Exponential Rates of Technological Change The lines of technological development are beginning to overlap.  Call these overlaps "technological rogue waves," places where the exponential growth curves underpinning information technology are stacking atop one another, doubling in force and power and giving birth to radically new and exceptionally disruptive industries.  These rogue waves mean that the massive rate of change we’re already witnessing in the world is really the warm-up. Simply put, we ain’t seen nothing yet.  Here is a glimpse at the nothing we ain’t seen, a deep dive into four of these technological rogue waves and the tsunami-like disruption they’re about to bring to our lives.

1. Exponential Convergence
Rogue Waves of Technology

2. Rogue Waves
• Rogue waves (also known as freak
waves, monster waves, episodic
waves, killer waves, extreme waves,
and abnormal waves) are relatively
large and spontaneous surface
waves that occur far out in open
water, and are a threat even to large
ships and ocean liners.
• Rogue waves present considerable
danger for several reasons: they are
rare, unpredictable, may appear
suddenly or without warning, and can
impact with tremendous force.
• Disruption

3. Exponential Rates of Technological Change
• The lines of technological development are beginning to overlap.
• Call these overlaps "technological rogue waves," places where the
exponential growth curves underpinning information technology are
stacking atop one another, doubling in force and power and giving birth to
radically new and exceptionally disruptive industries.
• These rogue waves mean that the massive rate of change we’re already
witnessing in the world is really the warm-up. Simply put, we ain’t seen
nothing yet.
• Here is a glimpse at the nothing we ain’t seen, a deep dive into four of
these technological rogue waves and the tsunami-like disruption they’re
about to bring to our lives.

4. Accelerated Advancements
• in materials,
• computing,
• sensing,
• networks,
• Artificial Intelligence
• robotics and
• 3D printing

5. ONE: Best Breakdown of Accelerating
Technology
"An analysis of the history of technology
shows that technological change is
exponential, contrary to the commonsense
“intuitive linear” view. So we won’t
experience 100 years of progress in the
21st century—it will be more like 20,000
years.“
This is from Ray Kurzweil’s essay: “The Law
of Accelerating Returns,” the single best
summary of why tomorrow will be nothing
like today.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-
accelerating-returns

6. TWO: Robot Psychiatry and Automatic Preventative Medicine
There’s a rogue wave at the
intersection of sensors, networks,
computers, genomics, AI, and
biotechnology that’s in the
process of totally reinventing
healthcare. IBM’s supercomputer
Watson, for example, can
now diagnose cancer better than
a board-certified doctor.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015
/06/27/watsons-next-feat-taking-on-cancer/
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-
02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor

7. Watson Analytic Capabilities

8. TWO: Robot Psychiatry and Automatic Preventative
Medicine
The Internet-of-things, meanwhile, is
going to facilitate a diagnostic
revolution. Lab-on-a-chip style
health sensors will come embedded
in your clothing. And when your shirt
can do a system-wide medical
analysis and send that information to
a diagnostic supercomputer in the
cloud, then we can start to take care
of people before they get sick, not
afterwards. Think of it as automatic
preventive medicine.

9. The Quantified Self

10. TWO: Robot Psychiatry and Automatic Preventative
Medicine
This, of course, is only one instance of what’s coming. It doesn’t include
telemedicine, / robo-nursesand AI-surgeonsamong other
exponentially advancing fields. So what does this all mean? Peter Diamandis
thinks it means totally free healthcare that’s a hundred times better than
what we have today—a case he makes really well in this super-short
podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voh1ICtlkyk
telemedicine, http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrist/2015/03/12/telemedicine-is-a-game-changer-for-patients-the-system/
robo-nurses http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/robo-nurses-replace-people-deliver-pills
AI-surgeons, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/27/google-johnson-and-johnson-artificial-intelligence-
surgical-robots

11. TWO: Robot Psychiatry and Automatic Preventative Medicine
One of the most interesting developments here is psychological. Two
years ago, Steven Kotler at down with Ellie, the world’s first AI
psychologist. He covers that meeting in detail in this Forbes piece,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2014/07/20/the-uncanniest-valley-what-happens-when-robots-
know-us-better-than-we-know-ourselves/
What’s most important is that Ellie is getting very good results. In some
cases, she’s already better than regular, real human psychologists. The
impact of Ellie will be that AI psychotherapy will soon be available to
just about anyone with an internet connection. This means the
healthcare wave includes both mental and physical health.

12. 3: You’ll Never Own Another Car
• As computing, AI, robotics, networks and
sensors accelerate along exponential
growth curves, one of the most discussed
places these lines intersect and stack is
autonomous cars.
• Access vs. Ownership models
• Uber and Lyft
• Streaming vs. digital downloads and CDs
in music consumption
• Your car sits unused 95% of the time
• Safety and auto fatalities
• Traffic jams
• Unproductive time

13. 3: You’ll Never Own Another Car
• Tesla’s latest models now come with “autonomous mode.”
• Google thinks it’s five years away from the first commercially available
model
• Others https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/autonomous-driverless-vehicles-
corporations-list/
• the market is ready for them. Already, every major car company has an
autonomous division. As does Uber, which has already said it plans on
building an entire autonomous fleet.
• once taxi services and companies like Lyft and Uber have autonomous
fleets—will we even want to own a car? Will we even need driver’s
licenses?

14. 3: You’ll Never Own Another Car
• 96 percent of the cars on the road
are personally owned. And 100
percent of those cars sit idle and
unused 95 percent of the time. But
if you can order any car you like
whenever you like it—a Ferrari for
Friday night on the town, an SUV to
take the family skiing on Saturday,
a car with a bed in it so you can
snooze on your way to work on
Monday—why would you ever
want to own? Autonomous cars
mean you ride in what you want,
when you want, and with lower
costs and considerable upside.

15. Faster, Safer, Cheaper Transportation
• Examine the upside of autonomous car: time saved is the best place to start. If we go this
route, we can reclaim the 2.7 billion hours we spend driving to work.
• We could have cars with desks in them so we could be productive during commutes.
Forbes* recently did a fairly conservative economic breakdown of using autonomous
vehicles to turn useless commute time into useful work time—they see a time-savings
benefit worth $500 billion a year.
• The commute itself will take less time. Autonomous cars self-navigate with eight times
the efficiency of today’s cars, meaning fewer traffic jams and, as platooning or packing
cars together on freeways reduces drag, a 20 to 30 percent decrease in fuel use.
• If you no longer own a car, there’s no mandatory car insurance, no need to renew at the
DMV, and no more trips to the Jiffy-Lube—meaning even greater cost and time savings.
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2014/11/08/the-massive-economic-
benefits-of-self-driving-cars/#2715e4857a0b1329d82c68d9

16. Faster, Safer, Cheaper Transportation
• these cars crash far, far less (81
percent of crashes are caused by
“human error”), the 18,000 people
we lose each year to automobile
deaths will massively decline. We’ll
get to repurpose the $317 billion
those deadly crashes cost us.
Similarly, as we also spent $226
billion on non-fatal crashes, we can
put that money to other uses as
well.
• Thankfully, drunk driving will
become a thing of the past.

17. 3D Printing
• The bigger revolution is what happens when autonomous cars meet
3D printing.
• Already, we can 3D print a car in one day*. Right now, the holy grail of the
auto-end of this field is parts reduction**. My friend Jay Rogers, the CEO of
Local Motors, believes we will soon be able to use 3D printing to reduce
the 20,000 or so parts in a car to about twenty parts—meaning, in the not-
too-distant future, we’ll be snapping together our cars like we now snap
together Ikea furniture.
• 3D Printing of parts is important for the Space Station where boosting a
payload into space is very expensive.
*https://localmotors.com/3d-printed-car/
**http://3dprintingindustry.com/2015/11/04/local-motors-ceo-jay-rogers-
on-the-first-3d-printed-car-series/

18. 4: Totally Addictive Education
• Virtual reality, VR, is our next wave. It sits at the intersection of optics, networks,
sensors, computing power and artificial intelligence—all fields currently
accelerating along exponential growth curves.
• Already, there’s plenty of talk about how this wave will reinvent shopping and
redesign entertainment, but its impact on education will be the far greater
disruption.
• Some of this comes down to neuroscience. VR, for reasons explored in this Forbes
piece*, can trigger the release of six of the brain’s main pleasure chemicals (as
opposed to video games, which can mainly access only one: dopamine).
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2014/01/15/legal-heroin-is-virtual-
reality-our-next-hard-drug/#2715e4857a0b5a97b7ca7472

19. 4: Totally Addictive Education
• Soon, we’re going to be able to make virtual
experiences that are more pleasurable than
actual experiences. This fact has designers of
educational games very excited. It means that
VR has the possibility of creating totally
addictive learning environments.
• What’s more, these environments should
actually be able to accelerate learning. Again,
the reason is neurochemical. A quick
shorthand for how learning works in the brain
is: the more neurochemicals produced by an
experience, the greater chance that
experience moves from short-term holding
into long-term storage.

20. Flow
• Flow is a great example. The state
cocktails five of the brain’s primary
pleasure chemicals, which is why
research done by DARPA and
Advanced Brain Monitoring found that
learning could be accelerated 240-500
percent* in flow. Because VR has this
same capability, it should amplify
learning in a similar fashion.
*
http://www.advancedbrainmonitoring
.com/ted-talk-a-window-on-the-brain-
chris-berka

21. 4: Totally Addictive Education
• Equally important to this discussion is logistics. With brick-and-mortar
schools, getting the education you want is a matter of location. But VR is a
distributed platform, so anyone with an Internet connection and the right
interface gear can attend classes.
• As companies like Facebook, SpaceX and Google are now in an arms race to
bring free wireless to the world, (which should start happening by 2020),
and the interface gear is currently accelerating on an exponential growth
curve, (meaning the cost will drop precipitously over the next few years),
we may not have long to wait for this possibility.
• Put all this together and you have completely distributed, totally addictive,
accelerated learning environments or, more simply, the end of school as we
know it.

22. The Final Frontier
• in the very near future, we’re no
longer a one-planet species.

23. Reusable Rockets
• Elon Musk developed the first,
Jeff Bezos just fired off the
second. And away we go.

24. Economic Driver for Space Exploration
• Asteroid mining. In this Big Think
video Steven Kotler explained
why he agrees with Peter
Diamandis.
• And all of this makes Obama
signing our first asteroid mining
legislation into law last week a
big deal.

25. Space Tourism
• The Bigelow Space Hotel is ready
to go, those just-invented
reusable rockets make its
supposed 2017 deployment not
seem like a totally fruitcake idea.
All of which means I may, in fact,
get to utter the words: “Second
honeymoon in space?” to my
wife before I die.
• Virgin Galactica

26. Viable space stations
• One big problem with colonizing
space is the economics of gravity.
• It costs about $10,000 a pound to get
something out of the Earth’s gravity
well. This makes building actual space
habitats immensely expensive.
• This is why the fact that we can now
use 3D printers in space is a big deal.
• Combine those printers with asteroid
mining (which creates resources for
those printers) and we have a way to
build space stations in space.

27. Some Final Optimistic Thoughts For Those
Who Fear All This Change
• A couple years back, Fareed
Zakaria gave a great
commencement speech at
Harvard describing the reasons
he felt optimistic about the
future. He does this with his
keen eye for history and from a
global perspective.
• Check it out here—it is very
much worth watching.

28. Converging Trends & Disruptions: We cannot grasp the full
potential of exponential technologies until we explore the
interactions across them.