Fourth Industrial Revolution  

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.

The world is moving toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which mobile communications, social media and sensors are blurring the boundaries between people, the internet and the physical world.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, the digital, and the biological.

Previous economic revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different.

It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and software that translates languages for us almost automatically. Impressive progress has been made in AI in recent years, driven by exponential increases in computing power and by the availability of vast amounts of data, from software used to discover new drugs to algorithms used to predict our cultural interests.

Digital fabrication technologies, meanwhile, are interacting with the biological world on a daily basis. Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, 3D printing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.

While the next economic revolution offers a lot of promise, economists like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have pointed out, the revolution could yield greater inequality, especially in its potential to disrupt labor markets. With automation replacing labor across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines means the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor are diverging rapidly.

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Potentially though, the displacement of workers by technology may result in a net increase in safe and rewarding jobs overall.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, may not only change not only what we do but also who we essentially are.

It could affect our very human identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. It is already changing our health and leading to a “quantified” self, and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation.

As with so many predictions about the future, the possibilities are only limited by our imagination.

SOURCE  World Economic Forum

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Futurology  

Frequently when we are thinking about the future, we are thinking about the very small, from nanotechnology to microscopy advances. But technology to come will also be produced at scales that are unfathomable to us now. 

When it come to large-scale engineering, the future may put some of our current accomplishments far behind them. From architecture, to space travel to science, technological developments promise to unleash huge new machinery possibilities.

Architecture

Skyscrapers in the future promise to push much higher up than those on the planet today. The developing world is where many of these buildings will be constructed. For instance, China will be home to 21 of the world's tallest 50 skyscrapers by 2020, and Dubai is already well known for the impressively tall Burj Khalifa and other tall buildings. 

The Jeddah Tower, under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, will at completion in 2020 reach unprecedented heights becoming the tallest building in the world, as well as the first structure to reach the one-kilometre-high mark.

The structure will be home to the world’s highest observatory. It will also have a separate, 98-foot-diameter outdoor balcony, which was originally intended to be a helipad.

Tall building construction requires massive machinery too, from the construction vehicles and cranes, to the elevators, and building services inside the structures. 

As vertical farming becomes more viable and profitable, the machinery and automation required for massively tall farms will make hydroponics today look infantile. 

The future needs very large buildings too.  Tesla's battery production facility now under construction in Nevada is called the 'Gigafactory.' 

At a planned production rate of 500,000 cars per year in the latter half of this decade, Tesla alone will require today’s entire worldwide production of lithium ion batteries. The Tesla Gigafactory was kicked-off from the company's necessity and will supply enough batteries to support projected electric vehicle demand.

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Also, building and construction in the future may be as much about what is going on under the Earth's surface as above. Tunnel boring machines are already massive machines. For instance, Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct construction recently used the world’s largest tunnel borer: a 300-foot long, 7,000 ton, five stories-high driller named Bertha.

What might be a bigger overall impact though may be the scale of tunneling projects themselves. Elon Musk, for instance recently outlined his plans to bore many tunnels under Los Angeles as a way to alleviate traffic congestion.

Mining

Mining equipment is historically very large, and the pinacle of earth moving was Germany's Bagger 293, a giant bucket-wheel excavator built in 1995. At around 315 feet tall, 740 feet long, and weighing over 31 million pounds, the machine required a crew of five to operate and could move over 8.5 million cubic feet of earth per day. 

To put that in perspective, that is the equivalent of digging a hole the length of a football field and over 80 feet deep in a day.

While coal mining is hopefully not going to be in huge demand in the future, there will no doubt descendants to the massive machines the industry uses.

Space

The space industry has historically been behind some of the largest equipment ever made. This is not only referring to the spaceships themselves, but to the machines used to make, test and train astronauts. From NASA's Super Guppy transport plane that carries spaceships, to the clean rooms used to build satellites, space is all about scale.

With the commercialization of the industry, the pattern is not always for smaller, cheaper, faster either.

The Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) proposed by SpaceX to ferry people and equipment to and from Mars would involve truly gargantuan equipment. The proposed vehicle launch stack, is taller and wider than the Apollo Saturn V, the previous (and still largest) rocket ever.

Although only a small portion of the SpaceX workforce is being committed to the ITS system, the company was able to produce a full-scale development upper stage spaceship liquid oxygen tank. It is made of an advanced carbon fiber composite.

Robotics

Robotics is already a huge economic force, and in the future, the size of this industry's impact will also be matched by the size of robotic devices and machines. Already, the largest earth-moving and mining equipment is nearly self driving. 

Increasingly machines from the other categories in this list, and others like agriculture will see increasing automation and incorporation of robotics technologies. These devices will need a variety of electronics and sub-components like a donaldson air filter.

Within the next decade, farming as we know it is expected to be revolutionized by the use of self-driving tractors and robots that can perform time-consuming tasks now done by people. Much of the same work that is being put to used to make self driving cars a reality can be repurposed for farming, construction and other activities, and these machines may grow in scale as a consequence.  

Heavy equipment of all kinds may eventually begin to move in the direction of artificial intelligence, as we usher in a new era of technology.  Soon advances in robotics may find robotic bulldozers that can operate themselves independent of a human driver may become an common thing at construction sites of the future.

Science

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland is the largest science experiment to date, and the real estate occupied by the machine is immense. Ironically, this massive device has been built to detect the smallest particles in existence. The particle accelerator is built within a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi), at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres (164 to 574 ft) underground.

Already plans are underway to build even larger particle accelerators. In one design, the accelerator ring would be 100 kilometres around and run at seven times the energy of the Large Hadron Collider. The discovery/confirmation of the Higgs boson at the LHC has physicists eager to further the exploration of elementary particles.

Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton is one of those leading the charge to build a super-sized accelerator.

http://susy2013.ictp.it/lecturenotes/06_Saturday/Arkani-Hamed.pdf

Arkani-Hamed’s argument is that particle physics is entering a new phase. With the discovery of the Higgs, the Standard Model has effectively been completed. The theory predicted the outcomes of all known particle experiments. However difficult aspects of the model still prevail. For instance, even the short form of the equations used to describe it fill a page and are riddled with arbitrary parameters. The next generation of accelerators will have a different theoretical goal than prior ones: not to fill in the structure, but to understand it.

The onset of artificial intelligence has already crept in to today’s society in many different ways, and we can expect that heavy equipment of the future allow this type of technology to become ubiquitous. Combined with scale, the future of heavy equipment will be much different than today.

By  33rd Square	Embed

Futurology  

Let’s be honest; we all feel as though we’re living in a dystopian a lot of the time. The predictions of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy came true as soon as cloning was on the cards. And, Orwell’s 1984 was an accurate depiction of where politics is taking us. Yet, against the odds, we keep hope. Why? Because we have the power to speak out.

One thing most dystopias have in common is that the people have been silenced. Communication is removed, and people operate on a solo basis. So, we feel safe because we’re connected. We have a platform, and most of us use it. From Youtube to Twitter, we shout loud and proud about the state of the world and feel safer for it.

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e But, it’s possible that communication is another danger we should look out for. As we can communicate with each other, computers can communicate among themselves. They may not have reached AI level yet - they do need our input at some stage. But, with scientists developing an artificial synapse capable of autonomous learning, it won’t be long before we’re taken out the equation. 61850 source code may be helpful for developing communications systems for us, but will there come a time when it can operate alone? Some people laugh and brush away such a suggestion, but it seems probable when you look at the facts.

Why is it so frightening to think technology could communicate without us? In some ways, humans are afraid of their creations. There have been enough films and books written about machines taking over. Most of those were written well before the possibility even arose. Instead of seeing these as predictions, we could argue that they founded the basis for our research. Scientists watched those films and read those books and decided to explore. But, none of us can deny that the outcomes are rarely good. Another reason to fear the possibility is that it would make us obsolete. Many people have lost jobs to machines over the years. With the BBC reporting that 30% of jobs could be lost in the next decade, it’s understandable that we’re worried.

Despite our fears, though, we continue to invest in new experiments and developments. Why? There’s no denying that medical advances have been amazing. They’ve saved more lives than you could count. But, medical experimentation can also be problematic. With the development of artificial wombs, we’re even taking ourselves out of the reproductive process. In a lot of ways, it seems that we continue to experiment because we want to see how far we can go. What can the human mind create?

But, have the people who lead experiments lost sight of what the public want? If asked, the majority of the population would say that science has gone far enough. It seems there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Is it possible that the communication which is saving us could become a problem later down the line?

By  33rd Square	Embed

Singularity  

The Singularity is coming and promises to change on a fundamental and massive level. While the future will be full of amazing advancements and technological wonders, the question is, will we be able to change with it?

"Right now, we are on the cusp of a technological disruption that will make the switch from horses to cars look like switching from Coke to Pepsi," states YouTuber Joe Scott from the channel, Answers With Joe.

"What happens when a third of your workforce is out of their job through no fault of their own?"

As Scott discusses, there is a dark side of the technological Singularity, one that really needs to be talked about because the way we respond to it is going to significantly alter our future as a species.

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For instance, The BBC released a report just a few weeks ago that said that 30% of jobs are going to go away in the next 10 years because of automation.

Factories already decimated by outsourcing are now losing even more jobs to automation. And as automation becomes more sophisticated, more industries are at risk.

The transportation sector actually makes up 25% of the jobs in the United States, if you can believe that. A full quarter of the population. And autonomous cars… They’re pretty much here.

For Scott, the future has the potential to be a utopia, but in between now and then he worries that things will get bad. How bad? Just "the worst it has ever been in history." He is more afraid of this than the effects of climate change.

SOURCE  Answers With Joe

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Ray Kurzweil  

In two recent interviews, Ray Kurzweil emphatically affirmed his optimism about the future. Despite the impression in the media that things might be getting worse, Kurzweil remains confident in the trends he fist started tracking 35 years ago.

Futurist, author, inventor and Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil spoke recently at the CeBIT 2017 Conference. In the talk, Kurzweil covered many of his common themes and extrapolations of his Law of Accelerating Returns, an extension of Moore's Law. Kurzweil is famous, in large part for this postulation, which he uses to track many technology models that, when distilled to information, point to exponential progression trends.

"There has actually been 18 percent growth every year, in every form of information technology, for the last fifty years, despite the fact that you can get twice as much of it each year for the same cost," he states in the video below.

Kurzweil first explored these technological trends in the books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near, and has continued over the years to be a popular speaker on the subject. He started making his predictions 35 years ago, and they are still coming true.

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To be honest, if you have seen Kurzweil speak before, you might want to skip to 34:20 for the question and answer portion. His take on alien life and the importance of religion are interesting viewpoints.

Kurzweil shares his optimism about the future in the segment too. "The reality is things are getting better, but people don't realize that," he says, following up the question with a number of facts and statistics on poverty, longevity, education, democratic values, and health.

Kurzweil encourages us to weigh the exponential rise in news availability with the actual trends in crime, illness and violence. Our compassion is what is being demonstrated by the collective feeling that things are getting worse instead of better.

"We hear about this terrible thing that happens to a family halfway across the world, and our heart goes out to them—it's actually a good thing, even though it is painful, because then we actually try to do something about it," he says.

Also recently, James Bedsole, who previously made an excellent documentary about the futurist, interviewed Kurzweil, in his Google office in Mountain View, California.

"Optimism is not an idle prediction about the future, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy."

In the interview (included below), Kurzweil is asked if he is comfortable being an optimist. "Optimism is not an idle prediction about the future, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy," he answers. "I do come out on the optimistic side, but it is not an idle optimism that ignores the dangers."

People quickly forget the past, according to Kurzweil. "Imagine life without search engines or search engines or smartphones," he suggests.

SOURCES ExpovistaTV,  James Bedsole

By  33rd Square	Embed

Artificial Intelligence  

For Grady Booch, instead of worrying about an unlikely existential threat of super-intelligent artificial intelligence, he urges us to consider how the technology will enhance our lives.

New tech spawns new anxieties, says scientist and philosopher Grady Booch, but we don’t need to be afraid an all-powerful, unfeeling AI. Booch allays our worst science fiction fears about superintelligent computers by explaining how we’ll teach, not program, them to share our human values. Speaking at a recent TED event (video below), he says rather than worry about an unlikely existential threat, he urges us to consider how artificial intelligence will enhance human life.

"We are on an incredible journey of co-evolution with our machines. The humans we are today are not the humans we will be then.."

"We stand at a remarkable time in human history," states Booch. "Where, driven by refusal to accept the limits of our bodies and our minds, we are building machines of exquisite, beautiful complexity and grace that will extend the human experience in ways beyond our imagining."

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When it comes to the threat posed by artificial intelligence, Booch doesn't think that the warnings brought up by the likes of Nick Bostrom and others will come to pass.

"With all due respect to these brilliant minds, I believe that they are fundamentally wrong," he says. "There are a lot of pieces of Dr. Bostrom's argument to unpack... but very briefly, consider this: super knowing is very different than super doing. [Stanley Kubrick's HAL 9000] was a threat to the Discovery crew only insofar as HAL commanded all aspects of the Discovery. So it would have to be with a superintelligence. It would have to have dominion over all of our world."

"This is the stuff of Skynet from the movie "The Terminator" in which we had a superintelligence that commanded human will, that directed every device that was in every corner of the world. Practically speaking, it ain't gonna happen," continues Booch.

"We are not building AIs that control the weather, that direct the tides, that command us capricious, chaotic humans. And furthermore, if such an artificial intelligence existed, it would have to compete with human economies, and thereby compete for resources with us. And in the end — don't tell Siri this — we can always unplug them."

Booch is optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence. He is currently Chief Scientist for Software Engineering as well as Chief Scientist for Watson/M at IBM Research, where he leads IBM's research and development for embodied cognition.

We are on an incredible journey of co-evolution with our machines. The humans we are today are not the humans we will be then. To worry now about the rise of a superintelligence is in many ways a dangerous distraction because the rise of computing itself brings to us a number of human and societal issues to which we must now attend. How shall I best organize society when the need for human labor diminishes? How can I bring understanding and education throughout the globe and still respect our differences? How might I extend and enhance human life through cognitive healthcare? How might I use computing to help take us to the stars?

That is the exciting thing, says Booch. "The opportunities to use computing to advance the human experience are within our reach, here and now, and we are just beginning."

SOURCE  TED

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Singularity  

Recently at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, Kurzweil reaffirmed his longstanding prediction that the Technological Singularity will happen sometime in the next 30 years.

With a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions, futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil has been called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine.

"By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence."

At the recent SXSW Conference, Kurzweil reaffirmed his predictions about the Singularity. Kurzweil made the statements in an interview following his keynote address, that he undertook with his daughter, author Amy Kurzweil Comix. The two discussed their creative work, inspirations, and collaborations across disciplines, while speculating about the future of storytelling, the arts and technology.

“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” he said. “That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, that’s not just a future scenario. It’s here, in part, and it’s going to accelerate.”

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For Kurzweil, the Singularity represents the exponential improvement of intelligence—both human and machine. He envisions the same technology that will make AIs more intelligent giving humans a boost as well.

“What’s actually happening is [machines] are powering all of us,” Kurzweil said during the SXSW interview. “They’re making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies, but, by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.”

“We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier,” the author of The Singularity Is Near said. “We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.”

“Ultimately, it will affect everything,” Kurzweil said during the interview. “We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.”

SOURCE  SXSW

By  33rd Square

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Peter Diamandis  

In a recent landmark talk, Peter Diamandis shared how we are rapidly heading towards a human-scale transformation, the next evolutionary step into what he calls a “Meta-Intelligence,” a future in which we are all highly connected—brain to brain via the cloud— sharing thoughts, knowledge and actions.

In a recent TEDx Talk, Peter Diamandis shared how we are rapidly heading towards a human-scale transformation, the next evolutionary step into what he calls a “Meta-Intelligence,” a future in which we are all highly connected—brain to brain via the cloud—sharing thoughts, knowledge and actions. Check out the video below.

People have no idea how fast the world is changing according to Peter Diamandis. Reviewing the history of computation on the planet, he describes how the deceptive nature of emerging exponential technology disguises their ever-increasing impacts. Initially with computers, the growth was slow, "it was beginning to change us, but we didn't feel it yet."

"We then entered a period of disruptive growth, where it is exploding onto the world," states Diamandis. He highlights the four driving forces as well as the four steps that is transforming humanity.

The exponential growth of technology promises a world of abundance, says Diamandis. Already global incomes are rising, lifespan is increasing, food price is dropping, energy production is increasing, with price reductions. These factors are contributing to a rise in literacy rates, a reduction and to the reducing cost of transportation and communications.

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For Diamandis this means that above all, knowledge is a million-fold cheaper—for every single person on the planet.

"It's happening in our lifetime, it's happening in your lifetime, it's happening during the next thirty years."

Moveover, "besides creating abundance, and demonetizing the cost of living, we are also about to see the transformation of the human race," he states. Diamandis believes we will change how we raise and educate our children, how we govern ourselves, how we communicate, how we conduct work and business, and we will become a multi-planetary species.

"It's happening in our lifetime, it's happening in your lifetime, it's happening during the next thirty years—so don't blink," says Diamandis emphatically. As Moore's Law continues, technologies like networks, sensors, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, materials science, augmented and virtual reality and artificial intelligence are combining and feeding off of each other, and combining, producing what Diamandis labels, "unexpected convergent consequences."

With billions of new users accessing the internet in the coming years, "we are about to see a massive explosion in innovation, like we have not seen yet," he states. What's more, is the Internet of Things (IoT) will bring billions of more sensors and devices on-line as well. Diamandis mentions how he and Ray Kurzweil predict that this connection will also be expanding to direct neural connections as well.

"AI is our most important tool ever," claims Diamandis, helping us bridge the other technologies with our minds. These will lead to what he calls the creation of a "Meta-Intelligence." What we about to do is to connect eight billion minds, allowing us to look out into the Universe.

Diamandis is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling co-author of two books: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think and Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World. He is also the Co-Founder & Exec Chairman of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world’s leaders on exponentially growing technologies.

As an entrepreneur, Diamandis has started 17 companies. He is the Co-Founder and Vice-Chairman of Human Longevity Inc. (HLI), a genomics and cell therapy-based company focused on extending the healthy human lifespan, and Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Planetary Resources, a company designing spacecraft to enable the detection and prospecting of asteroid for fuels and precious materials.

SOURCE  TEDx Talks

By  33rd Square

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Futurology  

Futurist Juan Enriquez asks: Is it ethical to evolve the human body? In a visionary TED talk that ranges from medieval prosthetics to present day neuroengineering and genetics, Enriquez sorts out the ethics associated with evolving humans and imagines the ways we'll have to transform our own bodies if we hope to explore and live in places other than Earth.

When Juan Enriquez gives a TED Talk, it is always worth checking out. In his latest, Enriquez examines medieval prosthetics to present day neuroengineering and genetics, and sorts out the ethics associated with evolving humans and imagines the ways we'll have to transform our own bodies if we hope to explore and live in places other than Earth.

"When you're talking about a heart pacemaker as a prosthetic, you're talking about something that isn't just, 'I'm missing my leg,' it's, 'if I don't have this, I can die.' And at that point, a prosthetic becomes a symbiotic relationship with the human body," states Enriquez.

Enriquez has a talent for bridging disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. He is the managing director of Excel Venture Management, a life sciences VC firm. He is a member of the board of Synthetic Genomics, which recently introduced the smallest synthetic living cell. Called “JCVI-syn 3.0,” it has 473 genes (about half the previous smallest cell). The organism would die if one of the genes is removed. In other words, this is the minimum genetic instruction set for a living organism.

"All of a sudden, it's not just one little bit, it's all these stacked little bits that allow you to take little portions of it until all the portions coming together lead you to something that's very different."

In the talk (video below), Enriquez mentions the new MIT Media Lab Center for Extreme Bionics headed up by Ed Boyden, Hugh Herr, Joe Jacobson, and Bob Lander. Bionic prosthetics are now being integrated into bone, muscle and skin. Boyden been examining how to connect bionics directly into the brain using light or other mechanisms "If you can do that, then you can begin changing fundamental aspects of humanity," says Enriquez.

Enriquez, co-author of Evolving Ourselves: Redesigning the Future of Humanity--One Gene at a Time, also discusses genomics work being done by the likes of George Church and others. Using genetic engineering and regenerative medicine, the promise is becoming open for more than just simple fixes to our DNA. We are on the forefront of potentially being able to rewrite our code completely.

All of a sudden, what we're doing is we've got this multidimensional chess board where we can change human genetics by using viruses to attack things like AIDS, or we can change the gene code through gene therapy to do away with some hereditary diseases, or we can change the environment, and change the expression of those genes in the epigenome and pass that on to the next generations. And all of a sudden, it's not just one little bit, it's all these stacked little bits that allow you to take little portions of it until all the portions coming together lead you to something that's very different.

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Enriquez brilliantly links the work being done in genomics and bionics to the development of humanity to the next levels of the Kardashev scale. The scale was originally designed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, who was searching for signs of extraterrestrial life in cosmic signals.

The Kardashev scale has three main classes, each with an energy disposal level: Type I (10¹⁶W), Type II (10²⁶W), and Type III (10³⁶W), a civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its own galaxy. Other astronomers have extended the scale to Type IV and Type V. Due to the necessities of space travel, Type II and Type III civilizations alters fundamental aspects of their bodies. "We can't even begin to imagine what that might look like," says Enriquez, "But we're beginning to get glimpses of instruments that might take us even that far."

SOURCE  TED

By  33rd Square

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Futurology  

Since the year 2000, the world has undergone a technological revolution that has touched nearly every aspect of our lives. The changes over the past 17 years have been numerous and profound, but they can be distilled into several key trends.

The world has undergone nothing short of a technological revolution since the turn of the century. These changes have impacted every facet of our lives, but they can be distilled into several key trends.

The Rise of Truly Personal Computing

“Personal computing” was a popular buzzword in the year 2000, but we didn’t yet realize how personal computers would become. Now, nearly everyone carries a smartphone that is vastly more powerful than any consumer computer the year 2000, and as the Brookings Institute notes, we use these personal devices constantly, every single day.

Rather computing being a something we do only occasionally, and only while sitting at a desk, we now engage with our computers all the time. They have become deeply embedded in the rhythms of our daily lives.

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Socializing Moves Online

In part because we are so attached to our devices, now much of our socializing is done online. Whether on Facebook, via text message, or on one of the countless dating apps now available, the internet now has become the primary place we socialize with others, according to a writer at the London School of Economics.

We now talk more online than we do in person. This has literally redefined the meaning of age-old terms like “friendship” and “community.” It has become easier than ever before to connect (or reconnect) with anyone on Earth. But at the same time, the intimacy of our relationships has perhaps diminished, leading some to decrease their time spent online.

No Limits to Digital Innovation

In 2000, it was easy to think of many digital products that were impossible to make, given the current technology. Now, tech has advanced so far that it’s increasingly difficult to envision things that cannot be created. Thanks to advances in hardware and the high-speed connectivity readily available through Ottawa network management companies, the pace of innovation is increasing around the world. As well, the number of people working in technology is rising rapidly across the globe. More people are dedicating themselves to working in tech, which further accelerates the rate of change.

In 2000, nobody expected the next 15 years would change the world. Today, everybody expects that the next 15 years will change everything (again). Together, these trends have reshaped the world since 2000, and made the last two decades a fascinating time to be alive.

By  Kara Masterson

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Ray Kurzweil  

Ray Kurzweil was featured in a one-on-one interview at the New York Times Global Leaders Collective, recently, discussing global accelerating change, artificial intelligence and other factors that are dramatically changing our world.

Recently renowned inventor Ray Kurzweil was featured in a one-on-one interview at the New York Times Global Leaders Collective, with host and top journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discussed Kurzweil’s theories on global accelerating change including examining his insights on how computing and information technologies can advance markets and lead to progress.

"If you look at the impact on employment, the perception is entirely opposite the reality."

When asked about the future of the economy in light of artificial intelligence and other accelerating technology Kurzweil responds, "economic growth statistics completely ignore the increasing value of a dollar. I spent a few hundred dollars for this device on my belt [referring to his mobile phone] and it counts as a few hundred dollars of economic activity. This, despite that it is a billion dollars circa 1980, or a trillion dollars circa 1965 of computation and communication."

"Manufacturing is going to be transformed," continues Kurzweil. "If you look at the impact on employment, the perception is entirely opposite the reality." He also describes how polls continuously show that people perceive things are getting worse, when they are actually getting much better for many more people.

"People are actually better off, but their perception of their economic security is infused with more knowledge of the change in the world," he says in reference to the recent US election results.

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Responding to Bill Gates and Elon Musk's latest descriptions of the threats of artificial intelligence, Kurzweil states that people go through three phases when examining the potential of new technology. One is inspiration, then fear at the potential dangers of the technologies, and finally, a balanced view that the technologies offer both risks and rewards.

The New York Times hosted the first meeting of the Global Leaders’ Collective, a select group of influential C.E.O.s, executives and innovators who lead companies in the luxury space around the world.

The purpose of this inaugural summit was to bring the best minds from diverse industries together to assess and navigate the dramatic new challenges in a key global market. In the wake of Brexit, President-Elect Trump's administration on the horizon, innovative technologies impacting strategic decisions, volatile demand in emerging markets, geopolitical risk and shifting trends in consumer behavior, companies require stronger leadership than ever before.

Kurzweil has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind.  He is co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University and a director of engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

SOURCE  The New York Times Conferences

By  33rd Square

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