The Rate of Change in United States

Imagine you are a typical inhabitant of the United States in 1870.11 You live on a rural farm; you produce most of your food and clothing yourself. Your only sources of light are candles, whale oil, and gas lamps if you’re lucky. If you’re a man, you face gruelling physical labour, sometimes from the age of twelve onwards. If you’re a woman, you face unrelenting toil as a housewife: one calculation found that in 1886 “a typical North Carolina housewife had to carry water 8 to 10 times...

 Social Media's Variable Rewards Schedule

While there is nothing inherently addictive about smartphones themselves, the true drivers of our attachments to these devices are the hyper-social environments they provide. Thanks to the likes of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, smartphones allow us to carry immense social environments in our pockets through every waking moment of our lives. Though humans have evolved to be social—a key feature to our success as a species—the social structures in which we thrive tend to contai...

 The Information Age has Increased Abstract Intelligence

Most dramatically, an increase in one kind of abstract intelligence is visible all over the world: mastery of digital technology. Cyberspace is the ultimate abstract realm, in which goals are achieved not by pushing matter around in space but by manipulating intangible symbols and patterns. When people were first confronted with digital interfaces in the 1970s, like videocassette recorders and ticket machines in new subway systems, they were baffled. It was a running joke of the 1980s that mo...

 Sequencing and Confluence to Inspire Technological Innova...

...innovation often occurs through sequencing—building on prior innovation. Recall that suitcases didn't used to have wheels. Then someone created a suitcase with two wheels. Now many suitcases have four wheels. What helpful improvement on the suitcase might come next? I've pitched this question to students, who then produced amazing renditions of future suitcases, with elements like GPS tracking devices and built-in digital scales that check whether a suitcase is over a weight limit—or ...

 Paradigm Shift: Everyone Will have a Timeline

In 10 years, every human connected to the Internet will have a timeline. It will contain everything we’ve done since we started recording, and it will be the primary tool with which we administer our lives. This will fundamentally change how we live, love, work, and play. And we’ll look back at the time before our feed started — before Year Zero — as a huge, unknowable black hole. This timeline — beginning for newborns at Year Zero — will be so intrinsic to life that it will quic...

 There is a mass exodus into the virtual world

The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy. And so, there is a growing perception in the gaming community: Reality, compared to games, is broken. In fact, it is more than a perception. It’s a phenom...