Manage updates with the Download App
I bring it up because I've been hearing more references lately to Kurzweil's Law, otherwise known as the Law of Accelerating Returns. Coined by futurist Ray Kurzweil, the theory states that building on past accomplishments, the pace of technological change doubles every decade--leading to a Moore's Law vision of progress.
"Early stages of technology--the wheel, fire, stone tools--took tens of thousands of years to evolve and be widely deployed. A thousand years ago, a paradigm shift such as the printing press took on the order of a century to be widely deployed. Today, major paradigm shifts, such as cell phones and the World Wide Web, were widely adopted in only a few years time," Kurzweil wrote in the original essay outlining the theory.
"In the 19th century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the 20th century, we saw more advancement than in all of the 19th century," he added.
Venture capitalists love this kind of thinking, because it implies that something huge is just about to emerge. Meanwhile, futurists at the TED conference and other future-technology events have predicted massive sociological impacts for emerging ideas such as blogging, utility computing and RFID.
The theory, though, may need some fine-tuning. At this rate, the first 10 years of the present century will yield a 20th century's worth of accomplishments, with each year contributing a decade of achievements. (The ratio may be higher, but my abacus keeps sticking.)
The social networking site Friendster debuted in 2002. Penicillin was invented in 1928. The 1920s also saw the debut of rockets with liquid fuel, television, the robot and the Pez dispenser.
Even the first 10 years of the 1900s--which saw the Zeppelin, the tea bag, neon lights, the Theory of Relativity, the tractor, the safety razor, air-conditioning, sonar, cellophane and instant coffee--seemed blazingly revolutionary when compared to 2000, which saw advent of the 1GHz processor and the Audrey, an Internet appliance that could be cleaned with a sponge. Sure, most people had just gotten laid off from a bunch of Internet start-ups, so quite a lot of time was spent sending out resumes, but the record still seems woeful.
Pyramid schemes
According to Kurzweil, the pace will only get more torrid. The current century is slated to produce the technological achievements of the preceding 200 centuries--or everything since the dawn of the Pharaohs, plus 16,000 years.
We're almost at the end of February 2005, people, and we don't have a lot to show for it. By the first two years of the 1950s, inventors had already come up with the credit card, superglue and power steering--and the bar code and Mr. Potato Head were just around the corner.
Kurzweil's theory actually founders due to what I to think of as Kanellos' Law, which is: The past often sounds more primitive than it was because you weren't around for it. Every culture likes to think of itself at the vanguard of civilization. Those cave dwellers would have progressed more rapidly if one of them had just had the foresight to say, "Better, cheaper, faster--that's what we need to think about when we look at a piece of obsidian."
Similarly, past accomplishments often look easy in hindsight. The bra (1913) and frozen food (1923) seem like the kind of things that could be knocked out over a weekend.
In reality, progress undulates. When the Romans erected the Arch of Constantine in A.D. 315, they had to decorate it with carvings stolen from other monuments, because sculptors had declined in ability. The Mayans created extensive astronomical charts and even devised a complex mathematical system based around the number 20, according to Yale University anthropology professor Michael Coe. Soon after, the civilization collapsed.
The pace at which a society adjusts to technological change also varies over time. The futurists may be right--technology may actually be accelerating--but the impact isn't nearly as strong. My grandmother, who saw the arrival of smallpox vaccinations, refrigerators and airplanes, can even so recall villagers draping their homes in wet towels on the roof as a precaution against Halley's Comet.
In my lifespan, technology seems to have mostly fine-tuned preexisting inventions (CDs for cassettes, and so on). Two big earth-shattering changes have emerged because of technology--the Internet and global warming--but one was unintentional. No one commutes to the moon or rides a hydrofoil.
Progress no doubt continues, but it's not like we're reinventing the wheel.
Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.
8 comments
Join the conversation! Add your comment
In my (humble) opinion, the article is not entirely fair to the development of technology. Instead, I think that it is merely more diffucult to see the changes. This is primarily because there is a much greater buffer between the consumer and the technology that they're using (your Dad used to fix the car without the garage--can you?). Your example of the "minor" upgrade from tape to CD's is an example. The technology required to make such a change was refined into a usable form primarily after tapes were a hit. That CD's were in the hands of the public within a few short years is evidence of the truth (of the quick spread of information). The medium, though used in the same way (by user), is almost completely different. I think that there are many such instances of these kind of "upgrades" as technology provides a better way to do something that we already currently do.
With this in mind, I posit that while information may be growing at such an exponentail rate, that information is not, and probably will never be, known by the vast number of users. What I mean is that while all of us make use of the unfolding technology in a cell phone (or PPC) almost none of us really know what makes it really work. It's the same way with all kinds of gadgetry these days. As a final argument of this, consider the internet. How many of the pages that are actually on in it are freely available to the public? I've read several places that anywhere between 1-10% (a liberal estimate--it's probably less than 10%). 90% of the internet is not readily available to everyday search engines (being hid in massive internet databases and such). In the same way, while the growing technology around us IS subtally affecting everything, the changes are largely beyond our notice (or understanding). This makes it very difficult to declare that things aren't really changing as quickly as thought.
In conclusion, while I do not know exaclty how I feel about the growth of technology, I can't help but agree with the futurists that there IS something big on the horizon. With the information revolution there is bound to be a physical revolution that follows. Consider the Renaissance. It was when ideas began to increase the technological innovation also increased. The sum total of the "information age" is that it is what might be understood as another Renaissance. With the advent of computing, mankind has to a large degree overcome several of the greatest hinderances to progress: 1) the failure of human memory, 2) the inability to examine and compare vast amounts of information is a short time and 3) our inability to quickly reproduce and quickly distribute said information to those who can best use it. Because of this, I believe we have only begun to see the tip of the iceburg of humandkind's potential. The Information Age is merely the catalyst to much more dramatic changes in the future.
(Note: sorry about the length of this post)
Consider:
Bringing democracy to Iraq might be a hundred times harder than inventing penicillin for all we know.
We might be making groundbreaking progress on fusion, that would dwarf every other accomplishment in human history.
For all you know, your next door neighbor has been transformed from an unaccomplished boor preying on little girls into an enlightened individual donating blood every month and a model citizen. How will we know until much later?
Want to criticize something? Criticize the 90's, or the 80's or the 70's or the 60's before them.
Tell me that the internet wasn't a step forward in human civilization beyond comprehension of the 80's. Look at the 80's and tell me that the medical devices that enabled us to provide quality medical care to millions that would have suffered otherwise, doesn't matter. Tell me that the PC, the innovation of the 70's is nothing much better than the airplane. Or that going to the moon in the 60's didn't change the world forever for the better.
Further, touting airplanes and penicillin at a time when people were killing each other regularily in World Wars doesn't impress me much.
What Kannelos lacks is any perspective beyond his 'little bubble' of a full-time job as a journalist. Go out, journalist, and find out, don't just sit in your office and pontificate like the bald guy.
Progress, as they say about 'beauty', lies in the eye's of the beholders.
P.S. Ten years ago, I thought there was a 50% chance that one of my wife's or my's parents would die in the decade. In the decade, here's what happenned. My mother had cancer and survived. My father lost a leg, and survived. My father-in-law had triple bipass and barely missed a step. Every one of them had cataracts removed. And best of all, it now looks like the chances that one of the four will die in the next 10 years is lower than it seemed 10 years ago.
So f... you.
What I disagree with is that certain inventions are being made, but in a new world of nanos and shrinking technology it is only logical to think that these inventions will take longer to hit the market. Optical Memory, the new storage media that breaks the boundries of magnetic storage as well as what many tech enthusists have been waiting for many years now, is stated to be market ready sometime late this year.
Nano technology is, from what I have heard, finally making leaps and bounds with future applications ranginging from miracle medical cures to extreamely high-speed CPUs. Were finally moving from the digial to the optical age.
Well put.