Peter H. Diamandis - The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

ALSO IN THE EXPONENTIAL MINDSET SERIES

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

BOLD: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World

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Copyright 2020 by PHD Ventures and Steven Kotler

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition January 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Diamandis, Peter H., author. | Kotler, Steven, 1967 author.

Title: The future is faster than you think : how converging technologies are transforming business, industries, and our lives / Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044600 | ISBN 9781982109660 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982109677 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781982109684 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Technological innovationsEconomic aspects. | Technological innovationsForecasting. | TechnologySocial aspects. | Convergence (Economics)

Classification: LCC HC79.T4 D4895 2020 | DDC 338/.064dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044600

ISBN 978-1-9821-0966-0

ISBN 978-1-9821-0968-4 (ebook)

I dedicate this book to all who have mentored and coached me during my life: Harry P. Diamandis, Tula Diamandis, Frank Price, David C. Webb, Paul E. Gray, David E. Wine, Gregg E. Maryniak, Ayn Rand, Art Dula, Robert Heinlein, Byron K. Lichtenberg, Sylvia Earle, Gerard K. ONeill, Arthur C. Clarke, John T. Chirban, Laurence R. Young, Martine Rothblatt, Charles Lindbergh, Tom Velez, Stuart O. Witt, S. Pete Worden, Robert K. Weiss, Alfred H. Kerth, Burt Rutan, Anousheh Ansari, Tony Robbins, Ray Kurzweil, and Dan Sullivan.

Peter

This one is for the late Joe Lefler and the crew from Pandoras Box. Thanks for so much magic. Thanks for believing in me long before anyone else did. Thanks for Derek Dingles cockroach pass. Still miss you. Down the funny stairs.

Steven

Your authors met in 1999. Steven was working on an article about Peters organization, the XPRIZE, which was then focused on unlocking the space frontier. Peter was working on, well, unlocking the space frontier.

Very quickly we discovered a shared obsession with cutting-edge technology and the use of that technology for tackling seemingly impossible challenges. This overlap led to a great friendship and a multi-decade writing partnership, of which The Future Is Faster Than You Think is the latest installment. This is our third exploration of how technology can extend the bounds of possibility and transform the world. Technically, its also the third book in The Exponential Mindset Trilogy, a series that includes this work and our two prior works, Abundance and BOLD. You dont need to read these books before diving into this one, but a little context is helpful.

Abundance is a book about how accelerating technologies are demonetizing and democratizing access to food, water, and energy, making resources that were once scarce now abundant, and allowing individuals to tackle impossible global challenges such as hunger, poverty, and disease. In BOLD, we tell the story of a different impossible: how entrepreneurs have been harnessing these same technologies to build world-changing businesses in near record time, and providing a how-to playbook for anyone interested in doing the same.

In this, our third installment, we expand on these ideas, examining what happens when independent lines of accelerating technology (artificial intelligence, for example) converge with other independent lines of accelerating technology (augmented reality, for example). Sure, AI is powerful. Augmented reality is too. But its their convergence that is reinventing retail, advertising, entertainment, and educationjust to name a few of the major transformations still ahead.

As well see in the pages to come, these convergences are happening at an ever-increasing rate. This has turbo-boosted both the rate of change in the world and the scale of that change. So buckle up is our point, because youre in for a wild ride.

The inspiration for this book emerged from the authors firsthand experience of this ride, a palpable acceleration in the pace of change in their own businesses and the world. Diamandis is working on his twenty-second startup, the most recent of them in the fields of longevity and healthcare. Coupled with his leadership roles in Singularity University, XPRIZE, Bold Capital Partners, and Abundance 360, this frenzied daily dance provides him a continuous infusion of converging technological insights.

Steven has encountered this acceleration in both his work as an author, where this book marks his sixth devoted to the topic of technology, and as the founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, where he focuses on the research and training of peak performancethat is, the very psychological tools we humans need to thrive in this world of amplified change.

As authors, wed also like to say that this wild ride has been something of a challenge. In the pages ahead, youll find descriptions of cutting-edge researchers and companies built atop their research. However, keeping pace has not been easy. Companies on the cutting edge when we started writing in early 2018, were often edged out by other companies by the time we completed the writing in late 2019. In other words, while the names are important, those names might change. The heart of this book belongs to the overarching trends of convergence and the transformative impact theyre having on business, industry, and our lives.

There is little doubt that the decade to come will be filled with radical breakthroughs and world-changing surprises. As the chapters ahead make clear, every major industry on our planet is about to be completely reimagined. For entrepreneurs, for innovators, for leaders, for anyone sufficiently nimble and adventurous, the opportunities will be incredible. It will be both a future thats faster than you think and arguably the greatest display of imagination rendered visible the world has yet seen. Welcome to an era of extraordinary.

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