Year ago, I read this story about a proud king and a humble farmer.
Sounds hackneyed? Oh wait for it.. As good old Barney from HIMYM would say
So once there was this big famine and the humble farmer was struggling. Not just he and his family, but the entire village was starving.
Unable to take it anymore, one day he picks up the courage to go to the proud King’s court and ask for help.
The proud king sees him and takes pity immediately. He says with an air of benevolent pride “Ask for anything you want.. the best meat and wine that money can buy, gold, diamonds?”
The humble farmer declines with utmost politeness and humility and says that he just wants some food grains.
“How many truckloads?” (yes, the ancient king has lots of trucks, please!)
The farmer points to the chessboard lying nearby and says “a single grain of rice in the first square and then the double of it in the next square and then the double of that in the next one and so on till the 64th square in the chessboard”
“What? That will be enough?” the proud king is puzzled, almost irritated at the utter foolishness of the humble farmer.
“Yes my lord, that will do”
“Ok granted”
I tell this story in one of the leadership workshops series that I run now. And then, I ask the audience ‘What is this story about?’
Why was the humble farmer being so evidently foolish? After all, how many grains did he ask for really?
Let’s see… 1 little grain of rice + double of that 2 + double of that 4 + double of that 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 +128… Oh wait.. we are already into the 8th square.. this is worse than we thought to begin with!
The poor guy is not going to end up with even a few kilos, will he?
Well, and so it goes. I ask my audience to guess the total number of grains the farmer will end up with, by the 64th square of the chessboard. They know by now I am on to something. There is gotta be a trick here, the number has got to be much larger than it seems to begin with. The guesses now vary from a few hundred thousands to even few millions!
Guess what? It turns out that the humble farmer was not so foolish after all. At the end of that story, the proud king ends up granting to the farmer everything he ever owned and some more.
As the total number of rice grains will turn out to be…wait for it……. 18,446,744,073,709,551,615
Surprised? Try figuring it out with your calculators sometime, if you like. As for me, I just googled it.
But what did just happen?
I relate this story in my workshops in context of talking about the exponential rate of change of technology that we are witnessing today.
Nothing extraordinary about that, huh? This is something that we think and talk about everyday nowadays.
But the reason why this story appeals to me is that it gives me a real sense of what something…anything changing exponentially feels like.
It seems innocuous to begin with.. almost sneaks past you… then at some point it starts getting mildly interesting… and then you lose interest…almost.
It is just a while after that…that it starts going bonkers.. you suddenly turn around and you see an unimaginable tsunami (let me say it.. Thank you Abhijit Bhaduri!) of change staring at you.. and you are overwhelmed by it, probably even engulfed in it.
Many of us, in relation to the exponential rate of technology, are at a stage in that story where things have just started to get mildly interesting.
With social media and smartphones having already changed our lives and work beyond recognition in the past few years, we now talk about things like AI, Blockchain, VR/AR etc.
We talk about these things in a similar vein we used to talk about BPR and Kanban once upon a time, for those of you who are old enough to remember. Or more recently, like we used to talk about social media and mobility.
Well not exactly, right ?
Some of us know it is a bit different this time? We have now come to believe that these technologies have far reaching consequences for the world we are going to be living in.
We may not yet fully understand them yet to have a real sense of what they ‘feel’ like. But we surely have an idea that something is up, right?
But then are we again making guesses in hundreds-thousands and millions, when something much much bigger is at play?
What do you think? Will love to know your views.
I will probably share mine in another article another day..
Wait,what did you ask? What has the title of this article got to do with what I actually wrote in here?
Remember what the old Barney said? Wait for it…. 🙂
