April 12th, 2007
I first noticed a reference to this video clip earlier this morning, in a Seth Godin blog posting titled “One in a million,” but it’s now popped up on several other blogs that I subscribe to. Interestingly, this comes from a website called glumbert.com rather than YouTube; and it looks like a relatively simple sequence of Powerpoint slides, with some unrecognizable (to me, at least) instrumental music in the background.
Basically, it’s a sequence of statistics and “factoids” about the consequences of change in technology and the global economy in the next several years. Chances are you’ll find a few of them to be familiar; and there may be some that you don’t really care about. But here are a few, just to give you a sense of what’s coming:
- MySpace had 106 subscribers as of September 2006. If it were a country, it would rank 11th in the world, between Japan and Mexico.
- There are 2.7 billion Google searches per month. As the video asks, “To whom were these searches directed B.G. (Before Google)?”
- Technology is changing so rapidly that half of the information that college students learn in their first year will be outdated by their third year.
- The top 10 jobs in 2010 will be jobs that didn’t exist in 2004. That means we are preparing our children for jobs that don’t yet exist, with technologies that haven’t yet been invented, to solve problems that we don’t even recognize as problems yet.
- Making an admittedly far-fetched prediction (which probably comes from Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence), the video predicts that by the year 2049, a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capability of the entire human race.
Okay, enough of a preview. Here’s the video:
April 13th, 2007 at 1:56 am
My favority wikipedia entry - the technological singularity. What an exciting idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
April 13th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
That’s kind of scary…
April 13th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Yeah, it IS kind of scary … but this is the future that my children’s generation is inheriting. I suspect my parents’ generation was equally overwhelmed, and perhaps a little scared, by the post-A-bomb world that I was born into, and the computerized age that I (along with several million computer geeks and techno-nerds) helped to build…
April 14th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Call me a skeptic but I think these so-called futurists overestimate the rate that things really change. I read somewhere (can’t remember exactly where now) that the rate of technological change was higher in the first half of the 20th century than in the second. We’re slowing down.
I also have a problem with items 3 and 4 in the list above. They are so vague that they are almost meaningless. Take #3 for example. How is this person measuring “information”? If he is measuring it as some quantity of memorized “factoids” then perhaps he is right. If, however, we are talking about real problem solving skills then I am going to have to call BS on that. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find that most of the math and physics I learned in college 20+ years ago is still relevant today.
April 15th, 2007 at 11:23 am
[…] On the “Trends - Social/Cultural” page, I’ve added a new link to the video clip entitled “Shift happens,” which I summarized in this recent blog posting. […]
May 1st, 2007 at 11:07 pm
[…] Rob reminded us — with a reference to a recent video called “Shift Happens,” with I blogged about a couple weeks ago — that there are a lot more Indians and Chinese than there are Americans […]