Humanity
Humanity has continuously evolved: from hunter-gatherers to agrarian societies; from
industrialization to today’s Information Society. From our earliest beginnings, we have
strived to improve our circumstances with the aid of technology, and each transition from
one stage to the next has brought with it new narratives, new ways of organizing ourselves,
and new political power hierarchies. The most significant difference between then and now
is the speed at which things are changing. Homo sapiens spent 200,000 years
as a hunter gatherer. The rate of change during this period was so slow that changes were not noticeable
by any single individual. Generation after generation we repeated ourselves, re-created what
we had learned from our forefathers.
12,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution spread and supplanted hunters and gatherers
over a period of a couple of thousand years. However, the Agricultural Revolution had
more far-reaching consequences than just a new way of producing food; it brought with it
towns, specialization and new technologies. Technological development consequently had
a big impact on how we organized ourselves.
200 years ago
A mere 200 years ago, people’s lives were transformed yet again by the technologies ofindustrialization. Industrialization meant using the power of machines instead of manpower,
and the introduction of chemical production processes. The Industrial Revolution was a
major milestone in our history and changed almost all aspects of people’s daily lives. For the
first time in history, the population as a whole experienced sustained improvements in its
standard of living. Industrialization also meant explosive population growth, the organization
of labor, and the establishment of city societies as we know them today.
What we today refer to as the Digital Revolution began sometime between the 1950s and the
1970s. This revolution represented the transition from analogue, mechanical, and electronic
technologies to digital technologies. The first digital computer was developed during this
period. During the 1990s, things went to the next level when the Internet became ubiquitous.
The Digital Revolution, with the computer and the internet, has brought us to what we
today call the Information Society. The Information Society has created a knowledge-based
society which is important in itself and which has also had a significant impact on both
the manufacturing and service sectors by, among other things, enabling the optimization
of manufacturing processes and providing a foundation for mass customization However,
the most interesting aspect of these developments is neither the Information
Society nor the Knowledge Society: it’s the digitization! Digital products have a number of
characteristics that set them apart from the physical products we are familiar with today.
A digital product can be replicated ad infinitum without any loss of integrity and can be
transported to the other side of the world in a matter of seconds. Finally, the relationship
between price and performance for digital products can be expressed by an exponential
function. We have discovered that the number of calculations that can be performed by a
computer (for the same price) doubles every second year. The smartphone in your pocket
today is already several thousand times faster and over a million times smaller and cheaper
than the world’s fastest computer was in 1968. Realizing this is essential to understanding
the evolution of digital products today.
A plethora of technologies are beginning to benefit from this development because they,
too, have gone digital. This includes robots, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and
3D printers. By going digital, they can take advantage of the enormous computational
power that digitization brings to the table. And when digitization becomes the driving
force, things go exponential.
But exponential growth is difficult for people to understand intuitively. We overestimate the
rate of change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. We see possibilities
and are thrilled in the short term, but overestimate the consequences. Three years later, we
are disillusioned and discard our projections, only to be taken completely by surprise 10
years further down the road when change hits us like a freight train.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also part of this development. Artificial intelligence is the ability
of machines to make decisions based on input from their environments. Our ability to
manufacture small, digital, and intelligent entities that can communicate with each other
has now reached the stage where we can both embed and activate them in all the physical
objects we surround ourselves with. The world we live in is awakening.
In the future, things around us will no longer be dumb and passive. They will begin to
do our bidding and may even take the initiative on our behalf. The Digital Revolution in
itself encompasses more than just the Information Society. This new era will be intelligent.
We call it the Age of Intelligence.
At the first stage, your washing machine will start washing when there is a surplus of energy
on the grid and the thermostat will turn on the heating when you approach your home. At
the second stage, we will see somewhat more complicated things such as self-driving cars or
digital bank clerks. At the third stage, your smartphone will notify you that you are about
to become depressed or manic, and may even initiate treatment…
The same thing applies to biology. In the first phase, digitization makes it possible for us
to visualize and understand correlations in extremely large datasets. We can “feed” an AI
with so much knowledge and so many research results that it will be better than any doctor
at making diagnoses and developing therapeutics. In the second phase, we can start to
manipulate human DNA, and in the third phase, we can print new organs in a 3D printer
and manufacture nanorobots that repair the human body from the inside…
In particular, the ability to manipulate DNA, the building blocks of life, makes for some very
interesting perspectives. As a hunter-gatherer, mankind lived off nature. In the agricultural
revolution, we learned to tame and control nature’s fecundity through cultivation. For
industrialization, it was no longer sufficient to control: we started to form nature. Digitization
enables us to take the next step: we are now in a position to mold nature.
Change has always met with open resistance because it often eliminates people’s livelihoods.
Consider how a coachman must have experienced industrialization and a typesetter digitization.
But the rest of us, who won’t necessarily become redundant to start with, are also hesitant,
presumably because the changes encompass more than just the technological advances.
Incumbent institutions, such as political and religious hierarchies, cannot cope with the
complexity that the new technologies introduce. Because of this, the new technologies can
often be considered a threat to the very foundations upon which our society is built.
We hope that this book will provide you with a perspective from which to view technological
developments – developments which will have a massive impact on our future. Not just
in the guise of cool gadgets, but as fundamental changes to education, the workplace,
and healthcare.
we explain the switch from linear to exponential growth. An
understanding of exponential growth is the key to understanding the digital revolution, and
is a central feature of the era we are entering.
In the second part, we describe developments within the fields of information technology,
artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. We will describe current developments
in each of these four fields as well as the disruption they will cause.
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