From Chapter 4 of my book, Write like they’re your last words
Ray Kurzweil is a name you should get to know thoroughly, particularly his law of accelerating returns. He’s achieved world fame for a number of reasons, two of which are his highly accurate predictions and his exponential view of technology.
Living with exponential trends is confounding because they mimic linear trends in their early stages then suddenly shoot skyward. As Kurzweil often describes it, “If I count 30 steps linearly I get to 30. If I count exponentially, 30 steps later I’m at a billion. It makes a dramatic difference.”
Here’s the point: Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, but we experience it linearly. If two points on an exponential curve are close enough, the experience of moving from one to the other will seem linear. Thus, our expectations and projections about the future are often based on the wrong scale — linear instead of exponential.
(Linear versus exponential: Linear growth is steady; exponential growth becomes explosive. Source: The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology [2005], Ray Kurzweil)
As Kurzweil explains in The Singularity is Near [emphasis mine in all extracts],
Exponential growth is seductive, starting out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Exponential trends did exist one thousand years ago, but they were at that very early stage in which they were so flat and so slow that they looked like no trend at all.
If Kurzweil is correct then before the middle of this century technology will reach a point he calls the Singularity, where the rate of change will be explosive. The rapid pace will still be finite, but it will seem infinite to biologically unenhanced humans. As he explains:
The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.
If these prospects leave you uneasy you’re not alone. Kurzweil, though, sees this state of affairs as a goal worth reaching.
All the machines we have met to date lack the essential subtlety of human biological qualities. Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.
Why do I mention all this in a book about writing? Because you will be writing in Kurzweil’s world.
There are many high-IQ people who are in agreement with Kurzweil but who nevertheless talk about the future as if technology were an irrelevant consideration. Political commentators especially have been speculating on presidential candidates for 2020 and 2024, as if the world will be essentially the same then as it is now in late 2016.
Maybe, maybe not, but the trend is clear: As technology advances individuals gain increasing control over their lives. They’re not as dependent on the ones above them as the ones above them think they are.
If anything is clear about the 2016 presidential election it is the failure of the Establishment to push their favored candidate into the White House. How did this happen? A technology known as the Web. As Gary North wrote in 2013,
What is going to shape the thinking of the American electorate is access to the Web, which enables people to read in-depth stories that interest them, and which interest people of similar perspectives. The social media will determine which news stories are read, not a handful of news screeners at the four major television networks. . . .
Technology is poised to redefine life-as-we-know-it. There are numerous books that advance this outlook in great detail, among which are:
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology,
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,
Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization,
Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.
And more recently,
How to use AI (for Real People)
And putting technology in an economics context,
Human Action: Scholar’s Edition.
Technological change is coming at us in ways that resonate with science fantasy. Nothing short of a global calamity will stop it.
You might be familiar with Moore’s Law and how it’s driving technological development. It is and it isn’t. Let’s clear this up.
In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, published a paper in which he noted that the number of components on an integrated circuit doubled every year. Since the cost of the integrated circuit would remain roughly constant, we would get twice the speed and twice the circuitry at the same price. Though later revised to every two years, Moore’s prediction has proven to be remarkably accurate and is known eponymously as Moore’s Law. Kurzweil gives us a sense of what this means:
When I was an undergraduate [in the late 1960s] we all shared a computer at MIT that took up half a building. The computer in your cell phone is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in price/performance of computing since I was an undergraduate.
Many observers predict Moore’s Law will end within the next few years, and with it we’ll see tech development slow from a sprint to a walk. But as Kurzweil frequently points out,
It is important to note that Moore’s Law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to Turing’s relay-based “Robinson” machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer which I used to dictate (and automatically transcribe) this essay.
He thinks the sixth paradigm of computing will be modeled on the structure of the human brain:
Chips today are flat (although it does require up to 20 layers of material to produce one layer of circuitry). Our brain, in contrast, is organized in three dimensions. We live in a three dimensional world, why not use the third dimension? The human brain actually uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital controlled analog computational process. The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three dimensions.
There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions.
As he writes in The Singularity is Near, it is specifically information technology that is growing exponentially. But this is far from a limiting factor:
We see information at every level of existence. Every form of human knowledge and artistic expression– scientific and engineering ideas and designs, literature, music, pictures, movies– can be expressed as digital information.
Nanotechnology represents the intersection of information technology with the physical world. By controlling the structure of matter at an atomic level, nanotechnology will launch a revolution in manufacturing, including factories on a desktop.
We no longer expect just our dinner from the marketplace. We expect better lives and are willing to pay for them. Competition and market demand are driving technological development.
At this writing Uber is operating self-driving car service in Pittsburgh and Arizona. As mentioned earlier, tech billionaires are funding research to discover ways to arrest and possibly reverse aging. Within the next 20 years we will likely see a computer as human-like as anyone you know, only a million times smarter. New methods of production based on atomically precise manufacturing will raise the poorest of the poor to living standards far beyond those of the developed world today, and with less ecological impact.
Moore’s Law will stall, but the exponential progression of technology will continue as long as civilization survives.
Pay attention to technology. It’s paying attention to you.
