I was born in the 21st century. How does my future look?

On October 11th and 12th, thanks to a sponsorship from Google, I was able to attend the inaugural SingularityU Canada Summit in Toronto. As a student living in the 21st century, many of these emerging technologies play great relevance to my life, both now and in the future. Understanding the possibilities and even experiencing them firsthand are, and will be, important in changing my mindset when facing the future.

What do I mean by changing my mindset?

Well, imagine a pond in which there is one lilypad. You visit the pond each day, but observe that the pond has some curious properties — number one, that the number of lilypads in the pond doubles each day, and number two, that the lilypads stopped doubling as soon as the entire pond was covered. If there the entire pond was first fully covered on the 24th day, on which day was the pond half covered? Don’t think about it, just answer.

If you answered day 12, as many do, you are displaying the linear nature of the human brain. The correct answer would be 23, as the doubling of the lilypads means that it would have been 50% full the day before it was 100% full. This is called exponential growth.

Both you and I live in a world with exponential growth. What that means is that technology is developing at a pace similar to that of your peculiar pond — technological potential is doubling each year, in accordance to Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law is an observation made by Gordon Moore: the number of transistors that we can fit in one integrated circuit doubles every 12–18 months.

Think about that. We, as humans, have a linear mindset in an exponential world. The technology we created is moving far more quickly than we humans are! As such, there are a few things we need to do.

These are just six things I learned at the summit. We also talked about a large variety of other things, such as self-driving cars, STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) versus STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math), assumptions, cryptocurrency, democratization of information, and so much more.

So, now what? With all this newfound information and different points of view, what should I be doing or saying?

Well, for one, I will be taking more time to research and prototype possible technologies for the future. With more information than the world could ever need or want right inside my pocket, I have the capability of doing something truly disruptive. You are capable of it as well, as long as you put the effort in.

So, the question becomes: “Will you?”

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