We live in exponential times


Karl Fisch created this presentation to start conversations with other teachers about the world their students are entering.


It is a collection of facts and figures about globalization, information age and America’s changing position in the world.


Since Karl generously shared the original presentation under a Creative Commons license, there have been several remixes, many YouTube versions, and SlideShare versions.


This is one of the video presentation of SHIFT HAPPENS


Created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod




The idea being that shifts in society are presenting us with some very real issues which must be addressed along with some startling facts.

The facts:

-In the next eight seconds, 32 babies will be born.

-Of the world's 2006 College graduates: 1.3 million came from the U.S., 3.1 million came from India, and 3.3 million came from China.

-Of the 3.1 million graduates from India one hundered percent of them speak English.

-It is estimated that in ten years the worlds largest population of English speakers will be from China

-One in four workers has been with their current employer for less than one full year.

-The United States Department of Labor estimates that todays students will have about 10 jobs by the time they are 38.

-Most of today's college majors did not even exist ten years ago, majors like: New media, Organicly produced Agriculture, e-buisiness, nanotechnology, and Homeland Security.

-Today's 21-year-olds have viewed 20,000 hours of television, played 10,000 hours of video games, talked 10,000 hours talking on the phone, sent 250,000 emails or instant messages, and have created more than %50 of today's internet content.

-70% of today's 4-year-olds have used the internet.

-It took 38 years for the radio to reach a market of 50 million people. It only took the TV 13 years to reach the 50 million mark. But it only took 4 years for the internet to reach the 50 million mark.

-The number of internet devices jumped frm 1000 in 1984 to 600,000,000 in 2006.

-The first commercial text message was sent in 1992, and today the number of text messages sent on any given day exceeds the population of our planet.

-The internet was first used widely in 1995, and in 2006, one in eight married couples met online.

-In this month alone there were 2.7 billion searches performed on the Google search engine.-There are curently more than 540,000 words in the English language, more than 5 times as many as Shakespeare's time.

-Today the amount of new technical information doubles every two years, and by 2010 it is predicted that the new information will double every two days.

-Currently the fiberoptic technology in use can push 10 trillion bits per second down a strand of fiber, this translates into 1,900 compact disks (CDs) or 150 million simultaneous telephone calls a second.

-There are nearly 2 billion children who live in developing countries, one in three of these children do not complete the fifth grade. The One Laptop per Child Project set out to change this by providing laptops for these children.

-It is believed that by the time the childen born in 2007 are six years of age a super computer will have more computational power than he human brain.

-It is predicted that by 2048 there will be a computer that costs $1,000 that will surpass the entire human race in computational power.

What does it all mean?

SHIFT HAPPENS

Today's student's are being trained to perform tasks that don't exist and technologies which we do not yet have, in order to solve the problems we don't know know are problems yet.

The truth of the matter WE LIVE IN EXPONENTIAL TIMES

What does that mean exactly?

It means that our society is growing in exponential leaps and bounds and there are things we must realize to prepare for the future.

Entering the zone of total transparence

This 5 minutes video produced by Italian Web Consulting Agency, Casaleggio Associati is aimed to predict the future of the Internet in 43 years.

Shortly, the Net will include and unify not only the media content but also our private lifes.

And the big winner will be Google. On 2051 we will live an overall Second Life named Prometeus. You will ONLY present your avatar and you will not exist out of Prometeus.

Devices that replicate the five senses will be available in the virtual worlds. We will really feel and live in the Second Life (ooops, Prometeus controlled by Google). BTW, even this blog is owned by Google and probably its collecting more information about me than I'm able to do for myself.

New providence or sharp viral ad? Should we regret that we will not be alive on 2051 when our lifes will be so restrained by overall Google control that the only way to become what you want is not by living your own life but only by living the (marketable!) life of your avatar in the Second Life ?

But on the other hand, it's the only sure wager of our eternity - maybe we will be still alive on 2051 only thanks to Google who are collecting everything about us right now (watch the video on the end of this post).

But first, read the complete text of the video above:

"Man is God. He is everywhere, he is anybody, he knows everything.

This is the Prometeus new world. All started with the Media Revolution, with Internet, at the end of the last century.

Everything related to the old media vanished: Gutenberg, thecopyright, the radio, the television, the publicity.

The old world reacts: more restrictions for the copyright, new laws against non authorized copies. Napster, the music peer to peer company is sued.

At the same time, free internet radio appears; TIVO, the internet television, allows to avoid publicity; the Wall Street Journal goes on line; Google launches Google news.

Millions of people read daily the biggest on line newspaper.

OhMyNews written by thousands of journalists;

Flickr becomes the biggest repository in the history of photos, YouTube for movies.

The power of the masses.

A new figure emerges: the prosumer, a producer and a consumer of information. Anyone can be a prosumer.

The news channels become available on Internet. The blogs become more influential than the old media. The newspapers are released for free.

Wikipedia is the most complete encyclopedia ever.

In 2007 Life magazine closes (sic!) The NYT sells its television and declares that the future is digital. BBC follows. In the main cities of the world people are connected for free. At the corners of the streets totems print pages from blogs and digital magazines.

The virtual worlds are common places on the Internet for millions of people.A person can have multiple on line identities. Second Life launches the vocal avatar.

The old media fight back. A tax is added on any screen; newspapers, radios and televisions are financed by the State; illegal download from the web is punished with years of jail.

Around 2011 the tipping point is reached: the publicity investments are done on the Net. The electronic paper is a mass product: anyone can read anything on plastic paper.

In 2015 newspapers and broadcasting television disappear, digital terrestrial is abandoned, the radio goes on the Internet. The media arena is less and less populated. Only the Tyrannosaurus Rex survives.

The Net includes and unifies all the content.

Google buys Microsoft. Amazon buys Yahoo! and become the world universal content leaders with BBC, CNN and CCTV.

The concept of static information - books, articles, images - changes and is transformed into knowledge flow.

The publicity is chosen by the content creators, by the authors and becomes information, comparison, experience.

In 2020 Lawrence Lessig, the author of 'Free Culture', is the new US Secretary of Justice and declares the copyright illegal.

Devices that replicate the five senses are available in the virtual worlds. The reality could be replicated in Second Life.

Any one has an Agav (agent-avatar) that finds information, people, places in the virtual worlds.

In 2022 Google launches Prometeus, the Agav standard interface.

Amazon creates Place, a company that replicates reality.

You can be on Mars, at the battle of Waterloo, at the Super Bowl as a person. It's real.

In 2027 Second Life evolves into Spirit. People become who they want. And share the memory. The experiences. The feelings. Memory selling becomes a normal trading.

In 2050 Prometeus buys Place and Spirit. Virtual life is the biggest market on the planet. Prometeus finances all the space missions to find new worlds for its customers: the terrestrial avatar.

Experience is the new reality."

Voice: Philip K. Dick Avatar !

Watch This Short Movie About The Power Of Google