The best way to predict the future is to build it yourself | Pascal Finette

It's an honor and privilege to be here with you today. What I want to do is I want to give you a little bit of an introduction to the way we're thinking and the way we're teaching and the way we see the future at Singularity University. So typically we do this in a week-long program as an executive program, which is where I teach. It costs you $14,000. So today we're doing this in 60 minutes for free. So I hope you had coffee and like brace yourself. Okay. So I'm going to give you a little bit of an introduction. So calling this a field guide to exponential thinking, and we'll get into the details of what that actually means in a minute. But before we get there, what I really want to get to is we want to talk about like where does the future of technology go and what does it mean for us as individuals, as organizations, and as society? And there's a couple of questions typically people ask themselves, you know, like what's next and like How do I succeed in this interesting world? Like, how do I disrupt if you're an existing company? So what we want to do today is we want to talk about 3 things: What is happening? How do you make sense of this? And why does it matter? By the way, you can have all those slides later, so you don't need to take pictures of the slides or something. I'm very generous with my slides. So as I mentioned earlier, earlier, I'm at a place called Singularity University. And similar to Draper, Singularity University has a strong mission. Our mission is to inspire, educate, and empower leaders, people like yourself, to apply exponential technologies. And this is what we're talking mostly about today, to address humanity's grand challenges. So this is the why. Like, why do we actually do this? We really believe that you can leverage technology to solve some of the world's biggest problems. And I think that's a really powerful mission. problems, and we're not quite that interested in creating the next mobile photo sharing app leveraging interesting technologies. If you ever want to follow me, I'm literally everywhere @pfienet, so by all means, like, tweet the shit out of this. And before we get there, and before we get to the beef, like, what is actually happening? Like, what is the that happens in this world of technology. L.P. Hartley once said that the past is a foreign country because they do things differently there. But I fundamentally believe you need to understand the past to understand where the future is going, right? And to get us there, I want to tell you a story of Xerox PARC. So if you're not familiar with Xerox PARC, they're literally like a few miles from here in Palo Alto, in the foothills of Palo Alto. They were founded out of a company called Xerox. They made photocopiers back in the day. It was a research organization. What's remarkable about Xerox PARC is that this organization in the late '60s, early '70s, with a very small amount of people, literally like about 25 people at their core staff, invented roughly what, 50% of what is the internet, the core technology of the internet. They invented laser printing, which became the advent of like desktop publishing. They invented Ethernet, the networking protocol, and most notably they invented the graphical user interface. So the thing which like you use today on your Macintosh and/or your Windows machine. Alan Kay, who's one of the key instigators there and like one of the probably most amazing people you can meet here in Silicon Valley in terms of like thinking about the future, had a mantra which they used at Xerox PARC, which is, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And I think this is really important to understand. It's important to understand because if you believe this, it tells you 2 things. The first is, the future is in your hand. The future is something you create. The second is, if you don't create the future, the future happens to you. You become a passive player in this world. And to give you an idea of how this looks like, so this is Alan Kay. 2008, showing a computer called the Dynabook. This is 2 years before the Apple iPad was introduced. This is at the Computer History Museum here in Mountain View. As you can see, the Dynabook is a computer, it's a folio computer. It's a thin computer, it has a touchscreen, looks a lot like a bastard child of a first-generation Kindle and an iPad. So this is 2 years before Apple, like Steve Jobs, gets on stage and shows the iPad. It's kind of curious, it's interesting, right? Like, we had tablets at the time, it's not really revolutionary. What is revolutionary is this: in 1972, Alan Kay wrote a 30-page paper describing the Dynabook in great detail. So 30 pages— 40 years before Apple even introduced this computer, this tablet device, Alan Kay effectively invented it. The way he could invent it is very simple. A lot of the technology which was necessary to build this computer wasn't even invented at the time. It didn't exist. But what Alan Kay could do is he could look at where did computing go for the last 10-ish years in terms of like it got smaller and smaller and smaller and more powerful and project out that one day we will be able to build a computer which is basically a little book, which is thin and has a touchscreen. A lot of the technology again like didn't exist, but it needed to be invented. The second thing which I find really interesting is when you read this paper, Again, this is from 1972. The use case Alan Kay predicts is what you see on your left, which is kids using this computer as a learning device, which is really interesting. You're not in the right age group here. Typically my age groups are a little older and I ask them, do you have got kids? And they say yes. And then I say, do you have got a tablet? And they say yes. And I say, who's using the tablet? And they say, well, my kids are using it, right? Because it's actually— he could also predict the use case of this machine. This is what I'm going to teach you today. I'm going to teach you today how you can, by extrapolating and understanding the past and having a good guess about the future, effectively invent the future. The second thing I'm going to show you today is that what took Alan Kay 40 years will take you 3 years today, because the pace of change is accelerating at an ever-increasing pace to an extent that the future happens way, way quicker to us. Let me quickly give you— show you a short clip. This is Alan Kay at the demo conference in 2009 or '10, and he makes an interesting point here.

On the other hand, we spent roughly 2 to 3 times a person's salary each year just on technology for that person, because we were buying— as I'll show you, we bought our way into the future. Because Moore's Law says that if you're interested in something 15 years from now, you can have that computing power now if you're willing to pay through the nose.

So this is an important point. The important point here is that the future already exists. William Gibson, who is a very famous futurist and author, said that the future is already here, it's just very unevenly distributed. So it's very important if you plan for a future, if you want to see the future, it already exists. I give you a simple example. Like, you're all familiar with virtual reality, right? Like Oculus Rift. Oculus Rift is not something which came overnight. Oculus Rift is something which has been like 25-ish years in the making. And even about 4-ish years ago, I could show you where it will be in about 4 years because it became very clear that suddenly technology converge to allow us to build something like Oculus Rift. Now here's the point for you as entrepreneurs: if you're building technology, if you're building something for today's technology, by the time you hit the market, you're outdated. So what you need to do is you need to actually understand where the technology will go and build for that future.