A Matter of Days the Future Is (Way) Closer Than You Think
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2 A Matter of Days The Future Is (Way) Closer Than You Think Philip Bowermaster A MATTER OF DAYS Copyright © 2018 by Phil Bowermaster All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. First Edition: September, 2018 Second Edition: July, 2019 Printed in the United States of America Cover photo by Alina Kuptsova 4 “Make use of time, let not advantage slip.” ― Shakespeare 6 A Matter of Days Table of Contents Up Front ........................................................................................ 11 Counting the Days......................................................................... 15 Getting to 20K........................................................................... 15 Time is Money (Sort of) ........................................................... 17 Days Matter ............................................................................... 20 Time and Acceleration .............................................................. 25 Data and Stuff ............................................................................... 29 New Combinations.................................................................... 31 An Example from Aerospace .................................................... 33 New Capabilities ....................................................................... 35 Acceleration and Wealth ............................................................... 41 Do Smartphones Make Us Rich? .............................................. 41 Data and Poverty ....................................................................... 47 Possibilities and Abundance ..................................................... 52 Acceleration and Health ................................................................ 57 Frail Vs. Robust Systems .......................................................... 57 Robust People ........................................................................... 60 Disease-Resistant .................................................................. 62 Age-Resistant ........................................................................ 64 Hard to Injure ........................................................................ 68 Hard to Kill ........................................................................... 69 Repairable ............................................................................. 70 Restorable ............................................................................. 72 To a Robust Future.................................................................... 73 Possibility and Reality .................................................................. 75 The Fourth Wall ........................................................................ 75 The Big Lie ............................................................................... 82 Crossing the Line ...................................................................... 90 Realized Possibilities ................................................................ 97 Imagination Becomes Reality ................................................. 100 Post-Everything........................................................................... 103 Our Story so Far ...................................................................... 103 Welcome to Post-Everything .................................................. 103 7 Philip Bowermaster Post-Poverty ........................................................................ 104 Post-Mortality .................................................................... 106 Post-Reality ......................................................................... 107 Post-Everything-Else .............................................................. 108 And Finally… ............................................................................. 111 8 A Matter of Days 9 Philip Bowermaster 10 A Matter of Days Up Front This is a short book about the future. It’s about how the future will be here sooner than we think, and how it will be very different from what we expect. 1 To say that the future will be here sooner than we think is to dabble in the profoundly obvious. We all know that the future is coming. We all know that life goes by fast. In fact, the more life you live, the faster it goes. 2 Even if nothing else was happening, if we were all just getting older, time would seem to be accelerating. But something else is happening. A lot of things, in fact. Or maybe not. Maybe that lot of things add up to one big Something. We’ll look at that later. For now, take it from me: it isn’t just that we’re all getting older. Time is moving faster. 1 So in other words, this book is indistinguishable from every other book, article, blog post, motivational speech, and YouTube video about the future. (Not to mention all those messages in fortune cookies.) Or maybe not. Spot me a few pages, anyhow. Also, I should just let you know up front: there are going to be a lot of these notes. Some of them are citations for references, but most are just little side commentary (like this one.) So feel free to read them, skip them, whatever works for you. 2 I don’t think I have to cite any sources on that one. If you doubt the idea that life goes by fast, you are probably a reasonably young individual. I’ll tell you what—let’s check in on this in 20 years. If you still think I’m wrong, we can discuss. 11 Philip Bowermaster And although it is profoundly obvious that the future will be here sooner than we think, we generally gloss over how much sooner. For example, the end of this sentence is in the future. Only now look— there it is in the past. In this book, I’ll explain why I think days are a helpful measure of time for the era we live in. Days don’t have the grandeur of the years or decades or centuries that we typically like to apply to the future. But they also don’t give us that comfortable barrier between now and the future. (Or the past, for that matter. I think if I were to write a book about history, I would probably measure time in days there, too.) Days are the measure of time of the present. And the present is so close to the future that the two become almost indistinguishable. 3 That is, they seem indistinguishable while things are happening. Then all of a sudden you look back and you’re amazed at how much things have changed. What happened to the world we knew? What happened to the reality we were comfortable with? We find that, unexpectedly, we’ve arrived in a later era. We’re in a reality that comes after the one we knew. That can be exciting, but it can also be disorienting. And maybe a little scary. 3 Of course, I will continue to distinguish between them, no matter what. I’m too lazy to go back and rewrite the first line as “This is a book about the present.” And more importantly, I am not about to start describing myself as a “presentist.” No way. 12 A Matter of Days But wait. There’s more. What happens if, some number of days from now, we arrive in a reality not where some things have changed but where everything has changed? 4 That’s not a new question. Over the years, there’s been a lot written and a lot said in an attempt to answer that question. And the new era where everything is different has gone by a lot of names. You may have heard it referred to as the Spike. Or the Omega Point. Or the Singularity.5 But I’m just going to call it the Post-Everything future. This book does not make any predictions as to when the Post- Everything future will arrive. (Although the title may provide a bit of a hint in that direction.) Nor does it outline any strategies for how to cope with living in the Post-Everything future. By definition, we don’t know anything about that world. So any strategies we come up with on this end are likely to be pretty useless. This book doesn't even tell you whether the Post-Everything future is going to be a good thing or a bad thing.6 So what then, you may be wondering, does this book do? In the pages that follow, we will take a look at what’s been happening over the past few days. We will then explore what we can expect to 4 No, not really everything. That should read “essentially everything has changed.” But when you keep putting those kinds of qualifiers in, it weakens the writing and distracts from the message. Unlike, say, adding a footnote. 5 Or if you’re old enough, possibly even “The Age of Aquarius.” 6 Probably good. 13 Philip Bowermaster happen over the next few. And then, as noted, we’ll spend some time considering the various things (or the one big Something) that are causing time to move faster. Finally, we will talk about what happens when everything is different. Along the way, we’ll look at the interesting relationship between data and stuff. We’ll see how that relationship is rapidly changing, and how its transformation might impact the nature of reality itself. From there, it becomes pretty clear that we are heading into a Post- Everything future. And even though I said we can’t do that, the book ends with some thoughts on what the Post-Everything future might be like.7 7 Or at the very least, we will try to imagine how different things will be. That isn’t exactly the same as describing what things look like, but it’s in the ballpark. 14 A Matter of Days Chapter 1 Counting the Days GETTING TO 20K We’ll begin with a number: 20,000. A while back, my two youngest children—the twins—turned six years old. By some wonderful cosmic coincidence, on that