Genomic Instability: DNA doesn't always replicate according to plan. Typically, these errors in gene expression get caught and corrected, but not alw… - Peter Diamandis

We were at 0G in 1940, when the first telephone networks began to roll out. This was the deceptive phase. It took forty years to crawl our way to 1G, which showed up via the first mobile phones in the 1980s, marking the transition from deceptive to disruptive. By the 90s, around the time the internet emerged, 2G came along for the ride. But the ride didn’t last long. A decade later, 3G ushered in a new era of acceleration as bandwidth costs began to plummet — at a staggeringly consistent 35 percent per year. Smartphones, mobile banking, and e-commerce unleashed 4G networks in 2010. But starting in 2019, 5G will begin to hotwire the whole deal, delivering speeds a hundred times faster at near-zero prices.

Each of us has an internal “line of credibility.” When we hear of an idea that is introduced below this line, we dismiss it out of hand. If the teenager next door declares his intent to fly to Mars, you smirk and move on. We also have an internal line of supercredibility.

The human brain evolved in an environment that was local and linear. Local, meaning most everything that we interacted with was less than a day’s walk away. Linear, meaning the rate of change was exceptionally slow. Your great-great-great-grandfather’s life was roughly the same as his great-great-grandson’s life. But now we live in a world that is global and exponential. Global, meaning if it happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it seconds later (and our computers hear about it only milliseconds later). Exponential, meanwhile, refers to today’s blitzkrieg speed of development. Forget about the difference between generations, currently mere months can bring a revolution. Yet our brain — which hasn’t really had a hardware update in two hundred thousand years — wasn’t designed for this scale or speed. And if we struggle to track the growth of singular innovations, we’re downright helpless in the face of converging ones. Put it this way, in “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs — such as affordable aerial ridesharing — will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time. It means, of course, that flying cars are just the beginning.