How Two Technologies Disrupted Our World in the Last Two Centuries

Exponential change in the past two centuries has altered how humans interact and react. Two specific technological innovations, one in transportation, and the other in communication have changed the world. In his latest email blast, Peter Diamandis tells the story of just how tools of cooperation have played a significant role in shaping our present.

Over the past few centuries, we’ve seen revolutions in two key technologies: Transportation, and Information Sharing and Telecommunications. A revolution in both has shaped our modern world and gives us a glimpse of what to expect in the future. From here I will let, for the most part, Peter’s words tell the rest of the story.

Our story starts by looking at the elections of two US Presidents: Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.

A Tale of Two U.S. Presidential Elections

In 1861, William Russell, one of the biggest investors in the Pony Express mail service, decided to use the previous year’s presidential election for promotional purposes. His goal was to deliver Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address from the eastern end of the telegraph line in Nebraska to the telegraph’s western end in Nevada as fast as possible. To pull this off, he spent a small fortune, hired hundreds of men, and positioned fresh relay horses every 10 miles. As a result, California read Lincoln’s words 17 days and 7 hours after he spoke them.

By comparison, in 2008 the entire country learned that Barack Obama had become the 44th President of the United States the instant he was declared the winner. When Obama gave his inaugural address, his words travelled from Washington, DC, to California 14,939,040 seconds faster than Lincoln’s speech. But his words also hit Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and Karachi, Pakistan, less than a second later. Barring some combination of precognition and global telepathy, this is about the fastest such information could possibly travel.

Such rapid progress becomes even more impressive when you consider that our species has been sending messages to one another for 150,000 years. And while smoke signals were innovative, and airmail even more so, in the last century, we’ve gotten so good at this game that no matter the distances involved, and with little more than a smartphone and a Twitter account, anyone’s words can reach everyone’s screen in an instant.

Obama’s speech went global instantly because, during the 20th century, this same positive feedback loop reached an apex of sorts: producing the two most powerful cooperative tools the world has ever seen.

Cooperative Tool #1: Transportation Revolution

The first of these revolutionary tools was in transportation that brought us from relying on beasts of burden to travelling in airplanes, trains, and automobiles in less than 200 years. Withn that time, we built highways and skyways and, to borrow Thomas Friedman’s phrase, “flattened the world.”

Before we applied machines to transportation, when famine struck in the Sudan, people elsewhere didn’t hear about it until years later. Providing relief meant gathering supplies of food and sending them by ship taking several weeks. Meanwhile people died.

But today, a famine outbreak is reported in real-time. C-130 Hercules transport airplanes rather than guys on horses means a whole lot of people could be a lot less hungry in a hurry. Measuring the change in cooperative capabilities yields an 18,800-fold increase in substituting a Herucles for horsepower.

Total carrying capacity over time is perhaps even a better metric, and here the gains are even larger. Whereas a horse can lug 90 kilograms (200 pounds) more than 50 kilometres (30 miles) a day, a C-130 can handle nearly 20,000 kilograms (more than 42,000 pounds) over 12,800 kilometres (8,000 miles) in the same 24 hours. This metric represents a 56,000-fold improvement.

Cooperative Tool #2: Information Technology & Telecommunications

The second cooperative tool has been the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution. This has produced even greater gains in the last two centuries.

In his book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Columbia University economist Jeffery Sachs counts 8 distinct contributions that ICT has made to sustainable development, all of them cooperative.

• The first is connectivity gains. These days, there’s no way to avoid the world. We are all part of the process. We all know one another’s business. “In the world’s most remote villages,” writes Sachs, “the conversation now often turns to the most up-to-date political and cultural events, or to changes in commodity prices, all empowered by cell phones even more than radio and television.”

• The second is increased division of labour. As greater connectivity produces greater specialization, it allows all of us to participate in the global supply chain.

• The third is scale. Wherein messages go out over vast networks they can reach millions of people in almost no time at all.

• The fourth is replication. As Sachs notes, “ICT permits standardized processes, for example, online training or production specifications, to reach distant outlets instantaneously.”

• The fifth is accountability. Today’s new platforms permit increased audits, monitoring, and evaluation, a development that has led to everything from better democracy, to online banking, to telemedicine.

• The sixth is the Internet’s ability to bring together buyers and sellers. What Sachs calls “matching” is the enabling factor behind author and Wired magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson’s “long-tail” economics.

• The seventh is the use of social networking. This technology builds “communities of interest,” that has led to applications like Twitter to SETI@home.

• The eighth is education and training. ICT has taken the classroom global, updating curriculum for almost every single bit of information one could ever desire.

Final Thoughts & A Glimpse into the Future

The world has changed tremendously over the past two centuries. But the rate at which the world is changing is itself increasing. I believe entrepreneurs will create more wealth in the next decade than we did in the last century. A key force behind the change will be how converging exponential technologies lead to further advancements in tools of cooperation.

Here are just a few examples:

Continued improvements in battery storage, machine learning, materials science, and sensors will lead to autonomous vehicles and flying cars (eVTOL) that will redefine human travel.

Fully autonomous vehicles, car-as-a-service fleets, and aerial ridesharing (flying cars) will be fully operational in most major metropolitan cities in the coming decade. The cost of transportation will plummet by a factor greater than three. Where you live and work, and how you spend your time, will all be fundamentally reshaped by faster and cheaper.

At the same time, the convergence of 5G networks, AI, surging computing power, hardware advancements, low-cost space launches, and advances in materials science will create global gigabit connectivity that connects everyone and everything at ultra-low costs.

The deployment of both licensed and unlicensed 5G, plus the launch of a multitude of global satellite networks (Starlink, OneWeb, etc.), is allowing for ubiquitous, low-cost communications for everyone, everywhere, not to mention connecting trillions of devices.

This skyrocketing connectivity will bring online an additional 3 billion people and drive tens of trillions of dollars into the global economy.