Convergence, Disruption, and Resilience

Recently I was contacted by a reporter for a major newspaper and asked to answer a few questions about “future trends in emerging technologies.” Here is what I said.

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Complete entry

Posted by Valkyrie Ice  on  07/29  at  12:34 PM

I would be surprised if there are any innovations in the next decade that are revolutionary enough to disrupt society.

Really Mike?

So Graphene based computers running at THZ speeds, Practical VR on a cellphone sized device, and the strong likelihood of controlled stem cell therapies enabling the "regeneration" of nearly any form of damage done to the human body are not revolutionary enough to disrupt society?

I think you are being a little TOO complacent. But then again, I see an enormous number of "society disruptions" occurring this decade, from the three I listed above to social and political factors which will lead to disruptions. As I see it, we're probably going to see more "societal disruption" this decade than we have since the Industrial Revolution, both world wars, and the Great Depression combined.

Posted by Aleksei Riikonen  on  07/29  at  12:47 PM

"humans were actually changing the climate of the Earth, far more than natural processes ever could"

Strange that you seem to say that natural processes can't ever lead to at least as great climatic change as is currently going on. There have already been very big climatic changes before humans were around, you know:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maximum

Posted by Rick Schettino  on  09/20  at  02:42 AM

I definitely agree that we overestimate what we can achieve in the short term and underestimate the long term. One only need to turn to sci-fi movies for evidence of that. That said, I think we're only beginning to see the disruptions of the technology we already have. Disruptions like mass global extinctions. And advances are now coming so quickly, that it's near impossible to see only a few short years into the future.

I saw a news story recently that some experts were making predictions about who would lead the smart phone market in four years. Then I saw another article that checked on the experts' predictions from four years previous, and these experts in the field didn't even see the Apple iPhone nor Google Android coming - and both of them were in development at the time.

I would even say the iPad is a disruptive technology in the sense that it is changing the mobile computing landscape, changing the way people buy periodicals and books, replacing doctors charts in hospitals and text books in schools, and so on. I think those disruptions are good, but printing companies don't.

I think the potential is there for a seriously disruptive technology in the next ten years. The candidates are already here, waiting to be unleashed - technologies such as geoengineering, genetic engineering and cloning of food, and artificial life, to name a few. And the disruptions caused by industrial pollution, agriculture, mass media, and world travel are just the tops of the iceberg. For example, invasive species, acidification of the oceans, obesity, pandemics, etc.

In the short term, I think we're going to start seeing some serious disruptions. In the long term I foresee a completely engineered planet, where every species of life and ecosystem on earth has been engineered or evolved to survive in a new climate, or the climate itself is engineered to minimize the mass extinction that's already in progress.

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