The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs — such as affordable aerial ridesharing — will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time.

Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we're going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years.

Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years.

I was reading Kurzweil around the end of 1999, thinking this exponential rise in technology is going to happen. The curves are going to cross and that's going to be really cool to see. I hope I live that long. And I keep seeing these numbers like 2035, 2045... but it feels like it's happening right now.

The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes). The Law... applies specifically to evolutionary processes.

The human brain evolved in an environment that was local and linear. Local, meaning most everything that we interacted with was less than a day’s walk away. Linear, meaning the rate of change was exceptionally slow. Your great-great-great-grandfather’s life was roughly the same as his great-great-grandson’s life. But now we live in a world that is global and exponential. Global, meaning if it happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it seconds later (and our computers hear about it only milliseconds later). Exponential, meanwhile, refers to today’s blitzkrieg speed of development. Forget about the difference between generations, currently mere months can bring a revolution. Yet our brain — which hasn’t really had a hardware update in two hundred thousand years — wasn’t designed for this scale or speed. And if we struggle to track the growth of singular innovations, we’re downright helpless in the face of converging ones. Put it this way, in “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs — such as affordable aerial ridesharing — will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time. It means, of course, that flying cars are just the beginning.

Ray Kurzweil — the eccentric inventor, futurist, and guru-in-residence at Google — envisions a radical future in which humans and machines have fully merged. We will upload our minds to the cloud, he predicts, and constantly renew our bodies through intelligent nanobots released into our bloodstream. Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 we will have computers with intelligence comparable to that of humans (i.e., AGI), and that we will reach the singularity by 2045.

In his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil identified a hugely important and fundamental property of technology: when you shift to an information-based environment, the pace of development jumps onto an exponential growth path and price/performance doubles every year or two.

Faster-than-exponential growth also occurs in computing power, as measured by the evolution of the number of MIPS per $1,000 of computer from 1900 to 1997. Thus the so-called Moore's law is incorrect, since it implies only an exponential growth. This faster than exponential acceleration has been argued to lead to a transition to a new era, around 2030, corresponding to the epoch when we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century.

Kurzweil himself has pegged the date when AIs will do everything better than humans at 2029.29 (As explained in Abundance, his predictions are based on exponential growth curves and have an amazing track record for accuracy.)

This interest in trends took on a life of its own, and I began to project some of them using what I call the Law of Accelerating Returns.

There has been a revolution in the way people think. They have just noticed, without daring to say it, that the old paradigm, according to which ‘the fate of humanity, individual and collective, is getting better every day, thanks to science, democratisation, and egalitarian emancipation’, is false. The age that believed it is over. This illusion has fallen. This progress (debatable anyhow according to people like Ivan Illich) lasted probably less than a century. Today, the unintended consequences of mass technology are beginning to be felt: new resistant viruses, the toxicity of processed food, the exhaustion of the soil and the shrinking of the world’s agricultural production, the general and rapid degradation of the environment, the threat of the invention of new weapons of mass destruction to add to nuclear weapons, and so on. In addition, technology is entering its baroque age. The fundamental inventions were discovered by the end of the 1950s. The improvements to them made in later decades have contributed fewer and fewer concrete ameliorations, like so many useless decorative motifs added to the superstructure of a monument. The Internet has probably had fewer revolutionary effects than the telegraph or the telephone. The Internet is a significant improvement applied to a pan-communication that was already substantially realised. Techno-science is following the ‘80-20’ power law. At the beginning it takes 20 units of energy to obtain 60 units of force. Later it takes 80 units of energy to realise only 20 units of force.

Forecasting the future of technology is risky. Predictions tend to be linear whereas technical advances come in quantum jumps from paradigm shifts. After the second World War, forecasters in electronics [who did not foresee the transistor] would have linearly [and incorrectly] foretasted breakthroughs in better vacuum tube reliability from, for example, improved filament chemistry.