Thinking Exponentially

If I accomplish one thing, I hope it is to get you to think exponentially. It's not easy. Most of us use the past to predict the future.

For example, 5 years ago we did not have an iPhone. So, you can say in that period of time, we went from the coolest phone being a Motorola Razor (because it was thin) to the iPhone 4s that comes with Siri. That is a lot of change. Hundreds of thousands apps, a dual core processor, centralized storage of music, apps, pictures, etc. (iCloud) ... the list goes on.

What does this tell us about the future?



Remember from my last post, each 5 years is expected to see change that is 8 times greater than the previous 5 years. Since the iPhone has gone through about 1 new version per year, it is not unreasonable to expect by 2016 we will be talking about the iPhone 9. What might the hardware include? Software? Connectivity? Apps?

While we can't predict exactly what it will look and feel like in 5 years, but we do know that it will leverage not only the advances in processor speed, connectivity (4g today ... 8g by 2016?), existing and evolving software base, but also allow us to solve many complex problems that are assisted by huge increases in computing power.

Here is the list of problems we can expect significant progress on in the next 5 years:

Speech Recognition - Check out Siri ... not bad today. We can decipher words, sentences, and some context. More processing power (both local and in the cloud) will help us improve the contextual issues associated with language.

Speech Generation - Today we have some rudimentary speech generation. It has gotten better in recent years. Expect clear human sounding voice responses that are contextually based. Probably not good enough to fool you, but getting close.

Vision - Lots of information to process, extract patterns, determine context, and map to meaning. More variable and nuanced than speech. But over the next 5 years, movement of images via video conferencing will explode providing a rich base of information from which to extract meaning.

Artificial Intelligence - Many would say that things like Siri and Watson are not AI. In the strict sense I guess they are not. However, I would argue that they are clearly the beginning of widespread use of expert systems that will clear the way for real AI. Leveraging both hand held devices with cloud based computing and web content (including numerous databases of experiences) will supercharge this area.

Connectivity - We have already come a long way. It was long ago that even simple images took a long time to download and display. Now we can easily stream 1080p HD video over the 4g network. Going forward network speeds will progress to the point where every endpoint will be capable of 1080p HD video conferencing. Higher bandwidth means more collaboration of complex tasks.

Robotics - Take all of the above together leveraging each other and imagine the types of machines that will be possible. In particular, robots will become more dexterous, faster, and able to communicate with other robotics to perform collaborative tasks.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of problems that an 8 fold (in 5 years) improvement in computing power can solve. But it does represent the basic areas that can be leveraged to perform work that was once the exclusive provence of people.

800% increase in power and all that brings in 5 years. How about 6400% in 10. Think exponentially!