Singularity University, a Silicon Valley think tank that offers educational programs and focuses on scientific progress and exponential technologies, believe it’s time to stop thinking linearly. For the first 250,000 years of human history, that’s how we’ve thought. That change is slow, occurring across generations. But over the past 50 years, change has grown exponential thanks to emergent technologies.

It took 9,000 years from the agricultural revolution to the creation of the first city. It took 50 years from the discovery of DNA to sequence the human genome. For NASA’s Apollo mission, it required several computers the size of a car that each cost $3.5 millions. An iPhone is 120 million times faster than all of NASA’s Apollo computers.

This is living proof of Moore’s Law, that the performance of computers (or any exponential technology) doubles every 18-24 months. Except these days, it doesn’t even take that long.

Kodak is a case study on what can happen if you misunderstand exponential technology. Kodak invented the first digital camera, but they believed it would never be important, and abandoned the technology. In 2012, Kodak was bankrupt precisely because of digital photography and Instagram.

Exponential technology takes what was once scarce and makes it abundant. They democratize, demonetize and dematerialize products. In the case of digital photography—it allowed anybody to take a photo without training, for free (as opposed to spending exorbitant amounts on camera equipment), and photos were no longer physical objects. They can be posted on Instagram and millions of people can see them immediately.

Synthetic realities (virtual reality and augmented reality) are the next frontier, according to Jody Medich, Director of Design, Singularity University.

VR dematerializes space—you can visit the set of Seinfeld or travel to distant planets without physically having to go there. It dematerializes presence: at a future conference, we can attend as holograms from the comfort of our office or home rather than being there personally. VR also dematerializes experience—you can have someone else’s experience and it will feel like your own.

While storytellers are familiar with the need to suspend disbelief, VR and AR has the opposite problem. You have to suspend belief, you have to tell yourself this isn’t real. Studies have shown that kids create false memories and adults create spatial memories in VR. It hijacks our visual cortex—the brain doesn’t differentiate VR from reality. It is reality.

This new reality offers a litany of applications for businesses. NASA is using the technology to help map out the surface of Mars. Soon, you’ll be able to be a soccer player on the field rather than a spectator. It can be used to train muscle memory development for astronauts or NFL teams or surgeons. Holoportation can enable a father and his daughter to play together from across the globe.

VR can be used to treat burn patients, relieving 60% of pain without the use of drugs (whereas morphine can only alleviate 20%). VR has shown the ability to repair paraplegia. VR helped paraplegics retrain synapses of their brain to communicate with their legs. No drugs or surgery needed: VR enabled the body to heal itself, like Wolverine.

Given work to allow facsimiles of telekinesis, precognition, supercognition and super-strength, Singularity University believes we are exiting the era of supercomputers and entering an era of superhumans, thanks to devices that augment and adapt to us.

And it will help efficiency. We check our phone 2,600 times a day—each time creating an interruption taking up working memory in the brain. In the course of an 8 hr work day, we spend 3.8 hours being interrupted. VR will eliminate this disruption, removing steps from tasks, and combining into one interface.

But with exponential technologies moving faster and faster, how do we design for the future? Singularity University approaches innovation by harnessing the power of science fiction: the ability to imagine new possible futures through their SCIFI DI program. It basically allows businesses to play Arthur C. Clarke or Aldous Huxley, starting with a vision for the future of any given field (e.g. medicine) in hopes of coming up with the next big idea.

They then devise societal, technological, environmental, economic and political frameworks in this brave new world—anything from the invention of commercial space travel to universal digital currency. Then characters are created, describing what a hero would look like in this futuristic world. From there, a story is born: they create a “day in the life” of this character.

Singularity University believes that in every story we create, the technology that is imagined could improve life, or solve world problems, like the exo-suits in Edge of Tomorrow or the precogs in Minority Report. To figure out how to invent these innovations, you retrocast, working backward from 2030 to today, noting key activities and milestones necessary to achieve such an invention or innovation. In a workshop session with comic book artists to fuel your creativity, all of a sudden, you have a road map to the future.

You’re no longer guessing where the world is headed, or going step by step. Instead, you see a future, and have a plan to achieve it. Now you’re thinking exponentially.

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