How We Can Manage Our Way Through the Intertwined Promise and Peril of Accelerating Change
Ray Kurzweil
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Evolution works through indirection, it creates a capability and then uses that capability to evolve the next stage. That is why the next stage goes more quickly and why the fruits and products of an evolutionary process grow exponentially in power.
So the next stage, the Cambrian explosion, where all the animal body plans evolved, took only ten million years and was one hundred times faster. The biological environment kept accelerating. Homo sapiens evolved in only a few hundred thousand years. Then again, working through indirection, evolution used one of its products: a species that combined a higher cognitive function and an opposable appendage to bring in the next stage, which is technology, which went a little bit faster.
It took only tens of thousands of years for the first stage - fire, wheel, stone tools, and so on. There is only a very small genetic change between us and our still unidentified primate ancestor. A few gene changes allowed a larger cerebral cortex to give us more analytical skills. A very small genetic change moved the pivot point of the thumb up about one inch. Although a chimpanzee’s hand looks similar to ours, chimps do not have a power grip or fine motor coordination. This enabled us to manipulate the environment to reflect our mental models. We always use the latest technology to bring the next stage. A half millennium ago, the printing press took a century to be adopted.
Interestingly, this makes a straight line, with technological evolution continuing this evolutionary process. If we look on a linear graph (Image 3), it looks like everything just happened.
Image 3: Countdown to Singularity, Linear Plot
Some people say that I only put points on this graph that fit on the straight line. So I took fourteen different lists; these were not thinkers who were trying to prove or disprove my point. Most of them did not even talk about acceleration. They include Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar, the American Museum of Natural History, the Encyclopedia Britannica, different reference works as to what were the key events in biological evolution and technological evolution. We do see some spreading of the points in the results. There is disagreement about a few things, such as when did agriculture start, when did language start, how long did the Cambrian explosion take? Nonetheless, the result is a very pervasive straight line. When economist Ted Modis grouped these into what he calls canonical milestones, he comes up with a very similar graph.
Image 4: Paradigm Shifts
Image 5 shows that there is a key difference when you look over a significant period of time between the linear and exponential view.
Image 5: Linear vs. Exponential Growth
Most public policy in government is based on linear models, which workvery well for short periods of time. You can see that the linear and exponential views are very similar. You can take an exponential progress at any stage and if you take a very small piece of it, it looks like a straight line, more or less. Yet if you go over a significant period of time, there is a great divergence.
The social security debate is unusual in that they are actually talking about 2042. That is the date I have for the Singularity. They are saying that there might be a three or four year increase in longevity and 1.7% increase per year in economic growth and so on. But this linear view will not match reality.