Can Our Imaginations Match the Change?

At a recent Round Square International Conference, Dr. Peter Diamandis provided the most thought-provoking messages for both students and adults. Diamandis is the co-founder of two universities, creator of the X Prize for commercial space travel and subsequently expanded the concept into prizes for a wide range of endeavours, including genome mapping, environmental clean-up, high efficiency cars, as well as health sensing and diagnostic tools. His message and broader career focus is on the impact of exponential growth innovation on the human condition.

The increasing scope and pace of change almost seems like an old message. Buckminster Fuller talked about it in the 1930s. Paradigm shifting became a popular concept in science and business in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Innovators like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have transformed the way business works, the way we learn, the way humans interact, and the way we live our lives almost on a second-to-second basis. Even Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (2005) seems like it has been with us for decades.

Diamandis is one of those many experts who preach from the gospel of ‘change is our most important reality’ and whether it ends up being positive or negative (he has a strong bias for the former) the pace for the future exceeds our ability to imagine it. He makes the case that 150,000 years of human evolution in rural environments, where the sphere of influence was one’s own tribe and the area within perhaps a 100 km radius, provided us an ability to understand and internalize linear change (at a pace of perhaps 10%, 50%, two-times or even five-times.) However, exponential change – at a pace of 1,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000 times – exceeds the human brain’s ability to comprehend and adapt.

My maternal grandmother was born at the very start of the 20^th century and died in 1991 having lived her entire life in the same house in the Yonge and St. Clair area of Toronto. When she was young, the house was in the country, surrounded by forests, fields and wildlife. By the time she died, it was in the middle of the largest city in the country. When she was growing up, she would go with her mother to visit friends in a horse and buggy over dirt or plank roads. Throughout her life, she saw dozens of generations of automobiles, airplanes, trips to the moon, and even space shuttles. When you consider communications, medical science, energy, household operations, major world events such as the Russian revolution, the two world wars, the cold war, the depression, the role of women, the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism – almost anything, it is hard not to be impressed how she and her peers were able to adapt to the new social order. The scary truth, however, is that we will experience orders of magnitude of change beyond what she did, and those students entering Grade 7 will likely live through at least a thousand-fold more change than we will.

Diamandis outlines many examples of disruption innovation happening at an exponential level, including these three:

·         Computing power: This is perhaps the most commonly cited example of exponential impact, and we experience it in communication, automation of almost all machines and complex tools, as well as access to information (e.g. a Masai tribesman holding a smartphone with internet access has more more processing power in his hand than President Reagan could command, and access to more information than did President Clinton). IBM’s Watson computer can process 1 million books per second. Looking forward, as computing power reaches the capacity of the human brain and eventually the cumulative power of all human brains (technological singularity), artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to render many of our day-to-day tasks obsolete. (Think already of robotics like Big Dog, and the self-driving car.) In addition to changing lifestyle, this is and will continue to have a profound impact on information-based jobs and professions as AI will make accessing information intuitive and instantaneous.
 

 
 

·         Health & Medicine: There are many examples in health sciences of exponential innovation. Perhaps none will have more impact in the medium term than the mapping of the human genome and the discovery of genetic relationships with all aspects of life. This achievement, together with other medical innovations such as artificial body parts, is already leading to the creation of artificial life by design, cloning, and the probability of dramatically extending life. While Statscan suggests that the life expectancy of the Grade 7 students will be 77-82, many scientists are declaring that these innovations will result in the strong probability of their living beyond 100, and possibly as old as 150. The implications to working life, pensions, quality of life, family structures, and the work force are immense. 

·         3D Printing: The possibilities for disruption through 3D printing are staggering. This form of manufacturing creates, in real time, three dimensional items of varied types – clothing, multi-working-part machines, food, etc. It is already changing the notions of the ease of creation and the ability for individuals to command design. While costs are still high, like computing processing power, 3D printing is putting immense power and potential into the hands of individuals.
  

The implications of change on our graduates will be increasingly important. The Canadian stories of Nortel and RIM, both of which used to dominate the TSE, are good examples of the increasingly volatile nature of the working world. This chart illustrates how the half-life of corporate power/success is becoming shorter due in large part to disruptive influences. Our students today should be prepared to be successful for jobs that haven’t been defined in companies that don’t yet exist.



Over the last decades, it has become understood that the ‘company man’ concept of someone working for one employer in one stream over a lifetime is close to obsolete. Our students will be shifting companies, sectors and even careers many times over. There is a high likelihood that they will leave a company involuntarily sometime in their lives, and they will also work for themselves at some point. A person’s ability not only to cope with disruption, but also to adapt to it, and optimally to capitalize on it will be a defining characteristic of future success. Interestingly, the rate and pace of the change for which we are preparing these students is beyond anything that either their parents or teachers have experienced or can easily comprehend.

Of course, as Appleby heads into the process for defining our next major blueprint for the future, we are compelled to answer the question, how are we ensuring that our graduates are ready for this world? What are the most important attributes that will allow them to capitalize on this pace of change?