Singularity University Notes — Exponential Thinking (1 of 25)
Nathaniel Calhoun: Introduction to Exponential Thinking
The speaker:
This guy is one of the most intense people I have met in my entire life. It was liberating meeting Nathaniel because until I met him, I thought I was crazy intense. I am hopeful someday my wife will meet this man and realize what intensity really is. Nathaniel built CODE Innovation six years ago, he is one of those guys who truly cares about his cause and is absolutely not afraid to be an open, honest conscience to his organization.
Nathaniel’s wife, Ellie, also works at SU. She is not as intense! She is actually quite the opposite, but also an incredibly brilliant person who is inquisitive and showed us some wonderful techniques about hacking flow state using music. More about Elllie later.
What I learned from Nathaniel:
Exponential thinking and how quickly technology will change our world was not something new for me. However, I learned a lot about how people in power have a major tendency to completely miss trends:
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home — Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977”
This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be taken seriously as a means of communication.” — William Orton, Pres. Western Union 1876
I continue to see this hubris at play with a number of business leaders. Generally I find insecure business leaders who are driven solely by self interest have a very hard time listening to other people. The reason why such leaders have a hard time listening because they have a hard time believing and internalising that another human being or resource working in their organisation could have aspirations that are bigger than their whole organisation. Thus, the “I know better” or the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (“HIPPO”) starts to prevail.
Going into the course I was fairly sure that most 20th century corporations will cease to exist in our lifetime. I walk away utterly convinced that majority of existing publicly traded large corporations will not exist in the next 15–20 years. There is plenty of research showing how the average life span of companies is coming down, there’s the Kodak/Instagram example and lots of other examples.
The really important point to internalise is that because the nature of technology is exponential, the next 5 years will go a LOT faster than the last 5 years. Likely disruptions in the next 5 years will equal the ones from the past 40–50 years roughly in my view. If you are still struggling with this, count 1–30 linearly and then exponentially to appreciate how deceptive a doubling can be.
I learned about the 6Ds of Exponential Technologies which essentially say that whenever a technology is digitised it becomes deceptive and disruptive because digitisation eventually leads to de-materialisation, demonetisation and democratisation. Examples are Skype, Amazon, Google, eBay, and so many others. I also learned that regulation is actually going to be the biggest challenge and regulators will need to up their game as well.
What I enjoyed the most about my first session was a way of thinking adopted by Astro Teller at Google. In order to decide whether Google should invest in self driving cars or not, Astro simply asked
“Is there a scenario in the future that DOESN’T involve self driving cars? No. So let’s just do it”!
No financial models, no investment committees, no stupid questions and we finally have self driving cars. I think that’s an example of exponential thinking that will probably scare the living daylights out of most corporations but that’s what the future requires. Clearly such decisions will require a high degree of trust in an organisation as well, and I believe that will be one big differentiator in who survives versus who dies: trust levels between owners and managers. Perhaps the time has arrived for truly re-inventing organisations.
Just like that we were introduced to this wonderful framework which keeps asking whether there is a scenario that DOESN’T involve sustainable food, free energy, medical care for all, zero G 3D printing and so on. The big one was:
Is there a future that DOESN’T involve safe and equitable living conditions for all people? No, so let’s just do it!
My big take away: IS there a future scenario in which I don’t find 150–200 self actualised humans to collaborate with? No, so let’s just do it! More on this later. I think this is the natural first step because we are indeed the average of 5 people we spend most of our time with. Spending most of my time with 5 fully self-actualised humans sounds like a great starting point. Though even before I do that, I need to keep making efforts towards my own self-actualisation.
I believe we can now make introspection easy, and difficult questions about how to define values can also be made easier using the right technologies (more on this later). I love this quote from William Gibson:
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”
The full set of detailed notes available at this link
