FEATURE INTERVIEW

The future is upon us

Acclaimed author Steven Kotler speaks to Alex Katsomitros about the accelerating
convergence of groundbreaking technologies, the rise of technophobic conspiracy
theories and how Covid-19 will bring the future forward

S
teven Kotler and Peter Diamandis were
promoting their new best-seller in New York
the day China hesitantly announced the first
cases of Covid-19 – the virus that would soon engulf
the rest of the planet. They instantly recognised the
danger: “A pandemic is an exponential, so we knew
exactly what was coming,” Kotler says. After all,
their book deals with forces that start with a trickle
and, little by little, take over the whole world: “I said
to Peter that we wrote a book called The Future is
Faster Than You Think and we think this is going to
accelerate. And that is exactly what we are seeing!”
Kotler is an acclaimed writer who along with serial
entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, the mastermind
behind Singularity University, XPRIZE and other
tech ventures, have authored Bold and Abundance,
two of the most authoritative tomes on how
technology is transforming our societies. Their latest
brainchild completes this trilogy with the inevitable
conclusion that everything their previous books dealt
with is finally coming to fruition; a wide range of
technologies, from AI and virtual reality to quantum
computing, are coming together in a smorgasbord of
innovation that brings the future forward.

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 Lockdowns would normally condemn a book
brimming with optimism to irrelevance, but not
when it explores exponential forces that spread like
wildfire – just like a pandemic. In one of the most
revealing chapters, Kotler and Diamandis discuss
how technology is revolutionising healthcare by
accelerating drug development and tailoring cures
to individual patients. “The changes in healthcare
that we thought would take a decade, if not longer,
are coming now. The greatest proof of the power
of exponential technology is that within three
weeks after Covid-19 was announced, there were
71 vaccines in the pipeline,” Kotler says. “Nothing
like that has happened before in history. That’s
converging exponential [technology] at work.”
All at once
What Kotler and Diamandis think will transform
the economy is the almost uncanny combination
of seemingly unrelated technological trends, from
nanotechnology and advances in materials science
to 3D printing. “We believe that pretty much every
industry will be re-invented within the next 10
years,” Kotler says. They do not hesitate to tint
their predictions with a shade of sci-fi escapism
that may seem incongruent in our giddy world,
still reeling from the shock of strict lockdowns.
“The wait is over... the flying cars are here,” they
enthusiastically proclaim in one chapter about
the future of transport. Serial disruptors such as
Uber are taking to the skies, they explain, testing
miniature space-pod airplanes and new business
models that will render flying not less ordinary than
a visit to the supermarket. As they promise readers
in the US: “Sometime in the next decade or so, ‘off
to Europe for lunch’ may become a standard part
of our lexicon.” A slew of mind-blowing numbers
add a flavour of surprising precision: “In 2023 the
average thousand-dollar laptop will have the same
computing power as a human brain (roughly 1016
cycles per second). Twenty-five years after that, the
same average laptop will have the power of all the
human brains currently on Earth.” And if that is
not enough, the authors fuel every technophile’s
dreams with promises of robots delivering pizzas at
our doorstep, a trend the pandemic may accelerate,
according to Kotler.
It is easy to dismiss such wild claims as unabashed
futurism, a criticism often levelled at proponents of
the so-called “Californian ideology”: an idiosyncratic
mix of technological determinism, free-market
mantras and new age spirituality. And yet, Kotler and
Diamandis are anything but. For example, they have
a cautionary tale for business leaders who wish to
harness AI before it’s too late. “The best combination
of forces is not just automation, but humans and
robots working together,” Kotler warns, using the
recent predicaments of carmakers BMW and Tesla as
an example: “When they fully automated their plants,
efficiency went down. They had to put humans back
‘Pretty much
in the chain to get the real benefits.” every industry
Another lesson corporations need to learn is
that staying future-proof is all about constant
will be re-
reinvention. Kotler and Diamandis use the example invented within
of Sears, which was once the US’s biggest retailer
and went bankrupt in 2018, and the rise of Amazon the next 10 years’
on the back of new (the internet) and old (mail- Steven Kotler, co-author of The
order catalogues, ironically pioneered by Sears) Future is Faster Than You Think
technologies to highlight the importance of adapting
to fast-paced technological change. One reason
we tend to ignore disruption, they argue, is that
our brain is hardwired to treat our future selves as
strangers, and therefore ignore calls for change as
alarmism. That’s not a risk we can afford to take in a
world where Alexa can do your shopping.
The great leap forward
With all its optimistic bombast, The Future is Faster
Than You Think has landed at an unfortunate time.
Hasn’t the pandemic exposed a glaring disconnect
between the promised land of tech utopias and the
harsh reality of our inability to defeat a microscopic
virus? Isn’t Peter Thiel’s famous (and quoted in
the book) aphorism that “we wanted flying cars,
instead we got 140 characters” more pertinent than
ever, since we were promised personalised medicine
and instead we got Netflix binge-watching?
Grudgingly, Kotler concedes that technology has
ABOUT STEVEN KOTLER
Steven Kotler is a bestselling author, award-
winning journalist, and the founder and
executive director of the Flow Research
Collective. His work has been nominated
for two Pulitzer Prizes, and has appeared in
over a hundred publications, including the
New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly,
Wired, Forbes.
www.the-european.eu l 25
FEATURE INTERVIEW
exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities and created
new ones between digital glitterati and the rest.
However, he believes that the benefits outstrip the
costs: “Exponential technology makes resources that
were once scarce abundant,” he says, pointing to
smartphones as an example of a gadget offering us
for free capabilities worth millions just a few decades
ago. We may not all live in mansions, but we are
nonetheless the richer for it: “Income disparity is
not the measure of standard of living it once was,
because we now get for free through technology so
many things that have massively improved our lives,”
Kotler says. Examples of the democratising force
of technology abound, from DNA scanning to the
use of surgical robots that were once affordable only
to the super-rich and are now standard healthcare
practices.
One idea that often crops up in this debate is
universal basic income. Kotler is a sceptical fan,
not because technological unemployment will
render its adoption inevitable, as many Silicon
Valley entrepreneurs predict, but because it may
be a springboard for more cool stuff. “Small scale
experiments show that, unlike other forms of welfare,
it encourages innovation, entrepreneurship and
increases overall wellbeing and life satisfaction,”
he says. However, for those who think that robots
will take our jobs, or even our lives, Kotler has one
piece of advice – think again: “The two big boogie
men over the past few years have been AI and
tech unemployment, and both are kind of silly,
rather than real.” Adjusting to automation is for
him a “worker retraining problem”, as convergent
technologies hide many employment opportunities
that we don’t see yet, in the same way that we didn’t
see the job-creating potential of app development.
Dopamine junkies
If there is something about technology that irks
Kotler, it’s the impact it has on our brains. As a
neuroscience enthusiast with an interest in ways we
can expand our learning capacities, he fears that the
reason we can’t put down our beloved smartphones
is worrying – their use prompts our brain to generate
generous doses of dopamine, the same chemical
behind many forms of drug addiction. “We have
managed to destroy the attention capabilities of a
generation. We are not [natural] multitaskers, and
we fostered this addictive multitasking technology
before we were ready for it,” he warns.
This also partly explains why neo-Luddite
conspiracy theories about 5G technologies are all the
rage. Smartphones and social media have turned us
into dopamine junkies, and conspiracy theories feed
that addiction. “When you have more dopamine
in your system, you can see more connections
than others. But if you turn it up too high you see
connections where they don’t exist,” Kotler explains.
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‘Shutdown
showed the
world that we
can deal with
climate change’
Covid-19 made things worse: “The pandemic forced
the whole world to go inside where you can’t have
social connections. You get starved for dopamine,
which you get by spending a lot of time on social
media and plugging conspiracy theories.” In an
era where trust in traditional gatekeepers such as
mainstream media and science is diminishing, what
Kotler calls “the ingredients of panic”, namely fear,
anxiety and uncertainty, have become existential
threats. “These are separate things in the brain,
but when [they happen] together it’s almost an
intolerable situation for most people,” Kotler says.
“You do everything you can to remove one or the
other. With anxiety going up, you want to get rid of
uncertainty, and that’s what conspiracy theories do.”
Brave green world
Nothing causes more collective anxiety than the
biggest challenge facing our planet: climate change.
In the book, Kotler and Diamond recognise that
technology has its limits when dealing with such a
complex problem. And yet, there is scope for hope.
He doesn’t pin his hopes on mega-engineering
projects, but on things like vertical farming, meat
production based on stem cells and solar energy
grids. “The technology is here, the problem is
deploying it at scale,” Kotler says. “Small changes in
initial conditions can produce large outcomes.”
Will our reliance on technology lead to
complacency? A natural-born optimist, Kotler
hates the thought. The world’s recent predicaments
prove that we can do better, he says: “The shutdown
showed the world that we can deal with climate
change. It was darkly wonderful in that it taught us
that we can collaborate at the global level.”