The other day, I sat down with a bunch of members from our think tank I asked them to imagine a new technology which would revolutionize the way we do things in society. The criteria would be a new technology which changed all other industries, even creating its own in the process. You might think this is a very tall order, and it’s hard to imagine something like this especially if we have no basis for it, in other words it doesn’t exist so how could you imagine it? Simple, let me explain.
The printing press, the computer, and so many other technologies have done just that. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin for instance. How about the airplane? Now then, what about the future? What about the present, we can come back to the future? Wouldn’t you say that mobile technology and all of the advances have changed everything? If not, perhaps you weren’t alive when the first mobile phones came into fruition. I was, and I had one of the first mobile phone, and it helped me in my business immensely. I was able to do things my competitors couldn’t do, and I never had to worry about sitting by a phone waiting for a customer to call. It was as if I had a free secretary.
Consider all the apps that you have today? Consider the difference between word processing programs and typewriters. I mean if you had to go through what I had to go through when I started my first business, you’d understand. You’d understand the difference the technology has made in our lives, businesses, and throughout the entire human endeavor, and around the world. It’s been nothing short of amazing in the last hundred years, can you begin to imagine what the next hundred years might look like? Perhaps not, but I’m asking you to imagine that now.
There is an interesting group called the Singularity Institute where quite a few technologists and futurists talk about these potential eventualities. Consider the future of nano tech, biotech, quantum computing, self-driving cars, human brain interfaces, 3-D printing, private space flight, life extension, weather control, and molecular and particle assimilation. What this Singularity Institute is suggesting that we should be asking now is; what if all of those industries came up with breakthroughs during the same decade?
Interestingly enough the line is blurred between biotech and robotics, biology and computers, nano tech and private space flight. We can combine any two of those together and we get a whole array of potential eventualities and new industries which would change everything in the process. If we add three or four of them together, the exponential for increase and change continues. It’s time to start imagining all of this stuff and then go out and create it. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
