The Law of Accelerating Returns
Ray Kurzweil predicts that if you can live another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then you can be around for the Singularity (when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software) a few decades later.
In 1976, when Kurzweil pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine. Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. Kurzweil debuted his cellphone-sized reader this year.
In the late 1980s, Kurzweil predicted the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998 (a year late, it turned out).
Kurzweil makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns. More than a century ago, machines’ computing power doubled about every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years; now it takes only about a year.
During the past century there has been exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education, etc.
Exponential progress has recently begun in nanotechnology, the ease of gene sequencing, and the resolution of brain scans.
Kurzweil says that if his predictions seem overly optimistic that’s because exponential upward curves appear deceptively gradual at first.
“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace. They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1% of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1% and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100% in just seven years.”
June 16th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!