Entrepreneurship And The Singularity

If Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns holds true, we won't be experiencing 100 years of progress in the 21st century--it will be more like 20,000 years of progress at today's rates.  The history of technology demonstrates that change in technologies, specifically information technologies, is exponential and this counters our common sense intuitive view of linear progression.

Information and communications technologies (and this now includes medicine, nanomaterials and others that were not previously part of the paradigm) now double their price performance power every year, and this trend is speeding up.  The standard case for this is Moore's Law, but now systems based in other technologies are also following exponenetial acceleratations.

The economic impact of accelerating returns is powering growth in the key areas of:

1. Nanotechnology
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Robotics
4. Biotechnology
5. Medicine
6. and possibly even entrepreneurship itself

In business today, the proportion of any product or service value in terms of the information (intellectual property, innovation, brand value, data value, etc) is increasingly important.  At the same time, the cost of developing and maintaining the infomration at every level experiences deflation.

Think about images.  Hundreds of years ago, only wealthy patrons could afford to have a skilled artist, who himself would have invested a lifetime to cultivate their talents and processes to create a single reproductive portrait.  This was the case for centuries.  When photography was developed, initially the costs were also incredibly high and photographic images were highly prized.  Nowadays high quality, high resoultion images are plentiful and so easy to produce and store that it is difficult to quantify.  Creative and pioneering photography remains highly valued, but the average person can also walk around with thousands of photographs on thier smart phone.

On a larger scale, all of history and humanity created 5 exobytes of data (5 billion gigabytes) from the start of history to around 2003.  In 2010 this amount of data creation took two days. Next year it will take 10 minutes.

This deflationary force is what makes entrepreneurship a double-edges sword more than ever.  If you are part of the curve your chances for success increase, but if you fall behind, your business will probably perish.

Entrepreneurship itself is being transformed by technology.  According to Steve Blank, the barriers to entrepreneurship in each case they’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten. For example, Internet commerce startups the time needed to get the first product to market has been cut by a factor of ten, the dollars needed to get the first product to market cut by a factor of ten, the number of sources of initial capital for entrepreneurs has increased by a factor of ten.

Accelerate Past Laggards and Your Competition

Peter Diamandis, of the Singularity University discusses how exponential technology can progress so fast that it can easily make established businesses irrelevant.  Exponential technologies like the rapid advances in computation (Moore’s law), biotechnology, and connectivity can be implemented so that entrepreneurs and businesses can use them to gain a competitive advantage.

“If you’re a CEO of a company and you’re not aware of where these technologies are going, they can literally put you out of business in a snap of a finger,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat at a graduation ceremony of the class of Singularity University. “Or, you can use them to leapfrog your competition.”

This notion is also part of the reason why the 10⁹⁺ program at Singularity University focuses on projects for the developing world.  With great opportunities for leap-frogging may come the best rewards.

The Entrepreneurial Singularity

The global economic downturn in the has had an unexpected consequence for startups, especially in the United States – it has created more of them. Young and old, innovators who are unemployed or underemployed now face less risk in starting a company.  Crowd-sourcing and crowd funding are empowering small start-ups to rapidly commercialize innovations.  Micro-financing is extending global capital to parts of the world and population groups that previously never before  had such opportunities.

If we are at the cusp of a revolution as important as the scientific and industrial revolutions what does it mean? Revolutions are not obvious when they happen. When James Watt started the industrial revolution with the steam engine in 1775 no one said, “This is the day everything changes.”  When Karl Benz drove around Mannheim in 1885, no one said, “There will be 500 million of these driving around in a century.” And certainly in 1958 when Noyce and Kilby invented the integrated circuit, the idea of a quintillion (10 to the 18th) transistors being produced each year seemed ludicrous.

It is possible that we’ll look back to this decade as the beginning of our a whole new revolution. We will one day look back at this as the time when scientific innovations and technological breakthroughs were integrated into the fabric of society faster than they had ever been before. When the speed of how businesses operated changed forever. As the time when we reinvented the global economy began to take off and the world reached a level of wealth never seen before.  As Diamandis would suggest, an age of Abundance.

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