The issue, then, is that we are interpreting a global world with a system built for local landscapes. And because we’ve never seen it before, exponen… - Peter Diamandis

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you’d need to be the chairman of MIT’s computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. “By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries — cell phone, Internet — that we all seem to take for granted.

A recent RAND Corporation report illustrates these points precisely, finding that preventable medical errors in hospitals result in tens of thousands of deaths per year; preventable medication errors occur at least one and a half million times annually; and, on average, adults receive only 55 percent of recommended care, meaning that 45 percent of the time, our doctors get it wrong.

Clay Shirky uses the term “cognitive surplus” to describe this process. He defines it as “the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects.” “Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create,” says Shirky.