Summary of the book “The Future Is Faster Than You Think”
The author Peter H Diamandis is a Greek-American engineer, an entrepreneur himself and an advocator of technology in enhancing the quality of human lives. He is the co-founder of establishments, executive chairman in few of them, that promote collective collaboration from the public to solve some of the world’s problems leveraging the exponential technology boom. The first book he co-authored alongside Steven Kotler titled “Abundance” in 2012 was a futuristic discussion about technology’s potential that will raise global standards of living within the next 25 years. In 2014, Clinton Global Initiative recommended “Abundance” to the readers as an antidote to negative news. This book “The Future Is Faster Than You Think” , again co-authored alongside Steven Kotler is the third book from Peter Diamandis, “BOLD” being the second. All these books have a common theme. They level up the readers to think how the upcoming technologies act as game changers improving our productivity and overall wellbeing. Specifically in this book “The Future Is Faster Than You Think”, emphasis is on the technologies converging and filling the Business purpose. For few Businesses, waiting was worthwhile until breakthroughs arrived albeit in sequence. However from here onwards, the path to the future is much faster than the past. To learn more about the initiatives Peter runs and is part of, visit https://www.diamandis.com/
Is Flying car possible? As of 2022, the technology world is experimenting with “Autonomous cars”. Probably in the future, flying cars will be a reality. We will have to wait, but until when? The experimentation on autonomous cars began, likely, when artificial intelligence and the internet of things started interacting with each other. Drill into these two fields further. Artificial intelligence itself has to wait until the programming languages have in-built meaningful libraries and repositories. These libraries enable programmers to code faster. In parallel, hardware has to be robust enough to serve the compute intensive software demand. Exchange of information between computers needs speed and accuracy. Think internet and bandwidth and speed, generations such as 3G, 4G, 5G. Flow of information on the internet is prone to prying eyes and hence need to be secured. Cyber security is of prime importance. The Internet of Things is hardly possible without sensors. Sensors or detectors themselves have evolved through a series of inventions in the material science world. Explained in a series of events, segregated by Businesses, author builds the ground for the readers to appreciate the convergence of many technologies. Collectively these technologies have made remarkable progress in shopping, advertising, entertainment, education, healthcare, longevity, insurance, finance, real estate and food. Peter inspires us to peek into the future and imagine possibilities that can manifest, although it may look like a dream at the same time. Purpose of a car, either man-handled, flying or autonomous, is to transport from point A to B. If converging technologies have made progress that were un-imaginable in the past, what is stopping us from envisioning a hyper loop. Even a rocket that would travel from Los Angeles to Sydney in 30 minutes.
This book touches every area of the technology boom that one may have read in the last couple of years. Quantum computers, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, material science, networks, sensors, 3-D pricing, augmented reality, virtual reality, blockchain. And all of this backed by discussions on its emergence and convergence with each other makes this book an enjoyable read. I don’t have enough research or material to support this, but the start -ups and entrepreneurs mentioned in this book, who dared to think differently and solve hard problems cements the credibility and the purpose. So much numerical data without charts adds to difficulty in assimilating information though. By the end of the book, the author succeeds in delivering a key message about the growth of exponential technologies. It is not possible without six D’s : Digitalisation, Deception, Disruption, Demonetisation, Dematerialisation, and Democratisation. A positive feedback loop with the market is a must that comes with failures but eventually follows the law of accelerating returns. Human brains are designed to think linearly but the technology revolution is on the exponential path.
Throughout the book , the author keeps the audience engaged with numerous examples of entrepreneurs who, with their exponential thinking, achieved marvelous feats. Hence in my summary I am including names of all the startups that have been quoted in the book. I believe this will be a value add in your knowledge dictionary.
