Don’t ignore small growth

According to Ray Kurzweil, an avid and renowned innovator, it takes only 7 periods of doublings to turn one percent growth into 100 percent growth. “So small growth should not be dismissed.”

At a presentation in MIT recently, he said “information technology- driven innovation is characterized by exponential growth, not linear growth, which causes almost everyone to miss their projections of when technology-fueled advances will take off.” Exponential growth means that performance doubles in a given period. Then in the next period (say a year), that doubles.

He also said because we don’t understand this, we dismiss the potential of such technologies as solar energy, which is doubling every two years. Kurzweil says that in fewer than 5 years we will reach the tipping point where solar power will be less expensive than fossil-fuel power.

21st Century 1000 times faster than 20th

Ray Kurzweil also illustrated the growth of various technologies over the centuries. His main point: technology evolves exponentially, the rate of technical progress itself is accelerating, so expect to “see 20,000 years of progress in the 21st Century, about 1000 times greater than the 20th Century.”

One of the predictors of the power of the internet, Kurzweil believe we can say good bye to cancer and heart disease within 15 years, and hello to living way past 80. Among his other prognostications – computers “will combine the subtlety and pattern recognition of human intelligence with the speed, memory and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence.” The marriage of nano technology and AI will bring us “a killer app”-- nanobots that can keep us healthy from the inside. Wow!

The best selling author of The Age of Spiritual Machines presents the next stage of his compelling view of the future: the merging of humans and machines.

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