Wellness week and concept of singularity & exponential growth
At Objective Experience, we celebrate Wellness every Thursday by Zooming with our Sydney and Singapore teams. As part of R U OK? we start this extra special week with the CEOs of Singularity University Australia, Christina Gerakiteys and Lisa Andrews. They shared about the concept of singularity and their insights on achieving exponential growth as one humanity. We spoke about the future of technology and the future of our world.
Broadly, singularity in technology is where intelligent and powerful technologies will radically transform reality as we know it. It is all at once exhilarating and humbling to think about what has been achieved and what is to come.
Today, we have 5G, AI medicine, practical quantum circuits… In the next 5 years, 3.8 billion new minds will be connected. The Internet of everything!
What will these new minds discover?
What will they consume? How will they choose what to consume?
What new companies will they build? What industries will they disrupt?
How will they choose?
By 2030, longevity escapes velocity – this means we will reach a point where science and technology can extend our lives for an extra year for every year we live.
Utopian or Dystopian?
It’s hard not to get all black mirror and get into the “what if technology got into the wrong hands” spiel. Who’s going to stop governments or big tech villains from deciding what the code should look like or, from prioritising their shareholders?
And then there’s the question of what’s “good”? Where do we look to establish humanity’s goodness as being impactful to all of us? How do we nurse humanity so that we don’t veer off track – there is a judgement in that and we need to cradle everyone, so no one is scared for basic needs and then we can pick humanity up collectively.
To put the fate of humanity into the hands of humanity with the notion that “humans are generally good” is scary! But fear cannot be the answer.
Christina did a quick exercise with us – she asked us to think of any one who we knew were actually trying to harm us across our lives and raise our fingers, none of us could think of any! We did the same for people who wanted to help us and many of us raised both hands.
We need to be compassionate and optimistic about the future. Technology is a resource but humans come first. Don’t play to keep up, choose instead what you want to focus on. Humanovate! Consider humanity first in the process of innovation.
Our framework for creating the world we want to live in can and should be based on exponential mindset, exponential technologies and exponential impact. Life is about making a difference together.
Together, we can
- Decrease suffering for the current population
- Increase happiness for the current population
- Make the world better for future generations
We must have a hopeful outlook on the world and our future – it is the only way. So we focus our energies on empowering others to create the abundant future we envision. We make every day life easier by making the technology that our clients create a little bit easier to use. We use our skills as behavioural researchers and human-centered designers to be part of this future.
Thank you ladies for challenging our perspectives and teaching us about the optimistic future of technology.