Exponential Thinking
Gathering some of the latest articles such as The Fourth Industrial Revolution or Humans Need Not Apply, it is clear that the key element is that these are exponential changes. Although Tim Urban explains it brilliantly, when we talk about exponential stuffs, the name of Ray Kurzweil always comes out.
Kurzweil talks about the Singularity, a concept that defines a moment in time beyond which it is not possible to predict the existing order of things through the natural laws, mainly because the exponential growth of new technologies has changed the world we know. The machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined and has merged with everything, including ourselves. This moment is placed in 2045.
It sounds like science fiction or something that will happen in a very long long time, but the trap is in exponential thinking. Human beings think in a linear way, our brain looks for patterns, things based on what we know, what we understand, and is near to us in time. We simply add a constant to the formula when we really need to multiply it. Let’s give an example besides the well-known indian chess tale:
Here’s another way to think about it: imagine you are going to walk down a road taking steps a meter in length. You take 6 steps, and you’ve progressed six meters (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). After 24 more steps, you’re 30 meters from where you began. It’s easy to predict where 30 more steps will get you — that’s the simplicity of linear growth.
However, setting anatomy aside, imagine you could double the length of your stride. Now when you take six steps, you’ve actually progressed 32 meters (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32), which is significantly more than the 6 meters you’d move with equal steps. Amazingly, by step number 30, doubling your stride will put you a billion meters from where you started, a distance equal to twenty-six trips around the world.
The problem is when you live with a linear mind in an exponential world, and that’s what’s happen right now. The only thing that lasts is change and that’s why the ability to adapt is the best asset we can have. And if that weren’t enough, our creations (the legal or political system, for example) are also linear and that’s why everything is out of place, crushing and going against the “natural” evolution.
If we think of the business world, another name comes out: Salim Ismail, a Canadian entrepreneur, founder of the Singularity University and the author of Exponential Organizations, a book that is four years old, but I still recommend reading. Here is a video of him introducing exponential thinking and here is a lecture at USI explaning all of the concepts around ExO.
Do you believe we will ever think this way?
#365daysof #futurism #innovation #singularity #exponential #day31
