Recommended Reading:

In This Issue   Feature: The ERaCha Era: Living on the Edge of Radical Change   Robots Everywhere Internet Assistants AORTA At Last Pattern Recognition Instant Translation Augmented Reality Natural Navigation MALT Driverless Cars Solar World Ubiquitous Surveillance Real Medicine   Quotes of the Week   Takeout Window A Map of What the Chinese Deny Doing A New Theory of Network Effects: Percolation Explosions   Upgrades and Numbers No Grexit China's Currency Manipulation A New Memory Technology Tunable LEDs Using Graphene   Ethermail   Inside SNS   Upcoming SNS Events   Where's Mark?

 

Can't Not Do: The Compelling Social Drive That Changes Our World, by SNS member Paul Shoemaker (Wiley, August 2015)

 

For anyone interested in how individuals can make a global - and local - difference, I highly recommend reading Paul's new book. Does anyone understand social philanthropy better than the past CEO of Social Venture Partners? I doubt it. - mra.

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Please join us at FiRe 2015 to explore:

 

42 new technologies and

The Power of Patterns.

 

October 6-9, Stein Eriksen Lodge

                                  Park City, Utah

 

www.futureinreview.com/register/

 

 

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The ERaCha Era:

          Living on the Edge of Radical Change

 

You're driving toward the Grand Canyon at a pretty good clip. It can be hard to see that cliff edge right in front of you.

 

There are many people working on looking forward today, with a number of descriptions of what they see, generally within their own chosen fields of interest. On a larger scale, Moore's Law, and the shift to technology driving every sector of the economy, have united to create a different world, day by day, from that which came before.

 

This rate of change is exponential, and for that reason, almost impossible for us to grasp.

 

Vernor Vinge invented the concept of "the "Singularity" to describe the human / computer aspects of one moment in this change, and folks like Ray Kurzweil have suggested dates in the future when this will take place - but we've already passed the time when computers are smarter than humans. We need some other yardstick to understand, and see, what comes next.

 

For all these reasons, I thought it would be useful to first recognize this moment's importance, as we stand on a true precipice facing radical changes in almost everything around us - and then provide a brief attempt at describing what's coming next.