Unlearning 101

Jack Uldrich on the Future ... and Unlearning

In the past year, I have given dozens of keynote presentations to a variety of clients. Below is a short 10-minute speaking demo. If you are looking for an engaging, entertaining and informative keynote speaker for your conference or event, please contact either Mimi Hair or Ryan Foltz at Leading Authorities or Angela Schlep at Executive Speakers Bureau.

The Future Will Require a Whole Lotta Unlearning

If something doubles just ten times it is one thousand (1024 times to precise) larger. This is an important concept to grasp if you want to better contemplate the future.

Why? Because no fewer than nine technological trends—semiconductors, data storage, bandwidth, genomics, gene sequencing, robotics, nanotechnology, brain scanning and scientific knowledge—are doubling anywhere from every 6 to 18 months.

To put this in some perspective, consider the following examples.

If the military is currently deploying 1000 robots in Afghanistan but the number is doubling every year by 2020 that means there will be one million robots deployed in the country. This will change warfare as we know it.

If Wal-Mart is currently deploying 1 million RFID (radio frequency identification) tags but that number is doubling every year this suggests by 2020 that there will be 1 billion RFID tags deployed. This will fundamentally transform the global supply chain management system.

And if gene sequencing equipment can today translate one billion sequences every few hours (at an estimated cost of $20,000) but the technology is doubling year year, this implies we will be able to translate one trillion genes an hour by 2020. If this comes to pass, sequencing your genome will not only take minutes it will cost pennies on the dollar. Such a change could radically transform how we treat disease and will have profound implications for both the health care and the pharmaceutical industries.

A million, a billion and a trillion might not seem that different (perhaps because they rhyme) but here’s one way to think of the change coming our way:

One million seconds was 12 days ago;
One billion seconds was 32 years ago;
One trillion seconds takes us back to the year 30,000 B.C.

My advice? Buckle up because your future is about to expand in a million, a billion and a trillion different directions.

Unlearning the Future

Carl Sagan once advised the public to “never underestimate the power of exponential.” It was sound advice. Unfortunately, as with so much other wise counsel, it is easy to dismiss.

You shouldn’t.

Consider just a few recent examples of exponential growth. In 1998, a small Silicon Valley start-up was conducting 25 million web-based searches a day. The company had developed an impressive technology but it hardly seemed transformative. Ten years of exponential growth later, though, and Google has changed everything from how people get their news and entertainment to how politics and health care are practiced.

Wikipedia offers yet another example of exponential growth. Who amongst us could have imagined in 2001 when the first 100 Wikipedia entries were placed on the Internet that within eight years the site--which relies on free labor no less--would become the most widely used information source in the world?

It would be easy to believe that Google and Wikipedia are unique and, as such, represent one-time anomalies. They are not.

Ironically, if you type the word “exponential” into Google, the first search item that comes up is an entry from Wikipedia. If one then clicks on the list of “exponential topics” at the bottom of the definition there is an odd looking word: zenzizenzizenzic.

The term is defined as a number to its eighth power. Thus, the zenzizenzizenzic of 2 is 2(8)--or 256.

Now, zenzizenzizenzic might seem like a rather innocent concept but recall that Google and Wikipedia both experienced zenzizenzizenzic-like growth and, in the process, transformed a number of industries; and, in the coming decade, so too will a number of other emerging technologies.

Consider, for example, that Intel Corporation recently announced it had successfully doubled--to 2 billion--the number of transistors it has crammed onto its next-generation computer chip.

The real world manifestation of Intel’s zenzizenzizenzic is that we can now purchase a computer over 200 times more powerful than the one we bought a 1997--at one-third the cost.

Moreover, because the semiconductor industry will likely continue its little trick of effectively doubling the number of transistors it can place on a computer chip every 18 months this implies that by 2020 the zenzizenzizenzic of today’s 2 billion transistor could morph into a 500 billion transistor computer chip. Try wrapping your mind around what such super-powerful computers might enable us to do and achieve.

Exponential growth is not simply limited to the computer and Internet industries. Data storage, bandwidth, gene sequencing and even the growth of synthetic diamonds are all expected to undergo zenzizenzizenzic progression in the coming decade.

In fact these fields are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. According to Gartner Research, the field rapid prototype manufacturing (i.e. machines which can physically print objects) will grow more than 100-fold. And in the past year, researchers in Finland have replaced a patient’s lower jaw with synthetic material growth from stem cells; researchers at the University of Minnesota have successfully demonstrated that they could grow a beating rat heart from living cells; and self-driven robotic cars have successfully navigated through an urban environment. Progress in these fields will not stop.

It has been said that the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed. This is true and if one studies the amazing technological progress occurring in information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology and robotics and then applies the power of zenzizenzizenzic to these advances, it is easy to understand how it would behoove us all to reconsider Carl Sagan’s sage advice and begin preparing ourselves for a great deal of unlearning. 

What If Society Has to Unlearn Death?

In 1899, just a few years before the Wright brothers achieved their historic accomplishment, Lord Kelvin—then one of the world’s brightest men and most accomplished scientists—declared heavier than air machines to be “impossible.”

He was wrong.

To add insult to injury, Lord Kelvin was proved wrong by a pair of bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio.

A few years ago, a relatively unknown computer scientist, Aubrey de Grey, declared that aging should not be viewed as something which will necessarily ultimately result in death. Rather, he theorized that aging is a disease and should instead be treated as such.

The outcry from the scientific community was similar to Lord Kelvin’s reaction to human flight. One group of scientists even declared that de Grey’s idea was “so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community.”

Well, according to this article in Wired, the idea is now beginning to gain some acceptance within scientific circles.

To be sure, society is still a long way from de Grey’s goal of ending aging but, as I have written before, I’d encourage people to not dismiss the idea entirely. For if he is right, it will require society to unlearn a great many ideas which it now holds as dear.

In fact, the scale of unlearning our current paradigm of “death as an inevitability” could make other past historic paradigm shifts—such as the idea that the earth is not at the center of the universe (an idea for which Aristarchus was run out of Alexandria and Galileo was forced to recant under edict of the Catholic Church) or Darwin’s theory of evolution—look like child’s play.

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Did You Know We'll All Have to Unlearn

Parlaying off my earlier post today about why businesses must unlearn, I invite you to watch this popular 5-minute video entitled "Did You Know" which documents a few amazing trends and highlights some important elements about today's accelerating pace of change. It emphasizes why all of us will need to continue to unlearn and why unlearning is such a critical skill. (If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it):

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Unlearning Bubbles

The Internet, the real estate market, fuel cell technology, nanotechnology and, now, "clean tech" have all experienced an investing "bubble." In retrospect, it is easy to point to signs that the market was inflating to dangerous levels. It is even easier to suggest that such bubbles are a bad thing -- precisely because so many investors got burned and lost a great a deal of money.

Bob Metcalfe, an early and successful Internet entrepreneur, see bubbles differently. He sees bubbles as a good thing. Here's his quote: "From Internet history, we know that bubbles are normal. Bubbles are an accelerator of technology progress. Bubbles go against the status quo. We should encourage bubbles."

I suspect that such statements are much easier to make when you're already a billionaire; as opposed, say, to someone to just lost a large amount of money in the stock market. Nevertheless, there is a certain logic to his argument and we may want not to dismiss all bubbles as cases of irrational investors getting sucked up by the winds of "irrational exuberance." Instead we want to view them as "technology accelerators." (This might not ease the financial pain of those who lost money in the bubble, but it might at least make them feel a little bit better about themselves.)