“We're not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be." CS Lewis
Accelerating Change is a theory of exponential advancement in science and technology first concieved in the middle of the 20th century. Put forth in it's earliest form in the 1950's, accelerating change has been a topic of speculation ever since. Theories regarding accelerating change range from Moore's Law to Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Change.
Kurzweil in his 2001 essay The Law of Accelerating Returns extends Moore's law to describe an exponential growth of technological progress. Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Kurzweil extends this to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of technology. Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He cites numerous past examples of this to substantiate his assertions. He predicts that such paradigm shifts have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."
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| Source: Wikipedia |
The graph above shows the decline in the number of years it takes for the 25% of the population to adopt a new technology. This takes on significance because the adoption of each new technology represents a shift in paradigm in human civilization.
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| Source: Wikipedia |
This graph shows the upward trend in the number of patents granted each year.
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| Source: Wikipedia |
Ray Kurzweil's Theory of Accelerating Change is based partly on this measure of the exponential growth in $1000 worth of computing power and it's projected trajectory for the next 100 years.
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| Source: Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil |
According to Wikipedia:
In November 2009, the AMD Opteron-based Cray XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was announced as the fastest operational supercomputer, with a sustained processing rate of 1.759 PFLOPS.
The graph above shows MDGrape as the fastest projected computer at the time the graph was made. MD grape operated at approx. 1 PFLOP. If Kurzweil's theory holds true extraordinary leaps in computer technology, bio-technology and nano-technology are just a few machine generations away.
