BOLD summary

Introduction and Exponential Technology

Bold by Peter Diamandis, Steven Kotler What's in it for me? Discover the power of exponential growth and how to tap into it. A fundamental question that all companies face is how to grow their business, and grow it fast. So what's the trick?

You've got to be bold. A bold company is a company that has unlocked the power of exponential growth. This summary explains how new technology enables new kinds of exponential growth. The emergence of a global online community has opened up possibilities for growth that, a mere twenty years ago, was the stuff of dreams.

Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and other ways of tapping into this community's power can rocket a startup from the doldrums to dominion in no time at all. Chapter one. The exponential growth of technology is democratizing the power to change the world. Some sixty six million years ago an asteroid wiped out all the dinosaurs, leaving the ruling of the world to a new group of animals our furry little mammalian ancestors.

Currently, another monumental event is rocking our modern world, the rise of exponential technology. And like that fateful asteroid, exponential technology will wipe out today's dinosaurs, that is, all lumbering, innovation resistant companies. Our understanding of exponential technological growth was first formulated by Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, who noticed that the number of transistors on integrated circuits consistently doubled about every twelve to twenty four months. This trend of exponential growth is called Moore's law.

To understand how Moore's law affects our world, consider that our smartphones are a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than a supercomputer from one thousand nine hundred and seventy. When a technology becomes digital, as photography did when images moved from physical film to digital files, its growth rate becomes exponential. After digitization, photography became far more widespread and popular that companies were soon willing to fork out huge amounts of money to get in on the action. Facebook, for example, bought Instagram for a cool one billion dollars.

Exponential technology, in addition to bringing us neat gadgets like smartphones, is democratizing the power to change the world. Three D printing, for example, is furthering the democratization of manufacturing. Thanks to three D printing, manufacturing a new car design no longer requires the building of an entirely new factory. With the right resources, almost anyone can do it.

Today, most cars have three D printed parts, and an entire car can now be printed on one site in one day. On a smaller scale, some experts think that three D printers will be a sound investment for individual households. A three D printer can quickly manufacture enough products to pay for itself, and if we each owned one, it would irreversibly change the world of manufacturing.

Exponential Opportunities

Exponential technologies offer the world's biggest business opportunities. These days, getting ahead as an entrepreneur means knowing which exponential technologies are on the verge of wide availability. One such technology, Artificial Intelligence AI, will soon be ubiquitous in our daily lives.

And some of these machines are already well on their way to near human sophistication. For example, Ray Kurzweil, the co founder of Singularity University, has long envisioned the rise of AI with natural language understanding. Today, with the rapid advance of generative AI, computers can indeed comprehend subtle nuances in both spoken and written languages. This progress has profound consequences.

If we could ask complex questions of machines, they could respond using not only logical intelligence but also emotional intelligence. At that point, AI's ability to understand the world might equal or even surpass that of humans. In fact, Kurzweil's famous prediction that machines will outsmart us by two thousand twenty nine is looking more realistic than ever. Another exponential technology verging on ubiquity is sensor technology.

A sensor is any device that detects information, for example, temperature or vibration. When connected to a network, these sensors can then transmit this information to us. As the price of sensors decreases, the only limit to how we might put them to use is our imagination. And with each technological advance, the number of sensors increases.

To get an idea of how many sensors there are, imagine taking all the world's iPads and iPhones and laying their sensors out on the ground. In two thousand twelve, the total area covered by these sensors was equal to that of twenty football fields, in two thousand fifteen, it will be three times larger. In other words, there will be enough sensors to cover half of Manhattan. With the growing availability of sensors comes new opportunities to innovate.

On a small scale, for example, there are now kits that enable your houseplants to tweet when they need to be watered, and beer mugs that can tell you how much you've had to drink during Oktoberfest. The possibilities are endless.