge of the Intelligent Web.
Neurosky (http://neurosky.com) has devices you wear that use biosensors to enable your connection with the Future Web. Entertainment, games, and learning can be boosted with this wearable bio-sensing neuro-device.
Consumer Physics (www.consumerphysics.com) has built an inexpensive and small molecular sensor that fits on a finger. It’s called the SCiO, and like a Star Trek tricorder, you can use it to point out and identify the molecular ingredients of the world around us. It captures information in real time and uses your smartphone to send it instantly up to the cloud for analysis of any materials such as food, plants, and liquids. NIR (near-infrared) spectroscopy has been known for decades, but until SCiO, it has only been used in labs or factories. They created SCiO to bring this powerful technology to everyone.
FitBit (www.fitbit.com) is a wellness and fitness tracker that you wear. It communicates with your cell phone and the web. It watches your fitness, sleep, and activity.
Occulus Rift (www.oculusvr.com) is a leading company offering state-of-the-art 3D virtual reality gaming. Sold to Facebook, their headsets and virtual worlds software enable developers to design an endless set of artificial realities. Having tried one, I lost sense of physical time and space as I was transformed into a gaming world of very clear images and stories that I experienced.
Nest Labs (https://store.nest.com) is a home-automation company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that designs and manufactures sensor-driven, Wi-Fi–enabled, self-learning, programmable thermostats and smoke detectors. You can conserve energy and control it over the web on your smartphone. I use it to lower the heat when my kids go to school and leave the heat up. There’s probably billions in lost energy from homes all over the world that waste energy and don’t know it.
Someday all of these devices will talk to each other and you over the web. These are devices connected to you, the world, and the Internet of Things, and they have multiple lifestyle enhancement functions, but the biggest is hyperconnectivity. This is the big shift here. The Intelligent Web will know you and serve you. Maybe you don’t want that, but that’s what’s coming. They will optimize your health, finance, business, and education. They will propel you into a new era of media and entertainment.
With the Internet freed from being in a place and now available, free of cost, from anywhere and accessible everywhere, always on, these features will cloak our reality with another layer of an alternative universe of information awareness and interaction.
Every person, location, topic, inquiry, or search becomes Data Rich. You will know when meeting someone who they are and their interests, connections, and interactions that will define them either ahead of time (Google Me) or in real time (Google Now).
Living in a Blended Reality of physical data, the where and who, and Virtual Data, will bring a type of depth to relationships for work and social interactions that may be completely alien to those who did not grow up with this intrusive or helpful technology, based on your perspective.
The emergence of Digital Societies and Virtual Worlds will further this experience of Blended Reality. The virtual and physical worlds will converge. You will watch TV and enter TV Worlds. The intimate interaction of this Blended Reality will give people many new choices for relationships with human and nonhuman or virtual avatars, digital actors, and digital beings. This is a user-generated universe of infinite entertainment choices, and entrepreneurs will enjoy the endless opportunities to exploit. If you think Reality TV is something, just wait for the real virtual reality—so real it redefines reality.
Future of TransMedia
All future media production, distribution, and viewing will move to the web. A new wireless, interactive, mobile, and social network–based entertainment industry will emerge as a vibrant market for media makers who can monetize their media productions for news, entertainment, and sports in real time.
The traditional media networks will adapt to this New Media World by engaging talent and new media productions that will transform the economics and distribution of media on the planet—much more opportunity for a larger community of creative media makers to make a career with their own audience they can reach 24/7 across the world as the planet becomes connected.
Consumer-generated media, from games, Internet, TV shows, and learning software to commercials, will dominate communications. The convergence of the Internet with TVs, telephones, kiosks, autos, and wireless devices will create many new media channels that share content across global platforms, nations, and cultures. Every surface will be media ready to send and receive media shows, get e-mails, surf the Internet, have communications, or access information.
Everyone will be a New Media producer. On-demand interactive entertainment content that is dynamically created and personalized for our preferences will be a standard feature. Advanced virtual reality as a global media platform bundled with digital agents and holographic entertainment will transform our experience of content, news, and entertainment.
Movie theaters will be linked to the web to receive digital broadcasts and satellite downloads of movies, video conferencing, and other interactive programming. Walk-in telepresence for video conferencing, using 3D holographic images, will be common. Faster, smarter, and more powerful multimedia communications devices—in cameras, phones, and cars—will enhance our capacity for producing and distributing entertainment in real time.
Digital TV will provide new fully interactive programs in which we will experience real-time participation with media-immersive content, personalities, and shows. Global-immersive games, the merger of entertainment and education, will offer a new genre of programming that will be greatly in demand and will blur the lines between learning, propaganda, news, and information.
Media technology that uses advanced AI avatars (digital personalities that collaborate with humans to customize media software—for news, music, videos, games, entertainment, and information access) will be in demand. All media technologies will be able to access geo-tagging, location-targeting applications. This will show who and where participants or people are in physical as well as virtual space.
Future of the Internet: Wearable Mesh
A mesh network is a network design in which each part of that network, called a nod, relays data for the network: “Hey, I am here, so connect with me,” it says with machine language. Every part of the network—say, a small device you wear, a Wearable Mesh—generates its own network; it’s the on ramp to the network. Your Wearable Mesh becomes like its own Wi-Fi network and enables you and the five to thirty miles around you to get online. A mesh network of the future will self-assemble to achieve maximum web power penetration, to reach the Internet no matter how remote you are.
Now imagine an ultra-high-speed network (one thousand times today’s speed—think at the speed of thought) that could be wearable that you generate anywhere you go? Now imagine a few billion people with Wearable Meshes walking around the planet at the same time. Now you have a revolution in communications, e-commerce, health care, and education.
Now you’re Meshed Up, ready for the future.
What happens in mesh network is that all of the nodes who are linked cooperate and collaborate to create the network robustness. A mesh network whose nodes are all connected to each other could be inexpensive, secure, and self-healing. When one Wearable Mesh goes off-line or breaks down, another can come online to take up the space. This could make the future of the Internet—a highly powerful and connected high-performance platform.
This Mesh idea for networks will lead to many Internets, many clouds—from personal, health, community, surfing clouds to war clouds. Mesh networks can be deployed anywhere, quickly, and go live and then go away. Mesh networks will enable the collaboration of sensors, the Net of Things, video cameras, and smart stuff that is now connected on the web to better understand us humans. Mesh networks of the future will enable free telephone and web access. Content, information, shows, data, and on-demand analytics will be how network providers will earn a handsome living.
Meshed networks will pop up and go away in minutes or seconds to preserve an idea, connect a friend, serve a customer, or get downloaded: “ Download Me Now” to another Mesh. It’s hard to imagine, but Mesh networks will provide a highly agile capacity to humans, machines, connected products, and goods. Mesh Networks will be first designed and deployed by humans until Smart Virtual Machines take over, or just learn from their human masters (for the time period) how to design optimal high-performing networks—better than humans can.
We will be able to shift our view through a Mesh into another person or virtual or physical place. This will be like playing a videogame, except we will have this Mesh On capability to travel and merge with other spaces, intelligences, and places. If you are ready for this and not confused, then I would be surprised, as this capability will change everything you know.
Mesh On Networks will merge into humans and enable other nonhuman AI intelligences to have a global digital highway to move from this physical reality into numerous virtual realities yet to be envisioned in our fairly primitive era today. When you consider the future of the Internet as an infinite physical and virtual galaxy of multidimensional domains, worlds, agents, humans, machines, things, and intelligences, even Superintelligences that, like a layer cake, are stacked around us, connecting all things, organic and inorganic, physical and digital, subatomic and molecular, optical and analog—well, then, now you have a sense of what the future of the Internet might resemble.
Our Connected Future: The Internet of Smart Things
A silent revolution is going on. This revolution is sneaking up on us a bit more every day. It’s about smart things that are linked up, connected to each other by the Internet. As computer chips get cheaper, smarter, smaller, and linked up, a new phenomenon is occurring that never happened before: everything is getting not just connected but also Connected and Discoverable. Microchips and sensors are connecting everyday objects, cars, sensors, clothing, and food packages, forming a new wireless web of smart things that someday soon will be able to discover one another, leading to an entirely new reality we call today IoT, the Internet of Things. But this does not do this phenomena justice—this is a much grander planetary transformation. Every chip will be geo-intelligent—Always Aware of Who “it” is, Where “it” is, and Why “it” is—the purpose and meaning of its existence.
Making the Internet of Things a Reality
Computer chips are the brains of every electronic device and are the key to many of the changes that are coming in the near and far future. Moore’s Law—the number of transistors on a chip, that doubles every eighteen months—has been the operating law that has powered the Information Economy of mobile, the computer, and the Internet for the past decades. The Internet of Things, IoT, is the bridge between the digital world of electronics and the physical world.
Many applications, such as radio frequency (RF) devices, wireless systems, sensors, biochips, and many other systems, working together with genetic-based chips and cognitive systems, will play a future role in building the IoT. The convergence of these technologies is known as “More than Moore,” MTM. What we have today, the emerging M2M, Machine to Machine world, will evolve into the MTM, as demand for greater processing power to crunch more data to solve more problems emerges. We will then blast through the limitations of Moore’s Law, beyond a silicon world of chips, and start looking at optical, nanotech, genetic, neural, and quantum chip ideas that will give us massively powerful supercomputers that live on the tip of a pin but have the power and intelligence to run a city or a planet. This Fast Future will amaze us.
What will this mean?
Universal connectivity of smart objects that are aware of each other, their own location, even where they are in relation to us is coming fast. It’s like saying we are going to lay a bullet train from Mars to Earth—wonder that will be like? Well, it would fundamentally change how we think about speed and agility, and it would create new fantastic possibilities for businesses that don’t exist yet. The self-awareness of things—for them to know where they are, to become geo-intelligent products—is an industry that will create great opportunity in the near future.
Phil’s car notices he is running out of meter time and downloads directly from the car’s bank account, making a YouPay deposit. No reason to tell Phil, but it does send him a text message, starting with “No worries, Big Guy.” Phil likes that his DEP, his digitally engineered personality, Monique, calls him Big Guy. She doesn’t know why he likes this and doesn’t really care.
Inhalable Medical Devices
Gayle’s doctor has her inhale a personalized medical device to monitor her headaches so he can wirelessly identify what is causing the severe migraines. The device was designed at the nanoscale and is invisible to the eye. He programs the nano-device with mobile phone application and sprays it into her nose. She feels nothing, no pain. The nano-device will wirelessly broadcast back to the doctor the status of her headaches, and the nano-device can distribute a pharmaceutical automatically to prevent the next migraine before it starts.
Smart Buildings
2088 Union Street in San Francisco is a designated Smart Building, a class-5 AI, and part of Smart Grid Alliance of California. They trade energy credits, optimizing energy usage and costs. If they do well, they get new cloud servers as a bonus.
Our Spooky Future
There are many things we shall never fully understand that will be perplexing to many. In order to run properly the global systems that manage food, energy, climate, economics, which is all coming, we will need a new generation of Super-Smart Computing Networks. To manage a planet with as much as 8 to 9 billion people before 2040, we will need a level of computational intelligence that doesn’t exist today. But this computational intelligence will evolve and start to be deployed by 2030. Already the automation of sophisticated computer systems plays a dominant role in financial markets, environmental controls, robots, manufacturing, and health care.
The inevitable collision and cooperation of humans and their Smart Machines will be a decisive point in human civilization when we must make social policy choices that will define generations to come. How much control do we give to our Smart Machines? What will our Smart Machines control? What happens when humans can no longer control our Smart Machines? Will we be creating a Rogue Civilization that will compete or serve humans? You want to be asking these questions now.
It is possible that we are facing shortly, within five years, highly sophisticated computers and networks that humans will not understand. Think about this: Do you really understand the technology that delivers the Internet, TV, or your phone service today? Most people don’t understand how VoiP, voice over the Internet, works or the drug that keeps them well. Tomorrow the onslaught of amazing technology that has become a fundamental part of every home, business, nation, community, and lifestyle will seem like a sea change from today. It will be vastly more powerful, personalized, and effective in transforming our lives.
The sweeping and almost insidious nature of technology, to try to understand and serve its masters as we program these massively fast, connected, and, yes, intelligent systems will not even be noticed as they fuse their artificial minds with ours.
The rise of the machines will be a complete takeover of humans, brought by humans to better humanity. We shall better deliver health care, provide security, earn a living, make profit, and, in general, have a better quality life. You might ask, what’s wrong with that scenario? Nothing, as long as humanity does not lose its humanity.
Selling Velocity
In 2013 a quiet construction of a private network, laid fiber optic cable, was made, costing over $300 million, to give the edge to a company that was selling speed. They are in the high-speed trading business, but really they are selling speed so they can make stock market decisions faster than anyone else—certainly faster than humans. In fact neither the network they built nor the cost is all that impressive, but what is amazing is they built it for their computers to be able to make the billions. No humans allowed.
There are over three hundred companies on the planet today that sell speed to create value: find a disease faster, make a trade faster, find a partner faster, identify a risk or threat sooner. You get the picture: speed sells. And every second of every day for the next one hundred years innovations that drive will gain an advantage for nations, entrepreneurs, businesses, and individuals.
I estimate that high-speed stock traders, only one category among many in which high-speed computing is favored, spent well over $3 billion on infrastructure between 2010 and 2014. Faster decisions create a new business—the high-velocity industry. The faster a decision can be made, the more money there is to be made. There are, for example, computerized trading of stocks, along with over one hundred new industries in the future that will be in the High-Velocity Business. Will you? One millisecond could be worth $1 billion. Are you ready to play? And the secret is not to let anyone know what your Black Box does, what the algos, the programs, that are that are running your business are. This is not just a hardware advantage but a software advantage also.
By 2025 there will be a future when everything is connected—computers talking to computers, running specialized software called algobots, in a complete virtual world where humans do not dwell. No one will call them computers in this world, not anymore. They are called brand names like Watson, Next Cray, or Archer. They will think and act in trillionths of seconds.
Knowledge Engineering
A new form of technology is emerging now and will mature into a powerful tool set that may well define how to better understand and influence billions of people in the future. It’s a mash-up of content: geo-intelligence, interactivity, Big Data, crowdsourcing, cross-platform media entertainment, and analytics. The significant trend will be the rise of neuro-marketing, understanding how the brain works, as this will transform jobs, business, and society over the next ten to twenty years.
Entrepreneurs will build new companies around this technology to better understand and serve customers. Entirely new industries will be invented, as motivation, influence, learning, and entertainment will be forever changed in ways you cannot imagine now.
This look ahead to our Neuro Future is detailed in this book. This will have an impact beyond what we know as the Internet, TV, and wireless media. The convergence of technologies, which will bring our Neuro-Future sooner and fiercer and influence everyone, is emerging. There will be Smart Things that are Smarter than humans. Smarter technology will first make us smarter, enabling our minds. Next we will build New Minds—for humans and our Smart Machines.
Immersive Entertainment Futures
Entertainment will be transformed in the future. By 2030 the very idea of what media entertainment is will be completely different. We will no longer just watch sports; we will interact with Immersive Entertainment, engage, and actually play in virtual reality sports. Will we play video games like Call of Duty—yes, but we will walk through Virtual Worlds where AI avatars will join us as we do battle with and against tactile-aware and Augmented Reality teams from both the world of Smart Machines and other human worlds. Some of these Immersive Entertainment experiences will be in our minds, Neuro-Enhanced Entertainment, and some will be in Blended Reality, where our daily Natural Reality is enhanced by information layering or holographic projections that we interact with—actually we Play-Merge with. “Play-Merge Now,” our future PS2s and Xboxes, will hear for activation.
The future convergence of technologies that will be used to interact and communicate remotely with the world will reach billions. Are you ready for this New Future when Immersive Entertainment stimulates your brain, engages your senses, and envelopes you in world of Neuro-Stimulation that is not so different from what we call daily reality? Is it Real or Super-Real? Super-Real is the augmented reality world of Immersive Entertainment, bringing together neuroscience learning, interactive video gaming, rich media, sensory feedback, life-like graphics, and Artificial Intelligence into one dynamic experience.
It is not just the networks that will be used to reach billions in the future; it is also the technology of software, media, and Neuro-Ware (DTB, Direct to the Brain Broadcasting) that will affect learning, news, relationships, ideology, and commerce. This is a higher order of technology that, though difficult to forecast, will be commonplace by 2025.
Knowledge Engineering is where the technology of new mass media convergence (Internet, TV, computing, wireless), data mining, predictive analytics, cognitive computing, and neuro-marketing collide. Supercomputing meets social networks, and crowd-enabling/sourcing meets the future design of media programming such as games, personalized virtual reality, interactive sports, and e-commerce. Highly advanced and personalized media will be structured, produced, designed, packaged, and targeted for specific audiences in highly sophisticated ways never seen before.
The design and production of knowledge (data or information that is actionable) is one aspect of this new technological capability. Knowledge Engineering will be a higher form of media information development that produces information in many forms—games, video, training, real-time collaboration for trade and business, telemedicine, tele-education, and others, as examples.
Knowledge-Aware Products will be able to locate, via virtual and actual sensors (over wireless networks or physical terrain), certain types of individuals or groups of people and then target specific messaging for those individuals.
The use of Knowledge Engineering to provide wireless predictive analytics and to anticipate, find, and interact with individuals regardless of where they are will be an essential tool for influencers of the future. When combined with satellites and the Internet, the sheer pervasive impact of this capability to deliver value, in services around the planet, will be an entrepreneur’s next decade of ventures.
Knowledge Engineers will be able to populate cloud-like databases in remote networks that can mine geographies, locations, individuals, and groups beyond today’s limitations of satellite technology or GPS. Diagnostics to sense, sniff, and find targets of opportunity for delivering Knowledge-Aware products.
The immense power, global reach, and influencing operational capacity these technologies will bring to future organizations and individuals who master these tools cannot be overemphasized. The capacity to Engineer Knowledge—to predict, shape, and provide strategic influence, reaching global audiences—may well be the most powerful capability on the planet over the next twenty-five years.
2025 Tech Forecasts
Neuromarketing: This is the application of neuroscience, technology that seeks to understand how the brain functions, learns, evolves, and can be influenced.
Cognitive technology: This is the application of neuroscience, the technology of how we learn, how we process information, and how we think, and how to influence thinking.
Crowdsourcing: Everything will be crowdsourced, from new pharmaceuticals to movies; the entire way we identify what consumers want will change. Crowdsourcing for finance, health care, energy usage, research, and even education and voting will transform the future by direct democracy—leveraging the wisdom of engaging consumers and nonexperts to mine information about preferences, desires, and products will become a norm in the future. When 8 billion people are mobile and connected, the possibility of real-time commerce, communication, and connectivity will yield a movable feast of benefits, insights, and awareness.
Predictive analytics: This is technology that can predict possible behavior and attitudes of individuals and groups to vote and purchase, what their needs are, and what they will value. Prediction Markets can be built to understand the global customer to be more in sync with the customer now and in the future. The technology used to accurately mine the wisdom of crowds, understanding authentic mass attitudes and the probability of influence. It is understanding the Group Mind and leveraging this awareness to understand and influence people and events.
Environmental scanning: This is the technology that scans the Internet and social networks—news, content, media, wikis, blogs, and music—to better understand the mood, attitudes, and motivations of people; gain more information awareness; and predict potential threat.
Neuro-data mining: This is the technology that seeks to identify individuals or groups based on their thinking models, behavior models, or neuro-maps—specific cognitive distinctions and modes of thinking. Neuro-maps combined with geo-tagging provide a larger framework for Knowledge Engineering and Influence.
Geo-tagging: This is the technology that brings together GPS location targeting, sensors, and geo-intelligence to identify, find, and access individuals or groups and current global location or to apply Predictive Awareness to where they may be located in the future. It is an application of Deep Digital Sensing.
Self-aware software: This technology is an advanced form of AI software that has embedded intelligence in its code, with the ability to reprogram itself, create new forms, and replicate new media messaging consistent with its mission parameters and is self-aware of its purpose. It can be used in any game, media, search engine, or digital communications over a cell phone, computer, or kiosk.
Real-time social media TV: This can be mass media, directed or focused on specific targets, that has the ability to communicate back to the sender, sense the individuals around its environment (virtual and physical), diagnose, interact, and influence on demand. It can morph or change to meet a need or objective. It can download new features and change its form, image, features, and direction. It can deliver messaging or create independent decision making of new directions or messaging in order to better influence. This technology will have interactive sensing capability, with GPS and DNA location awareness.
Distributed global intelligence: This is an advanced-concept, distributed intelligence that refers to the phenomenon of Emergence, in which biologically inspired networks (biomimetic networks) will “emerge” that mimic the way biological processes act, using neural nets of AIs on demand (computer bots) that emerge over linked information networks like the Internet.
As networks grow in the future to be more interlaced and complex and to globally link an infinite number of users, information, locations, and services (telecom, health, communications, finance, trade, etc.), the emergence of independent digital life forms—human and digital life forms—may emerge that mimic human interactions and behaviors.
Peer-to-peer networks that connect humans to machines to virtual online agents to offline digital minds may all be collaborating in this future ad hoc global network. Distributed Global Intelligence will become a highly useful and uniquely powerful force for reaching, engaging, and empowering the globally connected population of the future.
P2P commerce digital currency exchange between individuals will be commonplace before 2020. Coinbase, Bitcoin, and many other crypto-currencies will be used and will operate outside of the mainstream banking system between individuals. There will be Digital Currency Exchanges that will, like banks, convert digital cash for other currencies, monetary instruments, or actual assets—five Bitcoins for that pork barrel please.
Blended Reality: The Future of the Internet
It is likely that direct-to-retina heads-up displays will show an Information Layering of every person, location, organization, and even object in our view. This Information Layering will be scalable, enabling the user to delve deeper into the data provided about a person or location, accessing in real time history and relationships from massive archived Google- and Wikipedia-type databases.
Another feature of future Information Layering will be Predictive Awareness, the likelihood that through connections or relationships or some existing data evidence a specific person may be engaged with certain types of experiences or people. By 2020 Predictive Awareness will be the next evolution of today’s predictive analytics and neuro-marketing that companies use to determine customer buying interests.
Every person, location, topic, inquiry, or search becomes Data Rich. You will know when meeting someone who they are along with their interests, connections, and interactions that will define them either ahead of time (Google Me) or in real time (Google Now).
Future of 3D Animation
The advanced use of computer generated imagery (CGI) is essential to creating a Blended Reality. Computer animation that has been limited to the expensive use by films and games is getting cheaper and faster by the minute. What had cost $20,000 a minute will now cost $1. Supercomputing cloud services will be given away in the future. A Blended Reality is coming, and it will be delivered by the fast, inexpensive graphics renderings of digital humans, worlds, games—you name it. Photo-realism as a product, a deliverable, will come to immerse us—and it will look, feel, and be like this physical world.
The computer-generated imagery is the application of computer graphics to create or contribute to images in art, printed media, video games, films, television programs, commercials, and simulators. What’s coming is fully immersive 3D computer graphics that will be used to create people, cities, planets, and entire virtual worlds that people can make, travel to, and live in.
The term computer animation is used to build virtual worlds and refers to agent-based, interactive environments in digital networks. Computer graphics software is used to make computer-generated imagery for films as well as digital worlds. The availability of CGI software and increased computer speeds have allowed individual artists and small companies to produce professional-grade films, games, and fine art from their home computers. This has brought about an Internet subculture, with its own set of global celebrities and shows, and both the practical and bizarre. This is a consumer-generated world that is fully interactive and is inhabited by humans through their avatars, their substitute selves, their alter egos.
CGI will create a new lifestyle of Blended Reality. Living in a Blended Future Reality of both physical data (the where and who) and virtual data will bring a depth to relationships for work and social interaction that may be completely alien to those who did not grow up with this intrusive or helpful technology, based on your perspective.
The emergence of new forms of societies—Digital Societies and Virtual Worlds—will further enrich this experience of Blended Reality. The virtual and physical worlds will converge. You will watch TV and enter TV Worlds. You will work for an organization and enter the virtual worlds of that organization to interact with customers, workers, and vendors. This 3D holographic sensing and feeling Blended Reality will be “real.” The intimate interaction of this Blended Reality will give people many new choices for relationships with human and nonhuman or virtual avatars and digital beings.
There are innovators who are building these future worlds today. The difference is that today you can host your online multiplayer world or game in the cloud and pay Amazon to host and render human-like agents and landscapes that are as realistic as looking out the window. This will come to rival physical reality and present a challenge and opportunity for our society.
“If it doesn’t hurt to think about it, then we are not going to try it,” says the company High Fidelity (https://highfidelity.io). They are building the next generation of virtual reality. “We’re building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end users.”
Philip Rosedale is the innovative genius that created Second Life (http://secondlife.com), which has a global following. Second Life operates with its own digital currency, Linden Dollars, enabling digital makers who design their houses, avatars, and digital cultures inside the virtual world.
3D Graphics to 3D Printing: A Revolution in the Making
Now if you consider the convergence of these game-changing technologies, it will boggle your mind. When you add supercomputers operating in the cloud to both networks of people as well as increasingly smart and connected physical things, to CGI sensors and 3D printing, well, you have a revolution in making things both in the real physical world and in the real virtual world.
Imagine this: I can connect my spiffy new 3D printer to hook up in the cloud with my 3D graphics engine and then design a new car, computer, or medical device in about three hours. We can simulate the new product in a computer tablet and then post it on Kickstarter to raise funds to make it, all in the same day. Heck, I could presell five hundred units over an Innovation Ecosystem and be profitable by the end of the week.
Now that’s a revolution in the making. Imagine that you’re one of 5 million digital entrepreneurs who are doing this 3D-to-3D business every minute of every day. You need a customized heart valve—no problem, contact 3D HeartConnect Today . . . 20 percent off the first one thousand customers.
Nano: Hacking Matter
Think about the awesome capability that you could have to design on-demand matter. If you could manipulate matter at the atomic scale, to mix and match atoms to make things that did not occur in nature. What would you do if you had your own production box that sat in your home or office and could make any object? Did you buy the Maker Program off the Web? If we are to deal effectively in managing the risks facing us in the New Future—climate, disease, energy, resources scarcity—nano can help us get there.
The explosion of new nano entrepreneurs, who will have had ten years of experience in building businesses around 3D printing, when nano becomes available will transform business as we know it—millions of nano entrepreneurs will be generating billion of dollars or Euros, creating jobs, building new digital nano-ecosystems of agents, marketers, makers, and designers to support millions of customers who will want nano-products and services to support their businesses and customers. Over one thousand products in the market today contain nano, such as sports equipment, computers, textiles, materials, pharmaceuticals, devices, and cars. By 2020 the global market of products that contain nano will be over $1.5 trillion.
Nanoscience is the design of matter at the atomic scale. This is the building of unique things smaller than one hundred nanometers. The nanometer is one billionth of a meter. The nanometer is smaller than the tip of a hair yet has certain properties such as strength, memory, and storage that make it unique. The most interesting property of nano is self-assembly. Nano-tubes can self-organize into an infinite number of shapes and, perhaps, functions. Automated self-assembly could protect the planet from climate change, heal disease, enable a new energy source—the options are endless. New Nano industries will radically reshape medicine, energy, finance, and manufacturing by making inexpensive, smart, and fast tools available.
Nano Changes Everything: Bigger Than the Web
• A young child at risk to die from a genetic defect is saved by a programmed nano-device in a telemedicine operation.
• Nano-sensors will be used for the detection of diseases such as cancer.
• A new nano–fuel cell optimizes battery energy, bringing heat to a waiting community who live off the traditional power grid.
• A nano-coated material is so protective it that keeps a firefighter safe from the intense heat of a warehouse fire so she can rescue residents trapped and return safely to her family.
• Nano shields in orbit will protect billions from solar radiation and climate change.
• Nano batteries will transform energy, computers, cars, drugs, and new materials.
• Wearable computers and sensors will enable communications and computing.
• Nano will enable smaller, cheaper, and smarter devices, from TVs to computers.
Nanotech is an invisible technology that is often not seen as it plays increasing roles in food, aerospace, chemicals, health care, energy, and the list goes on. By 2030 the Global Nano Market could be over $3 trillion. Smaller, smarter, and stronger materials that go to make everything from heart valves to bridges and energy towers can benefit from the unique properties of nano.
Nanotech is the manipulation of matter at the atomic level to create new materials, coatings, and, eventually in the future, new products and devices. Nano also refers to the size: nanostructures are below the microlevel, almost invisible—one tip of your hair is a nanometer. But with the properties of steel and the conductivity for energy transfer and storage, nano is fantastic technology for the future. The applications are endless.
Nano has been used by companies in textiles to meet environmental challenges. For example, Lake Rotorua in New Zealand was affected by a violent volcanic explosion that occurred approximately two hundred thousand years ago. The result was a large, quite scenic lake, which is now being overrun by algae, an unwelcome development.
With access to advanced climate management technology that at its foundation is a sophisticated nano-engineering technology using nana membranes, the future of the lake is ensured to continue as a viable system. GE’s ZeeWeed Membrane Bioreactor used advanced nanotech methods to create a solution that worked to manage the algae and return the lake to sustainable levels, no longer under threat of being overrun by the algae.
Then there is Doxil, an anticancer drug, developed in Israel, that was the world’s first nano-based pharmaceutical. It’s been on the market twenty years, and no one knew when it was being developed that it was a nanotechnology. The use of nano, which has strange antibacterial and cancer-fighting properties, is just staring to be explored. In the future this will be a technology, when combined with computing, bio, and neuro, will transform our world through the use of inexpensive, strong, and flexible smart materials that can self-organize into what we need.
Nanotechnology Forecasts
• The nanotech convergence with computers, networks, neuroscience, and biotech will create Morphable products that can change their forms and functions on demand.
• Nano-devices—invisible, intelligent, sensing, mobile, connected to the web—will be used in every industry from media and medicine to defense.
• Nanotech 3D compilers will create fast, low-cost, high-quality products by assembling atoms on demand.
• Smaller than the head of a pin, surgical nano-devices will operate autonomously inside the human body.
• Nano-biology will prolong life, prevent illness, and increase people’s health.
• Nano-enhanced humans will have physical, intellectual, and sensing powers superior to other humans.
• Nanotech will enable inexpensive and high-yield solar energy tech.
• Nano-factories will build on-demand products in an inexpensive, flexible, and rapid process.
• Nanotech will revolutionize the global economy, providing new jobs, wealth, and enterprise that will produce high-tech products with low-cost and low-tech resources.
• Nanotech will create new choices that will alter human evolution, raise dramatic ethical issues, and challenge social norms.
Having been involved at the beginning of the Nanotech Revolution when we first presented the case for the United States to invest in nanoscience under President Clinton, I can say that amazing breakthroughs have not disappointed. I can remember that day we met at the White House Conference Center to make our case for why the United States should invest in nanoscience. I was an early sector adviser on nanoscience to the National Science and Technology Council, which reports to the president of the United States. Later advising the President’s Council on Science and Technology (PCAST), it was clear that innovation was a top priority for government, beyond just politics.
The engineer that has been the innovative evangelist for nanoscience is Mike Rocco, the head of the Nanoscience and Nanoengineering Department for the National Science Foundation. Mike brought me into NSF to help get the US government and the business community to understand how vital nanoscience is to our future.
At that time we could only speculate about the future industries and jobs that the Nano Economy might offer. I can say that we were right about the potential, though I think the best innovations from nanoscience are yet to come and in the far future will offer truly amazing breakthroughs to heal, fix, fuel, secure, and invent what appear impossible today.
Programming Realty
There may not be a technology that promises so much and can deliver so much of whatever humans can imagine in the future than nanotechnology can. Our ability to program matter at the atomic level will touch and change every industry and affect every life and generation on the planet. This fundamental shift in our mimicking nature and in surpassing nature by making entirely new things can only be limited by what we imagine.
Nanotech tools will enable consumers to fabricate on-demand materials, food, energy, devices, and computing and communications machines. Nano-devices and nano-materials—invisible, intelligent, and powerful—will be used in every industry to accelerate production of customized products.
Nanotech-enabled bio-diagnostics and sensors will be used in security, health care, and the home. Smaller than the head of a pin, surgical nano-devices will operate within the human body, configured by wireless interactions with surgeons.
Nano-biology innovations from rebuilding organs will prolong life, prevent illness, and increase people’s health—even promote dangerous behavior. Nano-enhanced humans will have augmentations of physical, intellectual, and sensing attributes superior to other humans.
Nanotech will provide cheap, available, new sources of energy as well as accelerate other forms of alternative energy by providing coatings, parts, and new “engines” for energy creation. Nano factories will build on-demand products in a global nano supply chain, leveraging inexpensive, flexible, and rapid processes.
Nanotech will revolutionize the global economy by offering mass customization of high-quality and useful products. At the same time, weaponized nanotech will become a global risk factor. Nanotech will create new choices that will alter human evolution, raise dramatic ethical issues, and challenge social norms.
Manipulating Matter
Nanotechnology is the process of manipulating matter at the nanometer or atomic scale. Nanotech is an emerging fundamental design science that, when applied to materials development, can yield properties that can offer exceptional attributes of strength, power, and programmable intelligence.
In addition, nanotech in the future may provide self-replication, self-assembly, and self-healing “smart” products or machines.
Nanotech may be applied in the future for producing new materials that can fabricate systems that produce new forms of energy, agriculture, computing, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and communications. As a new design science, nanotech can be used to design matter, atom by atom, to achieve the desired performance. This is a radical departure from the technologies of today. Nanotech may be used to speed up evolution, fix problems that nature or biology cannot, reprogram disease, end droughts, or enhance intelligence.
This new tool set, which uses atoms as building blocks to create new things, will provide a manufacturing capacity that invigorates the imagination. Given the evidence today of recent nanotech discoveries and the amount of funding nanotech is attracting from more than fifteen nations, this technology is already providing evidence of significant potential.
One of the chief advantages of nanotech is that it can theoretically be used to manufacture materials that do not appear in nature. Creating a new generation of materials that have properties that do not currently exist in nature opens possibilities that will have a profound impact on society. The harnessing of nanotech and experimentation has been ongoing for the better part of a decade due to the potential that this technology holds for the future.
The nanometer scale of nanotech offers an operational capability to reduce the size of other devices or machines without sacrificing performance and addressing issues not accessible with traditional engineering or design.
Nanotech also offers new capabilities that someday will translate into more complex machines that can be used for the betterment of humanity, from food production and inexpensive and personalized medicines to distributed energy sources and climate change engineering.
The capability of nanotech to realize its full potential over the next twenty-five years may be in its combination and convergence with biotechnology. A new generation of nano-bio devices will be developed within the next twenty-five years, dramatically offering therapeutic benefits to extend life and heal disease.
New Power Tools
Nano-bio convergence would offer the Power Tools of both biology and an applied materials science that could manipulate biological matter—organs, neurons, and cells—at the atomic scale. It will be possible to design new synthetic life forms. The next generation of medicine will likely emerge from this convergence and offer longer and healthier lives with less risk. Enhanced quality of life will be the outcome.
Future nanotech developments in energy production may have the most pervasive impact on society. As energy becomes increasingly more expensive and scarce, coupled with increased population and industrialization over the next twenty-five years, we will need new forms of energy. Direct manipulation of matter to create energy or even to create better storage for energy, is a likely development of nanotech in this time frame.
Nano Convergence
• New medical devices, replacement bones and organs that have been nano-manufactured on demand to prevent injury, disease or disability
• Neuro-nano smart machines, robots, and products that have thinking capabilities
• Self-assembly as an embedded capability—metals that absorb impact and return to the original memory shape—nano-chemicals, nano-electronics, nano-engineering
• Self-assembly, a nano capability, leading to self-generation of robots, autos, planes, energy devices, and agricultural innovations
• New forms of matter that act like a liquid but have the properties of a solid, with a programmable set of memories
• Food assemblers, to make certain meals from basic agriculture materials, with large- and small-scale production
• Superstrong but lightweight materials for protecting people at risk from climate, fire, hazard, or attack
• Mobile autonomous entities that can navigate extreme environments in space or on earth; extensions of human and nonhuman entities
• New nano-scale diagnostic devices that can target disease and deliver surgery or drugs on demand
• Radical nano-biogenetic engineering of human beings, tool augmentation, advanced communications, performance enhancement via hardened agility, and nano-enabled bodies
• New energy forms born from nanoreplication of atomic properties that mimic solar cells and generate power in small and large formats
Future nanotech applications will arise from the convergence of nanotech with the other game-changing technologies, such as biotech, neuro-tech, and quantum technology. At the atomic level a future generation of quantum computers may be possible to build using nanotech applied engineering.
The convergence of nano-bio-quantum, for example, will lead to a new, much more radical set of tools, assumptions, applications, and inventions that will transform our world in the next few decades. Without the agility of nanotech we could not even imagine designing a quantum computer or a synthetic brain cell, an organelle or neuron. The intersection of technologies is where future innovations will emerge. Nano 3D manufacturing will make your next running shoes and your new kidney.
3D Printing: The Maker Revolution
“What if you could send a physical object to a friend like a text message? What if you could subscribe to a series of objects like you do with a podcast? What if adjusting a 3D model was as easy as Instagramming a photo? Yeah, we thought that would be cool too. That’s why we created New Matter” (www.newmatter .com).
This is the advertisement on Indiegogo (www.indiegogo.com) that got me excited. I have been analyzing 3D printers for a few years and watching how fast this technology was moving into the market. For $240 I invested in my first 3D desktop printer, but what has been missing was the community. New Matter has included not just the printer but also the community of makers and designers who can exchange ideas over the web and communicate as a community.
But not all 3D printers sit on a desktop or kitchen counter. I am walking around a 3D printer based in a warehouse in Silicon Valley—massive in size, big as a pickup truck, but very wide and flat. This is like no 3D printer I have ever seen. It is used to produce homes by 3D printing, and I am convinced it is the future of manufacturing. On one end there is a computer from which designs are sent over the Internet. On the other there is a large printer set up to extrude materials that can be put together and fit to build the front and sides of a house.
The Chinese company Win Sun Decoration Design Engineering Company prints all of the parts needed to construct houses and then uses those parts to build them all in a day. Perhaps in the future they can build them in minutes. The finished houses are made of mostly concrete with other materials. Buildings of the future will greatly expand this capacity, print on demand (PoD), reducing labor and materials costs to almost nothing.
Dutch architects are updating the process for the twenty-first century: fabricating pieces of a canal house out of plastic with a giant 3D printer and slotting them together like oversized Lego blocks that kids would play with.
I am sitting at dinner in Poland at a high-tech conference on digital commerce where my friend John is receiving orders for making 3D tools on his smart phone. He is receiving the tool orders, fulfilling them by turning on, by cell phone, his 3D printer at home, and sending the files to his 3D printer to start production. His 3D printer is in New York and he is in Poland at dinner with me. This is his business. It has already changed the very concept of manufacturing. He is a 3D Maker who is part of a revolution in production that may disrupt even China.
What if 3D manufacturing goes mainstream? What if every home, office, and business had its own 3D printer to make even 30 percent of what they buy from China Inc. today? Now, that would be disruptive. But what if China decided to embrace high-end 3D printing for manufacturing? They would disrupt themselves and perhaps become a 3D Future Smart Leader. Could happen.
By 1982 Hideo Kodama invented the first working 3D printer in Japan, where many ideas come to be made reality. Although 3D printing has been around, it has not been mainstream. But something happened. As with computing, Moore’s Law and dropping prices for computers has reduced the prices of all technologies.
The 3D Revolution
We are on the verge of a Maker Revolution: small business meets manufacturing, distributed production that combines 3D printing, cloud computing, programs, and entrepreneurs hunger for the profitable next new thing. Here it is. 3D printing will accelerate commerce like mobile phones did. Making stuff on demand—tools, designs, products, and, eventually, complex things—will create a new postindustrial distributed marketplace for small businesses to thrive in the New Future.
There is a new manufacturing revolution underway. Small, distributed, and dynamic manufacturing labs are springing up around the United States. Groups of inventers, creators, manufacturers—the Makers—are self-organizing places and events to collaborate in “making stuff.” From industrial-scale body parts to new devices and objects, we are at the early stages of a manufacturing transformation. 3D printing of houses has actually been demonstrated.
The US government is planning to put one thousand production-quality 3D printers in high schools across the United States. Even without access to one of these 3D printers, there will be free downloads of Autodesk 123D, a 3D computer-aided design program that gives you modeling and push-button connections to online 3D printing services. There are dozens of online services supporting the Maker Revolution. Printing objects in 2015 will be hot. By 2025 everyone will have a 3D printer. What do you want to make?
3D printing will be a cloud-computing platform of distributed nodes in a network-based market that will link up producers and customers around the world. 3D printing is part of the future of distributed manufacturing, where bits are moved around the world rather than objects or products. Bits, programs about the design or functionality of the products, will signal how “they” need to be built, and a new Smart Machine ecosystem of designers, 3D printers, brokers, customers, partners, financiers, and even stock futures will become part of this Smart Machine Ecosystem of Future Manufacturing.
When 3D making meets nanotech and the cloud we will have, by 2025, a complete ecosystem for manufacturing anything from the complex device to any consumer product. This revolution is bubbling up to the surface today.
So let’s say you, as an entrepreneur, want to design a solar nano-chip that fits into a smartphone that would produce endless and renewable power, solving a big problem today. You call it the SunChip. Based on an ultrathin ten nanometers, it is tiny and powerful in collecting not just solar but also ambient light. You have a patent that you have licensed, and you now want to build a functional working model. You contact three potential customers who could sell your finished product.
Once your customers agree that the SunChip would be a great and much-needed product with huge market potential, you contact your investors, with endorsements from your potential customers, to prove up the demand. With this support you’re able to raise start-up capital.
Now you’re off next to design and to make a prototype. Of course, there is a vibrant community of Makers, designers, programmers, and manufacturers waiting for you to contact them as you stitch together a Virtual Global Supply Chain. They are freelancers who are inventing the future. They help you to invent your future.
You send this job out to your team, who are around the block or around the world. The designers, producers, programmers, and agents work on the attributes of the design, features, and performance, and they make prototypes after their Knowledge Engineering, through simulation models collaborating in real time over the web using computers and mobile devices. You approve the cost estimates, and you’re in 3D production within days. This could take months to get the right design and function to absorb, store, and transmit the energy needed on demand.
The final prototype is functional and working. SunChip is sent to you for approval via the web and then downloaded simultaneously at your office and at your customers’ offices, with specs on performance and cost. Your customers’ 3D printers produce your SunChip. You have orders within forty-eight hours, and you’re in business.
Eighty percent of this scenario is working now, part of the emerging 3D Revolution. Can you hear the sounds of this future?
Kickstart This
I invested in many start-ups on the website for entrepreneurs called Kickstarter. 3D printing ventures are a regular offering and the prices for performance are getting lower and lower while the performance gets better and better, so I invested.
3D printing is now used in almost all industries, including prototyping, manufacturing, architecture, construction, aerospace, and military. Emerging innovations in the medical arena are also promising, including on-demand dental appliances.
Experiments are now being undertaken for the printing of food. I actually tried some of this 3D food—bio-food—while at Disney’s Epcot, and I think that it needs some more work to get the food right. The texture was acceptable, but the taste was at the early stages or, let’s say, it has a long way to go.
Industries that will benefit will be health care, manufacturing, aerospace, architecture, consumer goods, autos, construction, and, eventually, pharmaceuticals and complex engines and devices. 3D printing of organs will be addressed in Chapter 12, but this will likely be the largest market in the world: Ready to grow your own liver in your own 3D printer? Could be coming sooner than you think.
According to Canalys, a market research firm, 3D printing will see a 45.7 percent growth each year, resulting in a $16.2 billion industry by 2018. My forecasts go beyond that, to $25 billion-plus by 2020, driven not only by cheap 3D printers but also something else more powerful—an ecosystem of designers, producers, buyers, and digital 3D manufacturing plants that serve the industry of entrepreneurs who are inventing a new industry.
By 2020 something else quite powerful will transform 3D printing—the home 3D printer. The ability to print at home with under-$1,000 machines that can do what expensive Big Iron 3D printers did way back in 2015 will create an industry of Home Makers, entrepreneurs for hire. They will invent the future of manufacturing.
Now, when you add to cheap-but-high-quality 3D printing the innovations in nanotech, which is about a revolution in materials, and bring together e-commerce and Big Data, you have an infrastructure of business in which anyone can participate. Cheap, smart, fast tools like 3D printers that can be used in the poorest parts of Africa to New York will create vast new markets and, more important, vast new millions of 3D entrepreneurs who will reinvent manufacturing by 2020. It has started now.
3D Futures
No longer will we need massive manufacturing plants to make products. We now see how 3D printing could start a revolution in manufacturing that was given away due to cost, not quality or skill. In the future 3D printing will be part of a massive retooling of society to reinvigorate the economy, bring jobs, change education, and create a new generation of entrepreneurs—3D entrepreneurs.
The made-to-order 3D printing business is really just starting. But in the future 3D printing in every home, business, and community will transform manufacturing. 3D entrepreneurs who figure out new ways to produce on-demand products and create entirely new manufacturing industries will lead the Maker Revolution. The most in demand will be tools, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and, eventually, with nanotech and IT, advanced devices and complex products with many features.
The future of 3D printing will be the Doctorow Effect, when 3D printers have achieved in the future the ability to not only print complex devices, pharmaceuticals, food, and energy products, and computing devices but also have the ability to print exact replicas of 3D printers. Then we will have arrived at a turning point.
When 3D printers can print 3D printers, perhaps with advanced next-generation technologies, as discussed here, such as nano, neuro, bio, and robotech features, our world will be transformed in powerful ways that our brains today cannot fully comprehend. Expensive.
My Computer, My Self
The coevolution of information technology and humans is inevitable. Collaborative intelligent computer networks—ones that interact with each other and humans—will become powerful extensions of human beings, designed to augment intelligence, learning, communications, and productivity.
Computers will disappear. We will wear them, digest them, and put them in our brains and bodies to enhance humans. Computers will develop Predictive Awareness; they will “learn,” “recognize,” and “know” what we want, where we are, who we are, and even what we desire.
Every product, object, and human will have an Internet address and will be connected, with communications used to exchange experiences and information. Computer chips will be everywhere, and they will become invisible—biometric, geotagged, and DNA tagged, location aware, embedded in everything from brains and hearts to clothes and toys.
Computer networks with advanced artificial intelligence and digital identity will manage essential global systems, such as transportation, health care, water safety, energy, security, and food production in a manner superior to humans.
Online computer networks will enable humans to create sophisticated interactive geospatial mash-ups—collections of geographical, statistical, demographic, and financial information—via wireless access anywhere and anytime. This will enable commerce and create wealth by forging new information-rich geo-intelligent products like where energy deposits are, how to harness solar, the optimal trading of assets, and where. It’s the marketing of Geo Information across global markets of connected networks.
Computers will become voice activated, networked, video enabled, and connected together over the Net, linked with each other and humans and configured for specialized tasks and mandates to find, acquire, transact, or monitor situations anywhere on the planet.
Computers will have digital senses—speech, sight, smell, hearing—enabling them to communicate with humans and other machines.
Computer senses in robots will give them the mental ability to sense and operate. Various forms of artificial intelligence, such as digital life, neural nets, and swarm minds, will make computers as smart as humans, and even smarter for certain jobs.
Digitally engineered personalities (DEPS), or Virtual Humans, will merge with habitats, autos, streets, products, and even humans. Multiple personalities within humans will manage information, health, work, security, and logistics.
Minds-within-Minds (MWM) will augment intelligence, enhance total recall memory, or restore memory. The MWM capabilities of connected and networked MWMs will be a requirement for certain highly complex work in finance, medicine, manufacturing, and defense.
Human and computer evolution will converge. Synthetic intelligence will greatly enhance the next generations of humans. Thinking machines will bring different levels of sentient awareness to different products, ranging from food to industrial products.
As computers surpass humans in certain domains of intelligence or just capability, a new cybernetic species and a new culture will evolve that exists parallel to humanity. The radical convergence of synthetic biological parts and advanced AI computing to make robots will accelerate this new cybernetic species. We are not ready for this future. Even talking about this future may be alienating and spooky.
Pervasive Computing Clouds
The era of pervasive computing, in which computers become invisible, is emerging. Computers over the next few decades will likely increase in power more than 1 million times that of today and will reduce in size and become free from the devices that today sit on desks and that we carry as laptops.
Computers will become embedded in every device, product, vehicle, object, machine, and human. Computing in the cloud will be a game changer. We will wear light and embedded devices that will provide Augmented Cognition, computer-assisted information processing, at a sophisticated and mediated level.
Other technologies such as nanotech combined with computing will make these future tools smaller and function well beyond the limitations of silicon. New computing logic, memory, and chips will provide cheap, fast, and dramatically morphing thinking capacity—no longer boxes, but Computing Fabrics, Agents and Matrices will be truly extensions of our brain, company, or community.
The computer chip will shape the next evolution of computers, except it will not resemble the chips of today. It is likely that after 2025 quantum chips that function at a very high level of complexity, image processing, computing power, and speed (while using less energy) will emerge. This next chip platform will offer hard encryption for security and privacy protection.
Speeds and computation rivaling the human thinking process will be common. In fact, neural networks, models for computers, and computer chips, the brains of computers may be modeled after human brains.
These neural nets will adopt neuroscience as the next platform for thinking machines, AI. Biomimetic chips that mirror how our brains and physiology will emerge, offering faster-than-thought processing power. From genetic algorithms to neuro-morphics to nano-post-silicon, the future of chips will optimize the web, universal connectivity, energy use, mobility, and commerce.
An example of a new computer chip based on neural networks, how the brain works and FPGAs, Qualcomm is developing a new approach to designing logic. They have been working on designing a new computer architecture that breaks the traditional mold of how chips work, creating on a computer processor that mimics the human brain and nervous system so devices can have embedded cognition driven by what they call “brain-inspired computing”—this is Qualcomm’s Zeroth processing.
A common theme is to imitate nature, figuring out how the brain works and then building that model, realizing that if we are going to build the future, let’s make it in our own image. Catchy idea. Building life in our image with our parts simulated and crafted to function like humans do.
Neurosynaptic Chips
IBM and Cornell University’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab is currently working on the second generation of neurosynaptic chips that may drive future computers, cars, robots, and, perhaps, future energy grids. The neurosynaptic chips, like the first generation, will emulate 256 neurons each. The intercore communication, however, has been developed, and the new processors are expected to contain around four thousand cores each. This will make for a total of around 1 million neurons per processor.
The Final Phase
The final deliverable is to fabricate a multichip neural system of 108 neurons (100 million) and install this in a robot that performs at cat level. It is estimated to begin between late 2013 and late 2015 and is estimated to be completed sometime between late 2014 to late 2017. Now, what if we could jump this curve?
By 2030 we will be building Smart Machines that are modeled on human brains to both autonomously function and enhance humans, to enable human longevity, to coevolve and merge with humans. I know many reading this will be repulsed by the insinuation of this convergence. Just the idea of computers and humans converging raises huge ethical issues, and I agree. At the same time the inevitability of this Big Merge of smart tech and humans is coming.
Aug Cog: From Google Glass to Wearable Minds
Augmented Cognition is coming. Wearables will be an essential part of our future. But more on point, Wearable Minds that augment our performance and intelligence are coming. More of interest, these Thinking Machines will augment human cognition on a regular basis. Augmented Cognition is the enhancement of human cognition for high performance by the use of computer and networked Internet information (video, audio, data, images).
This will take the form of wearable devices and wetware, direct-interfacing computer augmentation into the brain. Using nanotechnology, much of the direct interface will be invisible. It is likely that wearable wireless technology will be preferred.
To deal with the immense complexity and speed of information as well as the different types of information that will be available in the future, we will require a computer-assisted Augmented Cognition Architecture, Aug Cog.
This is a comprehensive platform that will connect not just the user to information but also users to users in Deep Real-Time Authenticated Collaboration. A radically different level of thinking and cognition will emerge that, by 2020 or before, will affect every human endeavor in fundamental ways. Identity and authentication of people, data, and information assets will be transparent.
The Aug Cog Future: 2030
• Bio-Complexity Management Aug Cog: enabling higher-capability processing for those jobs that require massive data sets, such as for drug discovery and DNA mapping.
• Asset Trader Aug Cog: will be required to enable and enhance the financial services asset trader to better perform.
• Risk Analysis Aug Cog: focused on risk analysis and threat assessments for finance, climate, and energy.
This Aug Cog will comprise a wearable computer device, an interactive, display-anywhere, digital dashboard for viewing along with a networking platform that automatically senses, collects, packages, and distributes to the user different info assets, such as video, audio, and data streams.
The Aug Cog will be linked at the network cloud level to other sensing distributed nodes in physical reality, such as video cameras, bio-detection sensors, and physical locations, that stream back uploads to the ACA for processing.
Aug Cog will be vital to processing the huge data sets and amounts of information to make it (1) relevant, (2) actionable, (3) opportunity creating, and (4) risk management.
To a great extent, the majority of humanity by 2025 will have access to some type of Aug Cog just to be able to work, conduct business, communicate, and locate desired information on demand. Smarter or dumber Aug Cog enhancements will vary by cost, access rights, and work. Aug Cog services will be targeted for different types of work or lifestyle.
The Aug Cog needs of doctors or lawyers will be different from soldiers or media producers. Specialists’ new careers, jobs, and industries will be built to deliver Aug Cog products and services.
Bio Forecasts: 2030
Diagnosing your DNA with cheap and fast sequencing will create a new personalized definition of health care, security, longevity, and even career potential.
The design of life forms, cells, organs, and bio-devices will alter human evolution.
Social and ethical debates about what it is to Be Human or Enhanced will come in the future.
The seduction to cure disease and cheat death will pose major social and economic challenges for society.
A Post-Genomic Society based on the next generation of bio-informatics, the Big Data of personalized and collective genetic information, will shape the destiny of our civilization, affecting work, culture, defense, and power.
A new radical era dominated by the consumer genetics industry will provide individuals, companies, and governments with vast new technologies to direct the biological destiny of humans, societies, and organizations. Overnight consumer genomics will create a new cultural awareness of our Genetic Personality. We will understand how your Genetic Personality—a mixture of the analytics of Big Data, population health and epidemiology, and the interpretation of your personal DNA sequence—will affect your relationships, health, family, career, and work. New global bioengineered transglobal societies will be formed around specific bioengineered services and skills based on the mapping of entire Genetic Personalities. This will identify high and low Creatives, Achievers, Optimal Health, Peak Performance, and other distinctions.
Genetic solutions to human ills will be highly prized intellectual property and will be traded by individuals and industry groups online. New biotech drugs will save countless lives and eliminate many diseases. Cancer will become a managed disease. There will be designer people, enhanced with next-generation genetic treatments to augment their capabilities and eliminate or modify unwanted characteristics.
We will learn to turn certain genes on and off to influence performance and health. Desired and customized genetic components will be in demand. This will create a new era of Personalized Regenerative Medicine.
We will have synthetic biology, in which engineering life parts into radical new systems will accelerate the health as well as the redesign of all living things. Radical new choices in lifestyle will be offered to morph one’s physical appearance.
We will learn to clone organs, rebuild brains, and use stem cell technology to enhance health and longevity. Entire societies will emerge that will be based on human-enhancement technologies, giving them advanced intelligence, mobility, longevity, and other attributes outlawed in some nations.
Privacy issues about access to individuals’ genetic data will cause conflicts among people, business, and governments. Biotech will be used to target ethnic groups and used by states to suppress dissent and maintain control.
Careers, relationships, and opportunities will be influenced by genetic heritage, life extension, and enhancement technologies. Biotech for human and health enhancement will be the most profitable global industry in the twenty-first century.
As nanotech represents the manipulation of matter at the atomic scale, biotechnology is the manipulation of biology, living things. Current developments in biotech point to a future of more control and choice, and rapid breakthroughs in genetics, biology, pharmacology, robotics, and bioengineering will transform medicine, agriculture, and bio-energy.
This massive transformation will alter the destiny and populations of the world. On the biofuels front, new sources of energy, grown or cultivated, will transform the energy equation of the future, especially local distributed energy conversion from local biomaterials grown as feedstock. Technology to transform grasses, reeds, organic waste, and biologically grown energy feed stock will emerge. Local energy production, scalable and sustainable, for the 4 billion people living in rural areas in the future will be an important influencing tool.
Biotech applied to food consumption, agriculture, though often resisted as politically unwanted, will become a necessary and valuable resource to feed the population of the world. The relative safety and efficiency of genetic foods is undeniably the only way to feed a hungry planet of 7 or 8 billion people in 2030. Biotech applied to transforming sea water to clean drinking water, as one example, would be a major breakthrough for reducing global conflict over water and food production.
Health care and medicine are being altered by the emergence of biotech technologies. People will be offered radical choices about life extension, disease prevention, and genetic engineering. The implications of having universal access to stem cell technology—to replicate any organ, replenish a disease-ravaged immune system, or grow back a limb—will offer a new era in regenerative and personalized medicine.
Biotech’s endgame is the future human enhancement of human performance, longevity, and even augmented intelligence and mobility. The evolution of health care will involve three stages, but the future will be more profound in technology’s transformation of choices for people in programming out unwanted traits and programming in desired traits that may give them an edge or potential that they would not have normally through random evolution possess.
Designed Evolution
I am not certain that we as a civilization are ready for designing our own evolution, but regardless of our Future Readiness, we shall. We will have the ability to make choices at birth or to genetically modify one’s body and to alter one’s mind, choosing attributes, capabilities, skills, even awareness. Designed Evolution will reflect the future state of society in which certain people will benefit from radical enhancements that will give them advancements to achieve, create, invent, manage, and live over multiple lifetimes. The average age of humans on the planet in 2033 may be close to 130 or beyond, but a fully enhanced human may live beyond this time to 150, given advancements in biotech.
There may even be some who argue for uploading consciousness into robotic or android bodies, as cybernetic enhancements at that time will be routine. The final step will be to upload into a wetware interface. At the far end of 2033 there will be wetware experiments to radically extend life. Serious questions remain: What will it mean to be human in 2033? The ethical and social implications of radical biotech in the near future will require setting limits to the use of these technologies in democratic societies. How human can you be if 80 percent of your body is synthetic? Can you still be human if your brain is the only original part?
Synthetic biology will converge with nano-engineering. It is the application and building of synthetic life, a bio-bricks, Lego approach to replicating, building, and creating new life processes. Life forms and quasi-biological systems will become commoditized assets and libraries of object-oriented components or even entities that can be assembled into life-form types for which there is no current definition.
This synthetic biological factory will take parts and weave them into an expanding array of manufacturing processes and end products, like new organs, biological systems, and even disease management.
The endgame of synthetic biology is a vast new tool set for making choices, from disease management and prevention to prediction to perhaps ending disease and aging. It is likely that more than 80 percent of the diseases we see today will not exist by 2030. Synthetic biology and regenerative medicine will defeat disease formation from birth or before and into later years.
The implications of longevity and life extension and its impact on demographics, wealth, and power will emerge well before 2030, as society gains access to new bio-engineering innovations that outpace law, ethics, and regulation. We will build a new Global Longevity Culture enabled by the enhancement of human performance, which will offer radical new choices to humans and cultures beyond the belief systems of what we are familiar with today. A radical New Future is upon us, but it is not so evident now as it will be after 2025. The next year will be like the previous hundred years of progress. Fast and furious innovation.
The Post-Genomic Society: 2030
The impact and influence of DNA and personalized genetic information will drive the most sweeping changes in our civilization. In our Post-Genomic Society every aspect of decisions, lifestyle, relationships, work, health, geography, and media will be mediated or affected by the information and analytics around our DNA. The DNA of companies will transform business. The DNA of nations will influence social services. The DNA of population health will shape the future of medicine. The DNA of individuals will shape the future of work, love, health, and the future of the individual.
Human Genomics will be an entirely new information awareness that will give us insights into the future of our world, including our identity and health. DNA will give us an understanding of behavior, learning, crime, security, and power well beyond our imaginations. Its importance cannot be overemphasized.
Genomic information will influence every act and decision. Just as we know today about the certain genes that may be precursors of certain types of breast cancer in women and Alzheimer’s disease in men, or cardiovascular risks, tomorrow we will have a vast trove of information of complex analysis and forecasting about what our DNA means for careers, jobs, education, health, crime, security, marriage, relationships—and the list goes on. Is there an intelligence or longevity gene? Yes, I think we shall develop an entirely New Future of genes that are associated with intelligence, creativity, invention, and emotional intelligence, even love.
Living in a Post-Genomic Society will offer a radical transparency that will as much enable as confuse people. We will not all want to know certain genomic personal information, even when it can be known. Though much of this analysis is not a credible source of information for making accurate behavioral predictions today, within twenty-five years science will be able to. Excellent, reliable biostatistics and longitudinal survey research will be available to make accurate predictions about individuals with specific genetic markers at a specific probability.
Specific characteristics, skills, and even competencies or potentials will be identified that make for excellent leadership, good team members, intelligent inventors, creative artists, and success in whatever career is chosen.
Access to personal genomics will reveal assumptions, risks, characteristics, and behaviors that will redefine society in fundamental ways. Genomic diagnostics will be common. We will have identified, in this future time, both antisocial and highly desirable DNA traits, some that we have or don’t have, or some traits we want to have and will buy. Some possible genomic markers (SNPs) may be found for identifying the potentials for:
• leadership effectiveness
• creativity and inventiveness
• genius functioning
• superior athletic abilities
• inventiveness
• artistic skills
• high language and communication capabilities
• criminal and antisocial behavior
Our Post-Genomic Society will contribute to the end of privacy as well as provide the ability to remotely scan, identify, and analyze in real time the Predictive Relationship Potential Fitness (PRPF) of jobs, skills, relationships, alliances, personalities, and marriage. This Post-Genomic technology will evaluate advancements, promotions, joint ventures, and competencies of people.
Hacking Our Evolution
In all fairness, our DNA does not solely determine who were are and who we will be. Our environment, our lifestyles, even our education and many other social factors influence our personality, capabilities, and our destiny. But the role DNA plays in our personal future may lend insights into how to not just predict but to also shape our future personality, mind, and body. In other words, when we think of DNA or even biology, we think health care. But this inquiry is deeper. Think hacking our evolution.
How might we eliminate, yes, disease but also less-than-desirable traits, such as alcoholism and mental illness as well as other factors, such as having an addictive personality or not being physically strong or tall or increasing your ambition gene or creativity gene good for invention and discovery.
Given the new Post-Genomic dynamics of this explosion of bio-personal information there will also be new choices. We will have access to Genomic Enhancement technology, in which we can mix and match and choose what we want from the human gene pool to fit our desire for a personality, skill, attribute, or capability to be modified or eliminated.
These choices and technologies in the Post-Genomic Society will offer threats and benefits that individuals, rogues, states, and nonstate actors will use to fulfill desires that go well beyond the options today. The implications for an entire society or an individual faced with the biotech tool box of choices as envisioned here, in 2030, will challenge all norms, laws, and conventions in ways we have only begun to examine but that defy the imagination.
We will evolve from curing disease to prevention to regeneration to evolutionary redesign. The New Future will be an Enhanced Future of choices and alternative paths to being human that, given the early stage of the Innovation Economy of today, may seem strange to many.