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How We Can Manage Our Way Through the Intertwined Promise and Peril of Accelerating Change

Ray Kurzweil

page 2 of 15

Those things are hard to predict. But if you were to ask me, what would the cost of a MIPS of computing be in 2010, or the cost of Kurzweil Quote sequencing a base pair of DNA in 2012, or the spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning in 2014, I can give you a figure and it is likely to be correct. I have been doing this for 20 years and these trends have been tracking very accurately. There are very smooth exponential trends that go way beyond Moore's law.

Moore's Law is one example of many of this basic exponential nature of the power that is measured in price-performance and bandwidth capacity of information technology. Information technology is not just electronic gadgets, but includes, for example, our understanding of biology and many other facets and ultimately will underlie everything of importance.

You might wonder, how could this be? If a particular project is unpredictable, how can the overall result of this unpredictable chaotic worldwide activity be predictable? We see that in other areas of science. Thermodynamics is a good example. It is impossible to predict the path of a single molecule in a gas, and yet if you take trillions of trillions of particles, all interacting unpredictably and chaotically, the overall properties are very predictable to a very high degree of precision according to the laws of thermodynamics.

The evolution of technology, which is a continuation of the process that gave rise to the technology-creating species, is itself a chaotic activity with a vast number of unpredictable projects, all of which give rise to a predictable outcome. I am going to quickly show some samples of that in order to demonstrate how pervasive this is.

Image 1 shows that the basic paradigm shift rate, the rate at which we introduce new ways of doing things and adopt new technologies, is accelerating.

Image 1: Mass Use of Inventions

It took half a century to adopt the telephone, which is the first virtual reality technology that allows me to be with someone else despite being hundreds of miles apart. That never happened before, a century ago. That took half a century to be adopted by a quarter of the U.S. population. More recent technologies – the PC, cell phone, the Web - were measured in a few years time.

These are all logarithmic graphs - meaning as you go up, the graph it represents multiplying generally by a factor of 10. So a straight line on the logarithmic graph is exponential growth. This is better than exponential growth: the Web was adopted in seven years time, according to this. We have had exponential progression in the adoption of new technologies.

In the first few chapters of The Singularity Is Near, I articulate a theory of evolution, starting with biological evolution, leading to technological evolution. Image 2 shows the key events on both biological and technological evolution on this double logarithmic graph.

Image 2: Countdown

This shows how long ago in powers of 10 the event took place and how long it took until the next paradigm shift. The first paradigm shift - basically the evolution of biology itself, cells, in particular DNA/RNA, where evolution created a little information processing system, a computer system to keep track of its experiments - took billions of years.

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