I often refer to the speed of change as the main reason for us to speed up our learning.
Changes requires adaptation.
Adaptation for humans means learning new stuff.
On of my main inspirations in understanding how fast change is happening in our society is Ray Kurzweil whom I often refer to in my presentations. Here is a taste of what Kurzweil means when he speaks of change…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’ve said that the year 2045 is the year of the singularity. Can you explain what that is?
RAY KURZWEIL: By 2029, we’ll have finished the reverse engineering of the human brain. There’s already 20 regions of the brain we’ve modeled and simulated and tested. We’ll have very powerful and very small computers by that time. Most of the computers in the world are not yet in our bodies and brains, but some of them are in our brains. If you’re a Parkinson’s patient you can put a computer in your brain. It’s not blood cell-sized today, it’s pea-sized.
And if you take what we can do today and realize these technologies will be a billion times more powerful per dollar in 25 years, a hundred thousand times smaller, you get some idea of what we’ll be able to do.
And one thing we’ll be able to do is send millions of nanobots, blood cell-sized devices, inside our bloodstream. They’ll keep us healthy from inside. They’ll go inside our brains and interact with our biological neurons, just the way neural implants do today, and put our brains on the Internet, make us smarter, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system. And so, we will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence.
So over time, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate, and that’s basically what we mean by the singularity. When you get out to 2045, we’ll have multiplied the overall intelligence of the human/machine civilization a billionfold, and that’s such a profound transformation that we call it a singularity.
Read the full interview here
Also look out for the film about to be released Transendent Man