Dystopia is Here, Please Applaud

The Future is Faster than You Think opens with a suitably futuristic scenario the authors Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler say is playing out right now: the arrival of flying cars. ‘By 2027 or so, you’ll be able to order up an aerial rideshare as easily as you do an Uber today,’ they predict, ‘And by 2030, urban aviation could be a major mode of getting from A to B.’ Shortly after that, they have a prediction for this year: ‘In 2023 the average thousand-dollar laptop will have the same computing power as a human brain.’ The reason this is going to happen, according to them, is the convergence of formerly independent waves of exponentially accelerating technologies. They cite author and futurist Ray Kurzweil to claim that ‘we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century.’