This document discusses the exponential rate of technological progress and its impact on various aspects of life. It notes that advances in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology are converging and multiplying, accelerating the overall pace of change. Examples are given of technologies like self-driving cars, mobile payment systems, and digital assistants that would have seemed futuristic just a few years ago but are now commonplace. The document warns that this rapid change will significantly disrupt many industries and jobs but that it also creates new opportunities. It emphasizes that an "exponential thinking" mindset is needed to understand and benefit from the changes brought by living in an "exponential age."

1. THE EXPONENTIAL AGE:
Progress, Technology and People
@davidcaygill
The iris Nursery
iris Worldwide

2. PROGRESS
Let’s talk about change, or as economists like to see it, progress.
We’re all junkies for progress.The cult of new, the need for a fresh perspective, to keep moving forward.
The trick is to look around you, to identify where the leaps are, the glimpses of the future.

3. The future is already here,
it’s just not very evenly
distributed.
William Gibson

4. Something as simple as glancing at your phone and seeing the travel time to your next appointment conveniently pop up, accounting for congestion and
disruption, subtly helping you get through the day more quickly and more efficiently.
15 years ago this would have involved that archaic map format the A to Z and some decent local knowledge of traffic patterns and public transport.

5. Something as simple as glancing at your phone and seeing the travel time to your next appointment conveniently pop up, accounting for congestion and
disruption, subtly helping you get through the day more quickly and more efficiently.
15 years ago this would have involved that archaic map format the A to Z and some decent local knowledge of traffic patterns and public transport.

6. PAY WITH FACE Vs CC SWIPER
Or being able to walk into a KFC in Hangzhou, China and pay with your face. Jack Ma’s Alipay business launched face pay last month, it’s part of their
strategy to merge offline and online retail.
20 years ago we’d have been using the old Zip-Zap machines (yes that’s what they were known as)

7. PAY WITH FACE Vs CC SWIPER
Or being able to walk into a KFC in Hangzhou, China and pay with your face. Jack Ma’s Alipay business launched face pay last month, it’s part of their
strategy to merge offline and online retail.
20 years ago we’d have been using the old Zip-Zap machines (yes that’s what they were known as)

8. Or a moment or when your car kindly lets you know it is ready to take over. 12 cameras and sensors enabling Tesla’s autopilot to navigate the journey. Elon
Musks company’s ability to start treating his cars like software and rolling out over the air updates is incredible.

9. However, of course it’s not without it’s teething issues…. yes this is a bad piece of road design, it still is an important reminder that it’s still the driver
who’s in charge

10. We only need to go back 30 years, we were being amazed that F1 and aero technology was trickling down to consumer cars in the form of ABS and traction
control. Key safety enhancements, starting to override driver decisions with technology using sensors from the car. It’s the beginning of assistive technology. B
we’ve come a long way in 30 years.

11. WHY DOES IT FEEL LIKE THINGS ARE SPEEDING UP?
It may start to feel as though the pace of technology development and breakthroughs are happening much faster than we are used to. How long did it take for
all this tech to be reduced to just a couple of devices?

12. WE THINK ABOUT TECHNOLOGY SEPARATELY
SOCIAL MEDIA
SMARTPHONES
CLOUD COMPUTING
FASTER PROCESSORS
INTERNET OF THINGSROBOTICS
VR/AR
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
VOICE INTERFACES
WEARABLES
The underlying reason for this is how we look at the world.
We’re aware that processors are getting faster, that robotics are advancing and wearables are getting smarter, but we can’t help but think about these things
separately.

13. SOCIAL MEDIA
SMARTPHONES
CLOUD COMPUTING
FASTER PROCESSORS
INTERNET OF THINGSROBOTICS
VR/AR
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
VOICE INTERFACES
WEARABLES
TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES CONVERGE
We can’t fathom what’s going to happen when they all converge and connect. But they’re all converging and connecting. So we need to.
Advances across different areas of technology are starting to multiply with each other, making the overall rate of change even faster.
According to Google’s futurologist Ray Kurzweil, It’s called the Law of Accelerated returns, and it means that the rate of change is not linear, but exponential

14. THE EXPONENTIAL AGE
Looking at computing, in just over 100 years we
get to insect level performance. But in just 8
years computers will have the same power as
one human brand, and not long till all humans.
We’re living in the exponential age

15. Struggling to get your head round this? That’s because our human instincts and
intuition looks for patterns in the past. It’s almost impossible for us to internalise
this rate of change.
And that’s why progress is so remarkable when we see it. Just when you think
you’ve got your head round the rate of change, it goes and accelerates.
So to try and help you.. According the law of accelerated returns, the 21st century
will feature 1,000 times the technological progress of the twentieth century

16. 40 YEARS PROGRESS AT TODAY’S RATE

17. WILL HAPPEN IN 13 YEARS

18. RAY KURZWEIL: ELASTIC NEO CORTEX
Google Futurist Ray Kursweil Imagines a world where we’re augmented by the cloud. Our brains offload
some processing to the internet.
Kurzweil predicts that humans will become hybrids in the 2030s.That means our brains will be able to
connect directly to the cloud, computers will augment our existing intelligence.
"Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking,” The bigger and more
complex the cloud, the more advanced our thinking. By the time we get to the late 2030s or the early
2040s, Kurzweil believes our thinking will be predominately non-biological.
He’s also famously predicted the Singularity, let’s ask our friendly conversational UI what is the
singularity?

19. TECHNOLOGY

20. In my view the single most powerful force driving this kind of progress today is AI. When we look at any particular field experiencing a leap in
progress and start to analyse what the enabling technologies were that caused that change, we usually find some AI or Machine Learning in the
mix.
Google’s AI - Assistant is rolling out across all android devices, google home and of course the smart watches, the sheer scale of google and it’s
data mass mean that it’s quickly going to become one of the most successful platforms.
Developers can now create Google Actions, which can include purchase and payment, similar to Amazon’s Alexa skills.

21. Of course the battle is on between the behemoths to dominate the home tech space, with the smart virtual assistants being the number one weapon of mass
influence. Why?
The closer they can get into your life, the more influence and control they can have. Building a successful tech product is about building a habitually engaged
audience. Your company becomes the go-to for everything.
Of course it’s not only consumer focussed AI, back office and B2B services using AI to provide efficiencies and identify new opportunities are where some of the
biggest gains are seen

22. Tomorrows
insurance
companies will be
data companies.
The big story here is about data.
I’m sure I can’t be the first to say this, perhaps not even the first to say this today.
Tomorrows insurance companies will be data companies.
However when I look at industries that are changing fastest due to data, it’s got to be
insurance.

23. The ones to watch out for are the GAFA, Google, Apple Facebook and Amazon
They will soon be able to offer insurance cheaper and more effectively than traditional insurance houses. Why? Because they have all the data. Knowing
more about you than your family they can price your risk more efficiently than any other entity.Those with the data are the ones with the power.
Do I think they are likely to start offering insurance? no. But the implication is clear, unless insurance companies have great data sources on their customers
and use that to optimise their business, it’s going to be easier for new market entrants to purchase data feeds from large providers and create disruptive
new models.

24. PEOPLE ARE
GETTING SAVVY &
SCARED ABOUT
THIER DATA
However consumers are of course becoming more wary of the data captured
by companies, they are starting to know more about us than even our most
intimate of friends or family. As the Guardian recently reported, a user
received over 800 pages from Tinder when she asked for her data to be
exported and sent to her. It’s an eye opening read. 870 matches, 1700
messages, the night of 16 compulsive concurrent conversations then Ghosting
them al the next morning. We’re all coaxed into sharing the deepest secrets
then it is commercialised.
The data value exchange will become increasingly hard to make work for
customers, they’ll be looking for very tangible benefits in return for handing
over personal information.

25. IOT: Risk mitigation to
risk avoidance
One hypothesis is that as more data is collected and acted upon the
role insurers will play will evolve into one that is closely aligned with
the consumer’s own needs.
So rather than being a financial safety net, the job is actually helping
the consumer avoid the eventuality they are insuring against.
By helping the consumer live a more healthy life or by adding sensors
to their home risk is reduced and therefore premiums can come down.
Great news for the consumer, and something that should start to
trigger conversations about business models in this room.

26. IBM’S INTERNET OF CARING THINGS
Sticking on IOT - IBM are working on The Internet of Caring Things
and are starting to look at how can the spaces we live in can be more
responsive to our needs. Ambient assistive living.
Passive sensors hooked up to IBM Watson capable of inferring
meaning from the signals received.
How often a fridge was opened, when the light was turned on etc can
help a carer know if someone needs assistance.

27. AUTOMATION WILL TAKE SOME JOBS
As we talk about robots and AI we probably have to talk about the aspect of job
replacement.
This slightly hypnotic video is a Chinese postal warehouse where robots sort over
200,000 parcels per day.
The RSA have predicted robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years’.
Most of the replacements to be highest in the transportation and finance and
accounting sectors.

28. AUTOMATION WILL TAKE SOME JOBS

29. But before we panic too much we should bear in mind that we’ve survived it before.The last couple of centuries have seen industrialisation, automation
and computerisation take the load off large swathes of our planet.
In 1790, 90% of the population of the US were employed in the agricultural sector, by 2011, it was 1.7%.
‘What humans do’ has changed enormously and is more focused than ever on maximising the potential of our creative and emotional abilities– things that
can’t be mechanised.
My advice on that front is to think about what ai & robots are great at and what humans are great at. There will be many jobs that frankly would be much
better if robots did them, poorly paid, dangerous, repetitive jobs in hostile or unpleasant environments.

30. PEOPLE

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32. scroll the length of big ben
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WE SCROLL THE
LENGTH OF BIG BEN
EVERY DAY

33. MOBILE IS MAKING US FASTER
Time.The scarcest resource, the only one that we cannot replenish.
What is interesting is that our perceptions of time change depending on the medium we’re
consuming content.
As part of their IQ research team Facebook conducted some research into behaviours on
mobile vs desktop.
They showed participants two different videos - one on mobile and one on desktop and
asked them to estimate how long they were. People who viewed the video on smartphone
estimated them to be 30% shorter than the desktop viewers.The videos were the same
length.

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35. 35@davidcaygill

36. @davidcaygill
All this reducing attention span drives us to want things more quickly, we life in the
now. There is no delayed gratification, there is no wait and see. Amazon Prime can
deliver me cold beer in less than an hour.
Perhaps that’s also why as of this year more people are googling ‘nearest’ over
‘cheapest’ urgency and convenience have become one of the biggest drivers.

37. EXPONENTIAL THINKING
SO what now? How do we make sense of all this change, how do we start to apply it in our own jobs and our own worlds?
The answer I think lies back in our roots.
You probably all know the origins of Lloyds of London back in the 16th century coffee shops in London.
SO what now? How do we make sense of all this change, how do we start to apply it in our own jobs and our own worlds?
The answer I think lies back in our roots.
You probably all know the origins of Lloyds of London back in the 16th century coffee shops in London.

38. coffee houses
38
Various investors underwrote percentages of a ships cargo to insure it against the risks posed by the ravages of the seas.
Well those coffee shops were important in the development of our modern society, academia, especially physics, our business landscape, you name it it probably
had it’s genesis in those coffeeshops.
Why? Because they were about the meeting of the great minds of the time. A place and context where views were challenged, wagers made, alliances born. The
same is true of an event like this, a moment where many minds will come together to create a new future. Now let’s debate what it might be.

39. THANK YOU
@davidcaygill
The iris Nursery
iris Worldwide