IS TECHNOLOGY ACCELERATING?
It may seem to you that the pace of technological development is moving faster than your ability to keep up. Are you just imagining this?
According to some of the world’s leading experts in technology, it’s not all in your head. Our tools and industrial processes are changing at an ever faster and faster rate. Ten years ago, you didn’t own a smart phone. Video services on mobile devices were unheard of. Thirty years ago, very few people owned personal computers, and digital information was nearly the exclusive possession of government and business elites. Today, you carry the entire store of the world’s knowledge in your hand.
According to Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, the pace of technical innovation really is gathering speed. You may have heard of Moore’s Law. It’s named after Gordon Moore, who said in 1965 that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years. So far, his prediction has proven to be accurate.
Kurzweil says that Moore’s Law applies to more than computer circuits. The same principle, he says, applies to technology development in general. For example, DNA sequence data has increased about ten million times since 1982, bandwidth in the internet backbone has grown by about 10 billion times since 1985, and the performance-to-price ratio for wireless devices has increased by nearly a million times since 1990. There are many more examples. A wide range of technologies increase capability by millions, even billions, of times, in just a few decades and at dramatically lower prices.
Kurzweil calls technical development an evolutionary process. As in biology, ‘natural selection’ means that advantageous development is passed on to our technological ‘offspring’. Not having to start from zero, we build on what’s been done. Our tools, like living organisms, become increasingly complex and increasingly capable. As Kurzweil put it: “Evolution applies positive feedback. The more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage.”
Technology follows the iron law of accelerating returns. Each generation stands on the achievements of its forebears. Each generation adds its own improvements, enabling the next generation of even greater achievement.
(To get the most out of technology, you need the right information tools. Talk to us. We can help.)