That said, there are a few undeniable trends.
Making sense of the numbers
According to every credible source we can find, there are almost 3 billion people connected to the public internet right now; by 2020 the number will approach 4 billion. According to Cisco, by 2020 there will be over 50 billion connected devices in the world. Some people like to call it the “Internet of Things,” others call it “Machine 2 Machine” or “M2M.” No matter what you call it, these are unimaginably large numbers of people and devices all connected.
So how do you sort it out?
I use three laws to help me understand the rate of change: Moore’s Law, the Law of Accelerating Returns, and Metcalfe’s Law. Moore’s Law is named for Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel. He wrote a famous paper back in 1965 where it posited that the density of semiconductors on silicon would double every 18 months.
This was true for a while, but now, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns (which states that the rate of technological change is accelerating exponentially) we know that this doubling of computing power happens much faster than that. Then there’s Metcalfe’s Law, which tells us that the value of a network increases proportional to the square of the number of users. If this all sounds too geeky, don’t worry — here’s how to think about the remarkable pace of technological change and the huge number of people in simple terms.
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On-demand food, shelter and transportation are obvious. On-demand retail and services of every kind are less so, and the wildcards are the meta-services that will evolve to make sense of our on-demand world.
What does a funds manager do when an app, that uses cloud computing to do your research based on a data-set created by your private investment behavior, replaces his job (both strategically and transactionally)?
What does a skilled repair-person do when manufacturers can diagnose problems over the public internet and deploy outsourced semi-skilled workers who will do a better, faster, cheaper job?
What happens when the manufacturer solves your problem by deploying unmanned vehicles and robots? Too far-fetched, you say?
Remember Moore’s Law, the Law of Accelerating returns, and Metcalfe’s Law. It will happen in the virtual blink of an eye.
