In 1996, there were 250k websites. Now there are more than 1.7 billion, Peter Leyden, former managing editor of WIRED magazine, told STAFDA members.

Twenty years ago, Leyden co-authored a WIRED feature on the future of technology during which he predicted that the internet would dominate life.

“Today 95% of people in North America are online,” he stated.

He also predicted that Apple, which was weeks away from bankruptcy when it begged Steve Jobs to return, would be a huge company. Likewise, Amazon, which was selling books at the time, would dominate online sales, he wrote in his feature. And while productivity would rise, incomes would not, according to his article.

“We pretty much called it right,” he pointed out.

Fast forwarding to 2019, Leyden said he’s heartened by how much positivity there is among tech leaders.

“The gloom and doom attitude of some isn’t accurate. We have to think about things differently.”

Charting the rise of technological advances he said PCs led the charge in the 1980s, while the internet influenced the ‘90s. Tech went mobile in the 2000s, and social media transformed society in the 2010s, all influenced by the “inexorable march of Moore’s Law.”

Now, computers are about 25,000 times more powerful than 40 years ago. The fastest supercomputers in the world in 1975 had 200 MFLOPS; in 2017 an iPhone 7 offered 300 GFLOPs for $649.

“Every one of you is walking around with a supercomputer in your pocket.”

So how do you adapt business processes to these rapidly changing technologies?

The classic process of adopting any tech and “flipping the switch” is obsolete, Leyden noted. The old ways of doing business will hang on until suddenly a majority embrace new tech, at which point it changes how something is accomplished.

“If you’re a boomer, it doesn’t matter what you think.  What matters in the marketplace is what Millennials think and do.”

Leyden also admitted his mistakes. He said he predicted in the 1990s that humans would reach Mars by 2020, a prediction he admits was wrong, though he blamed a lack of political will more than anything else for delay.

He also predicted wrongly at the time that limitations with batteries would limit the adoption of EV.  But not Amazon and other tech giants are adopting delivery EVs.

“These vehicles don’t have a lot of moving parts so they don’t need maintenance and they last forever.”

Robotics is focusing on augmenting what humans can do instead of replacing them, he explained.

“Machines can’t innovate. They can’t think like that.”

Leyden said artificial intelligence is “easier” than robotics at present. Robotics has not figured out how to make interactive robots that can roam a warehouse amid people and perform numerous different functions.

“Think of them as routinized, but don’t worry about them taking over your warehouse. We are nowhere near that right now.”

He noted that we are in a period of adjustment with tech companies growing faster than their founders can comprehend. 

“In the coming years, federal and state governments will work to rein them in and figure out how to integrate their functions into life more fairly.”

Peter Leyden is the founder and CEO of Reinvent, a media startup that gathers top innovators in video conversations about “how to fundamentally reinvent our world.” Web: reinvent.net