Ray Kurzweil – “Kurzweil’s Law”
September 26th, 02005 by Stewart Brand
Escape velocity
Attempts to think long term, Ray Kurzweil began, keep making the mistake of imagining that the pace of the future is like the pace of the past. Pondering the next ten years, we usually begin by studying the last ten years. He recommends studying the last twenty year for clues about the rate and degree of change coming in the next ten years, because history self-accelerates. That’s Kurzweil’s Law of accelerating returns: “technology and evolutionary processes progress in an exponential fashion.”
Thus, since the rate of progress doubles every ten years or so, we will see changes in the next 90 years equivalent to the last 10,000 years, and in the next 100 years changes equivalent to the last 20,000 years. It is always the later doublings where the ferocious action is…
Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary
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Posted on December 5th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
mmmmmmm
Posted on March 19th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Jitterbug…
You take the grey skies out of my way
You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day
Jitterbug into my brain
Goes a bang-bang-bang ’til my feet do the same
But something’s bugging you
Something ain’t right
My best friend told me what you did last night
Left me sleepin’ in my bed
I was dreaming, but I should have been with you instead
(For future post-singular historians, for posterities sake – i was happy at this point in my life – I loved my life, wife, job and friends – pre-fantastica. carpe diem bruce sterling. good night and good luck.)
Posted on June 18th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
[...] year, we end up at 128 times as much – 12.8% of today’s total. This is the amazing power of Ray Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Even if it takes two years for each doubling, we’re still up a factor of 32x in seven [...]