Exponential Technology Growth

Much has been written about the accelerating rate of growth of technological advancement. As humans we are used to seeing and understanding linear growth but exponential growth is harder to comprehend as are it's impacts.

In his essay the Law of Accelerating Returns, Ray Kurzweil has laid out the laws for accelerating returns:

• Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. As a result, the
• Rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time. Over time, the "order" of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.
• A correlate of the above observation is that the "returns" of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall "power" of a process) increase exponentially over time.
• In another positive feedback loop, as a particular evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more effective (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed toward the further progress of that process. This results in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially).
• Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process.
• Technological evolution is another such evolutionary process. Indeed, the emergence of the first technology creating species resulted in the new evolutionary process of technology. Therefore, technological evolution is an outgrowth of--and a continuation of--biological evolution.
• A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.

Kurzweil has developed his hypothesis by creating a number of interesting graps liek this which map out the the exponential rate of technology and specifically computing power:

While there is continued debate on whether computers will ever reach the level of intelligence (which in itself is a difficult concept to define) as biological entities, the implications on our lives in unmistakable.

One aspect of his hypothesis was particularly thought provoking. Because of the exponential growth of technology, that the 21st century will have as much technological advancement as the previous 20,000 years. Many pessimists about the future often discount this acceleration and compression of technological advancement in shorter and shorter periods of time. To put it another way, we will see a century's worth of advancement in just 25 years.

The most basic communication

Fascinating talk by Bonnie Bassler on the communication systems used by bacteria. I am fascinated by how so called simple organisms can be so become so power using nothing by effective communication techniques. Communication and cooperation seem to be way forward as it took bacteria billions of years to figure out. Web 2.0 and Facebook are just modern multi-cellular equivalents of a billion+ year old technique. Now if only we could figure what it was all for?

Just circuits?

V.S. Ramachandran is a mesmerizing speaker, able to concretely and simply describe the most complicated inner workings of the brain. His investigations into phantom limb pain, synesthesia and other brain disorders allow him to explore (and begin to answer) the most basic philosophical questions about the nature of self and human consciousness.
This is a fascinating talk (as all TED Talks are). Leads to the question are we all just wired up like circuit boards? Can we rewire and short-circuit our hardware (brains) and more important can we hack the software that runs on the hardware?



Ramachandran is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He is the author of Phantoms in the Brain, the basis for a Nova special, and A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness; his next book, due out in January 2008, is called The Man with the Phantom Twin: Adventures in the Neuroscience of the Human Brain

Information Hunter Gatherers

Information gathering is only the latest iteration of the natural human tendency to be a hunter-gatherer. There is a strong compulsion to check in on new information. There is almost a primeval sense of anticipation as you fire up your email client and watch expectantly to see what new information your snare has caught. Sometimes the fare is meager, an email with the latest meme or the skateboarding pug from You Tube. At other times it is something more substantial that feeds the intellect and satisfies the age old urge to hunt and gather. Is the next logical progression to settle down, organize and cultivate? Has that already begun with consumer-created content, wikis and the rise of the prosumer?