This Changes Everything, The Law of Accelerating Returns
Is it possible to live forever? This question can be met with derision, apathy, and scorn. Common responses include “We don’t have the capability and we never will have the capability to do that”, “Living forever is only the province of God and god’s chosen.”, “We shouldn’t do that because it will deplete our natural resources” and the classic apathetic “eye rolling”.
When harbingers of bygone days speak out like this, you can only help by politely showing them the thousands of successful computing, regenerative, bionic, nano, and cybernetic advancements that have occurred over the last decade.
You can show them books such as: Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, J Storrs Hall’s Nanofuture, Aubrey de Grey’s Ending Aging, James Hughes’s Citizen Cyborg, Michael Fossel’s Reversing Human Aging, Marvin Minsky’s The Emotion Machine, Peter Diamandis’s Abundance, or even James Gardner’s The Intelligent Universe (we become the galaxy’s ET). You can also bring them to a Singularity Institute conference, a Humanity+ (Transhumanist) conference, or a TEDMED conference to get a grasp of the emerging future.
Steve Jurvetson was a programmer of computer chips for HP and is now a venture capitalist and is on the board of the biggest paradigm changing companies on earth, that include: Tesla Motors, Synthetic Genomics, D-Wave (quantum computers), and SpaceX. Steve’s eye opening perspective on exponential growth is given to Google employees covering: The law of accelerating returns, investing, evolutionary algorithms, predicting the future, and business strategies as humanity evolves.
Steve Jurvetson on Meaningful Innovation: Whether to Design or Evolve at Google Tech talks.
The rate of change brought about by technology is so rapid that today’s leaders use the law of accelerating returns to help predict what disruptive technology will develop and what will be needed as society is changed by these events. The emerging future has created subject specific websites that highlight videos of the leaders of each of the industries describing the new paradigms that are changing the world for the good, while leaving today’s industries in the dust. In the last 5 to 10 years we have witnessed disruptive technology that has benefitted the world while ripping apart the financial structure of multiple industries such as the recording industry, newspapers, magazines, TV, movies, etc. Over the next 5 to 10 years we will see the medical and manufacturing industries go through the same downsizing and obsolescence as the music industry. Politicians will wrongly claim that policy is the driving force in society, which is absurd. If the power grid, cars, refrigeration, computers, the internet, and smart phones were not created and manufactured by inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs then we would still be living short Stone Age lives, no matter what political ideology was applied to society. Successful old world ways are accepted by the general populous and supported by politicians, unfortunately the successful old ways are woefully ineffective and in medicine. Successful old ways still lead to disease, aging, frailty, and death. Medicine’s standard of 5 year survival rates in curing a disease in clinical trials is no longer good enough. Doctors and patients are looking to medicine 2.0 and its preventative, regenerative, and cost effective solutions that extend healthier life indefinitely.
Juan Enriquez’s 2009 TED presentation addresses how our financial and political actions can lead us into thinking they are the drivers of humanity’s destiny and then shows how technology is ultimately powering human destiny towards Homo evolutis.
Medicine will shortly become a do it yourself (DIY) preventive disease platform using medical tricorders, MEMS, throw away biomarker chips, and a doctor that is a computer in the cloud for the price of electricity. Cures will become personalized and cheaper without damaging any other cells in the process of curing you. Manufacturing companies are going to have to deal with local, and in home fabricators, and 3D printing, reducing their profits. Oil companies and power and light companies will down size, as most surfaces start to produce energy during the day and during the night making the electric grid and gas stations quaint antiques. Police departments will be downsizing. Police will reduce their highway patrol and traffic control points as more and more autonomous cars fill the roads and IBM’s Detective Watson cracks the case. Trucks, trains, and ships will not be used as much; since fabrication of products will be local, vertical farms will be in the cities, and transportation companies will turn to autonomous transportation.
Today false medical claims and scientific scams have been perpetuated upon the naive in the name of breakthrough medical treatments. These medical scams will be minimized as our “virtual assistants” find us legitimate medical resources that will match up our electronic medical records from tricorder instant diagnostics. Within 15 to 20 years laboratories will send us the specific nano or cellular treatments to correct the cellular problems that have been found with 1) our medical microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) diagnostic machines, or 2) by analyzing a specimen in a flash drive sized genome/proteomic/biometrics medical analyzer. It will soon be difficult to find people that do not see that living forever is here for all of us. That’s because our confidence will build as our personal virtual assistants will constantly be changing our life with the best financial, medical, social, business, and personal growth opportunities that the world can offer us, wherever we are.
As more people become aware of the faster and faster pace of technological advancement, it will become very obvious that living forever in our lifetime has already happened for the majority of us.
