In a study released in 2003, the Berkeley School of Information found that in the previous year the world produced about five exabytes of new information. According to IBM, ten years later in 2012, we produced five exabytes of data every two days. It has been said we’re now producing five exabytes of data every two minutes. Put another way, Cisco reported it would take over five years to watch the amount of video that will cross global networks every second in 2015.



This is an incomprehensible amount of information for any human mind to process.

In recent decades, information technology has fundamentally changed the way we access, store and process information and knowledge. And it’s only the beginning: Today 60% of the world’s people do not have access to the internet. In the coming decades, billions more will come online, more than doubling the amount of information creators adding to our shared digital repository of knowledge.



The increased volume and sharing of information, along with the rapid disruption of many industries as a result of information technologies, is changing not only what we need to learn to be successful but also how we learn and even why we learn.

With nearly half of today’s jobs at risk of automation in the next few decades, the most successful will seek to learn the new skills which will allow us to add value and propel society forward. We will use new technologies like machine learning to better sift information and virtual reality to learn better and faster. And we will learn for a different reason: to achieve a greater purpose, not just to hold down a job.

This month we will be exploring “The Future of Learning” as part of our Which Way Next? series. We invite you to join us online throughout the month and in person on November 5th at Singularity University for an interactive panel and workshop to explore questions like:

What are the critical skills youth and adults need to thrive in the 21st century and beyond?

How do exponential technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality have the potential to change how we learn?

What roles should startups, governments, schools and communities play in the evolving learning landscape?

We’ll be discussing these topics and more, join us!

Tweet to us @singularityhub or to me @svm118 with questions, suggestions, comments and ideas on the series. To get updates on Future of Learning posts, sign up here.