Did you know? Shift Happens

Back in 2007 there is a great little video making the rounds about the exponential rate of change we are living through titled “Did you know?; Shift Happens”. This video was very inspiring for me and motivated me to start seriously studying the future. It’s a little outdated now — for example it talks about the impressive growth of users on MySpace (Facebook was just getting started in 2007 and wasn’t very popular yet). It’s still both educational and strangely moving.

The video was based on a presentation about the future of education created by Karl Fisch, a high school teacher in Colorado. It contains some of the predictions about future computer power that were made by Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity is Near”, as well as some comments about the growth of China and India. Besides a lot of intriguing facts, it is accompanied by a wonderful instrumental musical selection that becomes strangely haunting after listening for a while.

There have been multiple updated versions of this made since then, though the original is still the most moving to me. More information is available, including links to some of the new versions, at: http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/