Unsupervised

PART IImportant Technologies You Cannot Ignore

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.”

—Mark Twain

The Cognitive Revolution is happening. It is a period of exploration as bold and daring as the eras of great explorers in the past. It is being propelled by the rapidly accelerating and iterative cycle of human thought and invention. Humanity conceptualizes, builds, and uses, which leads to the next round of conceptualization, building, and use, and on and on and on…. The difference today is that much of the technology being created has the capability itself of continuing to propel the cycle independently—with or without direct human intervention. These technologies have evolved on the back of silicon chips and computer power, doubling every two years (an exponential increase). Yet as new materials and applications become fully integrated, these exponential increases will actually seem small. At the same time, our own cognitive ability is increasing linearly, if at all. The clear implication is the potential for computers to rapidly reach or even surpass many human capabilities, certainly on a skill-by-skill basis, as machines did vis-à-vis our physical abilities during the Industrial Revolution.

Perhaps the hardest thing to fully comprehend and internalize today is that we are already beyond the period of mere imagination—vast numbers of practical applications already influence and, in some cases, ...