Introduction

Good afternoon everybody. This presentation is a summary of a week-long firehose of information I consumed in December at Singularity University in Silicon Valley. Plus my own conclusions.

SU is about ‘exponential technology’ - which I’ll get to. It’s also about robot battles, asking questions and meeting like-minded people.

My primary goal is to convince you that there are a few technologies accelerating towards us. In the next 5 to 20 years they will cause significant change and massive disruption in every industry. If not the economy and world as a whole.

My secondary goal is to give you a couple of nuggets to digest. Things that you can use as a starting point for further thought. Ask yourselves, with an open mind, how these technologies might disrupt your own business.

So please suspend disbelief a little and listen with less skepticism than unusual.

Once we’ve looked at the tech, we’ll turn to some consequences, finishing with how this has affected me personally.

Deceptive

We never got our flying cars, robots and space explorers.

But don't forget the other lesson of the boy who cried wolf. The wolf did come eventually.

Exponential tech is not the stuff I love to see at CES: flexible tv screens and drone delivery are cool but there are more fundamental, subtle shifts underway.

I'm talking today about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual reality (VR), the block chain, medical tech, nanotech, the internet of things (IoT), energy, space, 3D printing and robotics.

But we will only have time to look at 3 today.

All of these technologies have been the subject of intense research over many decades. But are all suddenly and simultaneously exploding with innovation.

This is not a coincidence. As most of you know computing power is subject to a phenomenon known as Moore’s law. To paraphrase: processing power doubles every 18 months or so.

So once any field of study relies on computing power, it becomes subject to Moore’s law too. Thus accelerating at an (almost) exponential rate.

And thus, exponential technology.

Artificial intelligence

The robot in this movie (Ex Machina) is “strong AI”. We don’t have “strong AI” but we do have weak, or specific, AI.

What do I mean when I say these things are "AI"? Basically, an algorithm that learns as it goes along. It improves for all interactions, with each individual interaction.

A word of caution - don’t dismiss this stuff.

People treat AI and magic the same way – as soon as they know the trick, they stop calling it magic. Or in this case, AI.

This phenomenon even has a name, it’s called the Tesler Theorum, or AI effect:

“AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”

In the 1960’s computation was ‘obviously’ a thing that computers could do. But chess… now that would be impressive. Then after Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997 people said “oh well that was just brute force computing” not real ‘intelligence’. And after IBM Watson won Jeopardy… more of the same.

AI is not about whether we humans think that the computer is 'intelligent' it is about whether the computer is learning.

What are some examples? Google Photos - look at this video, edited by AI from a number of my videos. Google sent me another 200 that I still haven’t watched. (And the technology behind it, TensorFlow, is now open source.) Gmail has an auto-reply function. Skype has auto-translate. Deep art will turn your photos into art.

And Siri might be mildly disappointing but it remains amazing. Think - you can now talk at your phone, ask questions and get back intelligible, and sometimes intelligent, answers.

So by definition, the version of Siri that is in your pocket right now is the worst version that will ever exist...

That's a theme with Moore's Law and deserves contemplation. Every technology we're talking about is currently in its complete infancy.

We’ve become very good at AI recently, and the tools are widely accessible. It cost a billion dollars to develop Deep Blue, but that computing power and software are now trivial.

IBM Watson is doing amazing things in cancer research and cost many billions but now any of us can access it for a small fee online.

AI has already beaten the best human analysts for certain kinds of cancer tests.

Remember that one of the main reasons the internet has been so successful is because of how accessible it is. Accessibility, because of the power of huge numbers (as in, people) drives innovation.

That is why we should be excited, and intimidated, by what is happening in Artificial Intelligence.

Think about this statement again. You might be quite fond of the work your company is doing. But if some kid in a dorm room can achieve 90% of the same results for 0.001% of the price... What do you think is going to happen?

Virtual reality

This is a product called Oculus Rift, you may have heard that Facebook bought it last year for $2 billion. I went for a roller coaster ride on the Oculus in December and I can tell you that it felt about 90% as real as an actual ride. The commercial product is coming out in March. Think of it as the virtual-reality equivalent of the first iPhone.

This is the Void - a real-world gaming environment matched up with a Virtual world.

But VR is NOT just about gaming, just like the iPhone isn’t just about Angry Birds.

- Imagine being able to travel anywhere in the world at will. - Attending a virtual lecture by any expert. - Walking around a house for sale. - Browsing through a bookshop - and imagine what you’d

choose between Amazon, or a Virtual Reality, or augmented reality bookstore.

- Imagine being able to learn practical skills like driving, flying, or training on a new machine before you apply for the job.

All virtually. All from your home with between 75% and 90% fidelity when compared to physical presence.

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You may be tempted to dismiss the potential because your product is so amazing, but remember: if the alternative is cheaper, or even free, the test is not “perfection” the test is “good enough”.

And they are at good enough already.

F35 helmet - this is already in use in the military. These pilots do not see any direct light, they fly completely (in the real world) using VR tech.

Within 2 to 5 years expect the VR experience to be full body, and no longer good enough, but better than.

And ask yourself then how many of your customers might choose this experience over the real thing…

And just for fun here's a quick demo of some Augmented Reality. This is from a company called Magic Leap - they’ve raised $2 billion and still haven’t shown the public what their product looks like.

Other Tech

There are lots of amazing things happening that I’m not going to speak about today but I want to signpost briefly.

There is a new Carbon XPrize for a product to capture carbon from smokestacks and turn it into a profitable revenue stream.

A company called Modern Meadow is growing synthetic meat and leather.

Longevity is now a legitimate field of medical enquiry. Advances in early cancer detection, biological nano tech; data analysis and machine learning is being applied to genetic and behavioral information in such a way that it is already extending health and lifespan.

The colonization and commercial exploitation of space is just about to begin. The first reusable rockets (reducing launch costs by 80%) landed in November and December. Two commercial trips to the moon are booked for 2017 as part of the $30m Google Lunar X prize to get a robot on the moon.

We will see a woolly mammoth cloned within five years. We will see driverless cars next year (as an experiment on a limited scale). Over the next decade we will see the first cancer vaccines, mainstream nano tech, 3D printing of food, clothes and housing…

But it is not just about the individual applications. Although they are exciting and I love reading about them.

Pay attention to the pattern – and ask what is going on. How will it affect you? How can you join it or leverage it or mitigate against it?

Blockchain

So the only other technology that I want to talk about in some detail today is the block chain.

Block chain is the technology beneath Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is only the most obvious and simple application of the technology so try to forget about it.

That is because, next to virtual-reality and artificial intelligence it is:

1) the technology that is going to make the biggest difference in the next two years,

2) it’s also one of the hardest to get to grips with while

3) being most disruptive to industries here on this island. And yet

4) it’s completely accessible to anybody who wants to use it – so any of you could innovate with this tool right away. These are new companies that are all using it right now.

Think of the block chain in the following way. Imagine the world was actual a village of 10 people. Every time we do anything, we tattoo it onto everybody. Forever. For everything. To document our acknowledgement and agreement that the transaction had taken place as described. In that village, there is no need for any other tool to document agreement. Because it’s hard to argue with all those bloody tattoos. So whether the transaction was me buying a house from you. Or electing Nico. Or a loan, or a marriage or a divorce or birth, or a plane ticket... You can record it all and everybody agrees.

That is what the block chain is. A tool for universal agreement. A technology that allows us all to behave as if we were just a village of 10 people. And we all agreed on everything.

The creation of crypto currencies was the first application. And now it's being applied to land registration, smart contracts, time-stamping, certification and more.

If everybody trusts the block chain and we start to use it more, what happens to those individuals, companies, industries and institutions that exist to confirm, to register, to process and to enforce?

What happens to our lawyers, our courts, our land registries, our passports, our contracts, our banks, our stock markets, our stockbrokers, our insurance companies?

There are people out there right now working day and night to completely disrupt each of those industries and more.

Conclusion(ish)

Any one of these technologies would be disruptive enough. Think about the billions of dollars of market cap lost to “creative destruction” because of the Internet…

A single technology that has only been around, in the public sense, for about 20 years. How many of us thought this (Amazon) was the dawn of a new era?

Think about the billions of dollars of new value created since the dawn of the smartphone? A technology that is only nine years old this month.

We're talking about 6 or 7 new phenomena that will each be at least as disruptive as ‘the internet’ and ‘mobile’. All emerging from their ‘deceptive’ phase between now and 10 years from now.

Remember faxes, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Kodak?

Kodak invented the digital camera… in 1973. They had no idea…

If you think that your company or your industry is immune to these forces then you have not been paying attention for the last 20 years.

If you are in health or fitness and have not considered how the IoT, AR and AI are going to affect you... You have some homework to do.

Are you in tourism, hospitality or education? Think about how VR is going to impact your bottom line. Or the size of your available market or your infrastructure needs... You need to

go back to your team and think about how you can incorporate this into your strategy.

If you are in retail, logistics or shipping, have you looked at 3-D printing and VR? How are they going to affect your supply chain and customer interaction? It’s time to rip up your strategy documents and start designing a solution.

Here’s Astro Teller expressing Google’s strategic approach…

You need to:

- develop your “adaptability quotient” - determine what the key driver of the value is in your industry and - be the person who turns that into a platform for others to grow off (you’ve all seen this Uber slide right);

Because if you don’t some 23-year-old in Korea is going to do it for you. Then you’ll end up on her platform, struggling for market share while your margins plummet.

You can even reverse-engineer this slide - what would be the wildest thing for my company to “have none” of?

- Start collaborating with your competitors. - Start sharing things. Open up. - Start a Skunkworx team. - Form uncommon partnerships - get a real outside

perspective into the boardroom. - You must get creative. Use design thinking, rapid

prototyping and science fiction scenario planning. - These will all force you to get out of the box.

As Paul Saffo says “find the sacred cows in your business… And kill them!”

Global grand challenges

Right. So, from a business point of view those are the things you need to worry about. But that’s still micro, let’s have a look at the macro.

While poverty is on the decrease and health is increasing globally, we have a long way to go and our planet is really, really suffering.

This is all the water on earth. That tinier ball is fresh water. The one that you can’t see is fresh water that’s actually accessible.

We know this. The world knows it. Here are the new UN goals (some of them). Here is SU’s list of global challenges (for its incubator/accelerator program).

Exponential tech means that things happen very, very quickly. We could quite feasibly be heading towards a complete dystopia… or a tech utopia. I believe the next 30 years will tell…

One of the biggest drivers of this, is the challenges to the labour force. None of these technologies are driving mass employment for unskilled labour.

Here are some projections on unemployment potential over the next period of automation. Here are the so-called Nini (not studying, not employed) figures for latin america. Projected to reach 25% within 5 years, if not there already.

In the past, labor markets had enough flexibility to recover from large-scale disruptions. But those disruptions took place over decades. And so, the new industries that emerged could keep pace with the creative destruction.

Here are some vulnerable industries.

A mere 10% utilisation of autonomous vehicles by truck fleets in the US would put 700,000 people out of a job. Note that they tend to be lower paid workers - those least able to cope without an income for any period of time.

So - huge technological disruption, mass unemployment on the way and... Current global scale existential crises. In the form of income inequality, climate change, food and water insecurity. And a completely unjust distribution of resources.

Get Personal

For me and Nupur, personally, this is where it all comes together.

The disruption coming from technology is unstoppable. But it presents us with a unique opportunity to redesign many human, global systems. We could align the real needs of humanity at a global level with what is being delivered on the supply side.

Maybe society as a whole will choose to only support more sustainable business models? Like Tom’s Shoes or Patagonia? Or something more radical like platform cooperativism.

Perhaps as people are losing jobs, they will become more engaged in their communities, volunteering and helping those around them?

Or perhaps they will be more inclined to choose 'work' that is more fulfilling?

I would love to see small, random acts of kindness become the norm…

But I don’t think any of those things will happen by themselves. I believe we need systematic solutions, or alternatives, in place to ensure that making those choices is sustainable.

Alternative reward or value exchange systems or complementary currencies that could augments the existing monetary system.

Guaranteed Basic Income experiments are already underway in Europe and YC, the most popular tech accelerator in the

US just announced they want to hire their first permanent researcher to look at this question in the US.

If we align financial reward with our values, perhaps we will come through this next challenging, transitional period as a truly just and compassionate society.

And it is incumbent on all of us to recognize that the current modus operandi is simply unsustainable, and that saying that doesn’t render you a heretic; and considering changes or restriction on existing implementations of capitalism doesn’t make you a revolutionary socialist.

We need to change something - we are all living downstream, in time, and we need to stop poisoning our own futures.

Technologist David Roberts said “Our power comes from our compassion not our technology.”

Perhaps our technology could nudge us all to exercise a little more compassion.

In any event, that’s what I’m going to be working on this year.

Gordon Casey @gordonwcasey gwpcasey@gmail.com www.brave.ly