The Lessons School Forgot

Chapter 4The future of work

Change isn't just happening fast, it's skyrocketing. While we're constantly told that the pace of change is accelerating, it's hard for our brains to comprehend exponential change. The human mind is local and linear. Even when we are told a change is exponential, we are likely to underestimate its impact. Here's my favourite example: Imagine taking 32 linear steps forward. If you did this, you'd advance around 32 metres. If you took the same number of steps but doubled the length of each step, you'd circumnavigate the Earth 54 times (travelling 2.2 million kilometres).

The reason this is important is that most of the technologies we work with today are advancing exponentially. They double in power and/or efficiency every 18 to 24 months, and this influences the types of tools we use and the world we live in. In grade school maths, exponentials are often introduced as a fun mathematical curiosity. We trot out an example like the one above to show how quickly things expand, to marvel at it, and then we move past it. But it's actually among the most important mathematical principles of our time, because it impacts the technology we connect with and use every day, and how we earn our money. Rather than going through all the different technologies that follow this law of accelerating returns — smartphones, drones, driverless cars, network speed and data storage, to name a few — let me give you this instead: Imagine that every single thing that relies on digital ...