Understanding the Accelerating Rate of Change

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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Understanding the Accelerating Rate of Change
by   Ray Kurzweil
Chris Meyer
<<http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0563.html>http
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We're entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at
every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are
going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of
exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of
progress at today's rate of progress; organizations have to be able to
redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace.

Originally published in Perspectives on Business Innovation. Published on
KurzweilAI.net May 1, 2003.

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, an entrepreneur, an author, and a futurist.
The creator of the first reading machine for the blind, speech recognition
technology, and many other technologies that help envision the future, Ray
Kurzweil is one of the most innovative creators of our time. His most
recent book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, asserts that by 2020,
computers will have outpaced the human brain in terms of computational
power. His insights into the accelerating rate of technological change and
the exponential growth of computing power shed light on the challenges we
face in society and business. Christopher Meyer, Director of the Cap
Gemini Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, sat down with Ray
Kurzweil to discuss the implications of permanent volatility.

Meyer: The accelerating rate of change makes it difficult to stay
innovative, especially because processes that worked in the past are
becoming less and less effective. Why do you think traditional ways of
inventing new products no longer work?

Kurzweil: Most projects fail, not because the R&D department cant get it
to work, but because the timing is wrong. Probably more often than not
these days, projects are premature. All the enabling forces arent in place
yet. But its also not a good idea to just target todays world, because
windows can be closed by the time you finish a project. So you really have
to catch the wave at just the right time.

Meyer: Evolution has taught us a great deal about the accelerating rate of
change. What can we take away?

Kurzweil: The Law of Accelerating Returns is the acceleration of
technology, and the evolutionary growth of the products of an evolutionary
process. And this really goes back to the roots of biological evolution.

Evolution works through indirection. You create something and then work
through that to create the next stage. And for that reason, the next stage
is more powerful, and happens more quickly. And that has been accelerating
ever since the dawn of evolution on this planet.

The first stage of evolution took billions of years. DNA was being created
and that was very significant because it was like a little computer, and
an information processing method to store the results of experiments, and
to build up a knowledge base from which it could then launch experiments
and codify the results.

The subsequent stages of evolution happened much more quickly. The
Cambrian Explosion only took a few tens of millions of years to establish
the body plan to evolve animals. And we see that evolution, like certain
technologies, has become mature and stopped evolving. Evolution has
concentrated on other issues, specifically higher cortical functions. And
that happened much more quickly than the Cambrian Explosion. Humanoids
evolved over many millions of years, and Homo sapiens over only hundreds
of thousands of years. And there again, evolution used the products of its
evolutionary processes, which was Homo sapiens, to create the next stage,
which was human-directed technology, which really is a continuation of the
cutting-edge of the evolutionary process on earth, for creating more
intelligent systems.

In the first stage of human-directed technology, it took tens of thousands
of years, which is what you would expect for the next stage via the wheel,
or stone tools, and that kept accelerating, because when we had stone
tools, we could use them to build the next stage. So a thousand years ago
a paradigm shift only took a century, like the printing press. And now a
paradigm shift, like the World Wide Web, is measured in only a few years
time. The first computers were built with screwdrivers and were designed
with pencil and paper, and today we use computers to create computers. A
CAD designer will sit down and specify a few high-level parameters, and 12
different layers of automated designs will be done automatically. The most
significant acceleration is in the paradigm shift rate itself, which I
think of as the rate of technical progress. And all of these are actually
not exponential, but double exponentials because not only does the process
accelerate because of our evolutions ability to use each stage of
evolution to build the next stage, but also, as the process, as an area
gets higher price performance, more resources get drawn into that
capability.

Meyer: As youve pointed out, technologys rate of change continues to get
faster and faster. If change is exponential, what will that mean for our
future?

Kurzweil: The whole 20th century, because weve been speeding up to this
point, is equivalent to 20 years of progress at todays rate of progress,
and well make another 20 years of progress at todays rate of progress
equal to the whole 20th century in the next 14 years, and then well do it
again in seven years. And because of the explosive power of exponential
growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at
todays rate of progress, which is a thousand times greater than the 20th
century, which was no slouch to change.

Meyer: What examples of accelerating change do we see in society now? Are
we responding in the right way to prepare for the future?

Kurzweil: We are still thinking in a linear fashion. We've extended out
Social Security from 32 years to 39 years. Well, obviously there is some
old model underlying that. We dont absolutely know what the future will
bring, and if you look at the models, theyre absolutely linear. We dont
take into account this law of accelerating returns, which is absolutely a
factor.

If you look at the economy as a whole, either per capita or just the total
economy, it is growing exponentially. But the various recessions, even the
Great Depression, are relatively minor features that you really see in
this chart that is a big exponential. And whats interesting is that when
the recession is over, including the Great Depression, it starts back to
where it would have been had that never occurred in the first place. It
does not represent even a permanent slowing down or delay in the
underlying exponential.

The really pervasive phenomena is the exponential growth. We have
exponential growth in productivity. Even that is understated because were
measuring the value in dollars of what can be accomplished. But what can
be accomplished for a dollar today is far greater than what could be
accomplished for a dollar 10 years ago.

Computation is not the only technology that is growing exponentially.
Communications, bandwidth, speed and price performanceboth wireless and
wiredare also doubling every year. Biological technologies, the price
performance of base pair scanning, for example, have doubled every year.

Meyer: How has the accelerating rate of technological change affected
society as a whole?

Kurzweil: Even with todays technology, which is going to evolve further
very rapidly, the opportunity for ideas to find the right people who are
going to push them forward and to get the right ideas in the right places
is really extraordinary, and a great facilitator of progress. And its a
very liberating and democratizing force as well, and I think its really
behind the trend toward democracy. It might seem like were moving toward
democracy, but if you really look at the world compared to, say, 1990,
there has been a tremendous movement in every area of the world. And not
just at a sort of national political level, but at every level of society.

Meyer: What traditionally expensive items will be commodities in the
future as technology enables progress?

Kurzweil: Well principally, business is more and more concerned with
knowledge and information. And you know, we talk about an age where
nanotechnology is fully in the mainstream, which is probably the 2020s. We
can just convert information into any product. But were not that far from
that today.

Look at modern factories. Its software that secures the materials at the
lowest possible cost and arranges for their just-in-time delivery, and
then routes them and sends them on their way. And there are only a few
people in the factory. You really have a conversion of inexpensive raw
materials, very efficiently secured and routed and shipped and shaped by
software into high-quality products. So were not that far from an
information economy today.

The value in todays economy is principally knowledge and information,
whether information is a movie, music, or a piece of software, or some
inventory control database. This trend will continue in an exponential
way. The human knowledge base will be measured in bytes stored in
databases, or patents filed, or whatever level you want to look at, and it
is also growing exponentially.

The opportunity to have different kinds of experiences and access to
information will have value. I think there are forces in both directions
on things like land. Because on the one hand, while we could say that
other types of products can expand without limit, were always going to
have only a certain amount of land.

Meyer: How will our lives change?

Kurzweil: These new technologies are going to allow people to spread out,
and we wont have the concentrated demands like we see in downtown
Manhattan because people will be able to live anywhere they want, without
sacrificing efficiency. Once you get virtual reality going, people can
have any kind of experience they want anywhere. This is a force that would
make land less valuable. You dont have to be in any particular physical
space.

Meyer: How can you plan for the future of your business in such an age of
unpredictability?

Kurzweil: Well, its an ongoing movement. Were entering an age of
acceleration. While acceleration was there 500 years ago, it was at that
point of an exponential where it looked like a flat, horizontal line. The
first time the rate of change was really disrupted, at least one of the
early harbingers of that, was with the weavers in the English textile
industry, who had had a weaving guild that had been passed down for
centuries through their families. The new textile machines that suddenly
emerged in the first phase of the industrial revolution destroyed the
weavers livelihood. It seemed that employment would soon be a thing of the
past, and then they realized that it instead lead to prosperity, and
rather than making the same number of shirts with fewer people, they could
make a whole wardrobe of shirts. The common man and woman could have
well-made clothing, and then the prosperity led to the different types of
pursuits, and leisure time, and industries to create the machines, and so
on.

But from that time on, the idea that the times they are a changing became
evident. You no longer expect your grandchildren to live the same lives
that you did, and your lives are very different from your parents lives.

Today theres an axiom that the only constant is change. But what people
dont recognize is that the world itself has changed because the greater
change is accelerating. So our whole concept of what it means to be human
is going to be changing, and it is going to be merging with our
technology.

Meyer: So, must we live with a new mindset, particularly as we try to
create new business models?

Kurzweil: Technology-based innovation these days requires collaboration
between different disciplines. This is because innovation today typically
involves interdisciplinary work. So one thing that you need is experts in
each of those areas.

Second, its also possible for people to anticipate change too rapidly. The
last booms we've seen have been an example of that. The perception by the
stock market that the Internet was a profound revolution was absolutely
correctand the same thing for telecommunicationsbut that doesnt mean that
there isnt a pace for that, and it doesnt mean that every business model
thats different from the past is going to succeed. The investment got
ahead of itself, and people were willing to invest in unproven ideas.

Meyer: What will happen to organizational life cycles in this time of
accelerating change?

Kurzweil: There are more challenges to organizational lifetimes, in that
an organization cannot be devoted to one business model. And the models we
have underlying society at every level are going to be challenged, whether
youre talking about the role of schools, or religious institutions, or
business in general. All of these models are going to have to be
redefined. A particular business model, General Motors thats selling cars,
or U.S. Steels thats selling steel, will have a lifetime. Some of them
have lasted decades, but in keeping with the law of accelerating returns,
that part of the business model is going to get shorter and shorter. And
of course, we see in the heart of technology itself, already very rapid
business models.

If you look at a company like Microsoft, and if you look at their stock,
its been pretty stable through this very difficult stock market. Some
people would say that their success is due simply to the fact that they
have the so-called monopoly in operating systems. I would point out that
PCs are only one type of computer. There are Internet servers, there are
hand-held computers, there are game computers, computers in cameras and in
other specialized devices. Microsoft is involved in all of these areas,
but does not dominate any of them. Their success in my view is because
they have a significant ability to adapt. I think it comes from Bill Gates
justified concern, what he calls his "paranoia" about relying for too long
on any particular business model, but rather trying to predict where
technology and the industry are going.

So we see that a company can be stable if its committed to a high level of
quality of its personnel and their ability to anticipate change, and
relentlessly question every assumption about their business, and develop
systematically models of where every level of their organization is going
in the world ahead. Companies need to be committed to innovation and
really to measuring the duration of their models. What happens in these
companies is that the old-line business model has all of the political
power because it is producing the profits and the revenue.

An organization needs to be set up to empower the people who disrupt
things from inside, but it has to be based on some disciplined methodology
of understanding some realistic model that incorporates an exponential
rate of change to understand realistically how long different models will
last, or how long specific assumptions will last. That doesn't mean every
disruption should be supported because some aren't going to work. But
organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and
faster pace.

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