With tech development accelerating at an exponential clip, the world's headed for science fiction to be made reality, according to the former chief business officer of Google X. Mo Gawdat, speaking at the Credit Suisse Global Megatrends Conference in Singapore, said rapid progress that has been made in a few major areas, including artificial intelligence, will lead to that future. Technological fields to watch, he said, are robotics, machine learning, life sciences, blockchain, virtual reality and augmentated reality.

"Control is an illusion ... there is no control, especially if you are trying to control a species that is much smarter than you are." Mo Gawdat former chief business officer of Google X

Robotics has "broken out," he said, with many robots soon to be doing tasks in everyday living, while machines are learning and becoming "much smarter than we are." As for life sciences, Gawdat said there are indicates that "by 2050 we will start to increase humans' life expectancy by one year every year." "So put all of those together and ... for the first time in my technology life, I tend to believe we really are heading for sci-fi. Everything you see in sci-fi movies is going to happen," he said. He highlighted the sheer speed of technological progress. "There are no peaks anymore, there are no big discoveries anymore ... It's all happening so fast that you don't realize the amount of change between this year and last year," he said. "The technology adoption curve ... is just very very much accelerating, to the point we're now talking about product life cycles in months, not even in years.

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