The exponential age of technology - what are the implications?

If you feel like life is changing faster and faster, you are 100% right. Much of what you have learned at school is possibly outdated by now. Technologies are developing at an increasingly rapid speed and it’s causing the rate of change to grow exponentially.

As an example, 20 years from now the rate of change will be 4 times faster than today. In 40 years from now this will be 16 times faster. If this continues it would mean that in 100 years from today the rate of change will be 1024 times of what it is now. Is your mind spinning yet?

The technological changes we experience in the 21st century will be 1000 times greater than what was experienced in the 20th century. The future will be much more surprising than we can even imagine and in order to keep up with it, we have to change ourselves again and again. We can not expect to stay the same in a world that is changing at this incredible speed.

In times like these, where the world is changing exponentially we need to continue digging into new concepts around us and try to find bridges. If we do this successfully we will benefit from being early adopters.

We at the PTC are seeing a lot of high quality deals coming down the funnel, and the status of technology is often times the big differentiator. We are seeing “Sillicon Valley” folks coming into the Proptech/Contech space and building products with industry veterans. This combination is powerful...

Follow the trend

In order to make the best decisions, let’s look macro. There are effectively three major global technology shifts that are happening at the moment, and eventually they will converge:

Web 3.0 & blockchain

What started as an embryo and something incomprehensible for most, keeps growing and is here to stay and change our lives in many areas, and for the better. Every single (major) financial institution and leading consultancy firm is leveraging this for different use cases.

A few examples:

Banking: peer-to-peer payments can be made with extremely high security and low fees, disrupting the commercial banking system as we know it. Let’s not forget that no single (paper) currency has existed >100 years and with the monetary reset currently unfolding in front of our eyes this will become one of the innovative “ways out”.

In cybersecurity blockchain is a very welcome evolvement because it secures data against unauthorized access. Supply chain management: there it can trace all steps of the supply chain, making it easy to find out where your order went wrong. Healthcare: keeping your medical files private and safe. And there's more...

Digital reality technology

Virtual and augmented reality is developing at the speed of lightning. According to different market studies, Virtual Reality is projected to grow exponentially in the next years. The global AR/VR/MR market was valued at $26 billion in 2021 and it is expected to reach at $242 billion by 2028. Of the US population 7% uses VR and 28.1% uses AR monthly. The worldwide market for AR and VR headsets grew 92.1% year over year in 2021.

The possibilities of digital reality technology are endless. Think of healthcare and manufacturing (we have looked at several interesting Proptechs in our network in this space).

Cognitive technology

According to a recent study the cognitive computing market is expected to reach $3.2 Trillion by 2032, from $ 257.1 Billion in 2022! Artificial Intelligence, neural networks, machine learning and language processing will be increasing human capabilities more than we can imagine today. A bit scary too…

How does this tie into PropTech?

Blockchain has been able to simplify the transaction process in selling and buying real estate assets, by removing a third-party and big volumes of documentation. Also, data governance is a big opportunity and we see a number of start-ups gaining a lot of momentum…

But, the overall take-away, it’s hard to make predictions when things are changing so fast. The future will be a surprise, but as long as we embrace change and keep learning, it might be a very bright one.

We distill the noise and get things done. With global insights + coverage we can help drive ROI from your strategy.

Should you wish to get more insights or get access to opportunities in our global network please do reach out:

hello@theproptechconnection.com

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