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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The twentieth century was like twenty years' worth of change at today's rate of change.

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.)

Once we can manipulate our genome, Lamarckian fashion, the rate of change will be staggering.

There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology, society, economy, and institutions.

If we focus our attention on the next twenty-five years we may say that development is likely to reach some point intermediate between the first bomb detonated over Hiroshima and processes which once initiated might put an end to all life on earth. Just what intermediate point will be reached within twenty-five years no one can tell.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.