The New Context for Our Future

Abstract

According to Dr. Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” In the Exponential Era, having access to data and having the ability to understand the information the data is telling us is on every individual's and organization's critical path for survival. Picturing in our minds how technologies move imperceptibly across what appears to the brain as distant and slowly approaching horizons – only to be surprised as they explode in front of us at speed and volume – is one of the great mental conundrums of the Exponential Era. These explosions in the growth and the unprecedented rates of adoption of new technologies are leaving most of us unprepared and in wonder. Over the first 50 years of Moore's law, the convergences of technologies create the early stages of exponential change in multiple industries and applications.