Accelerating change
"[1] And later on, "It is the argument with which I began, that a mighty change having come about in fifty years, and our pace of development having immensely accelerated, our sons and grandsons are going to demand and get results that would stagger us.
"[1] In 1938, Buckminster Fuller introduced the word ephemeralization to describe the trends of "doing more with less" in chemistry, health and other areas of industrial development.
[4]In a series of published articles from 1974 to 1979, and then in his 1988 book Mind Children, computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec generalizes Moore's law to make predictions about the future of artificial life.
Extrapolating these trends, he speculates about a coming "mind fire" of rapidly expanding superintelligence similar to the explosion of intelligence predicted by Vinge.
The first is that, if history is driven by individuals who act only on what they know at the time, and not because of any idea as to where their actions will eventually lead, then predicting the future course of technological progress is merely conjecture.
Burke poses the question of what happens when this rate of innovation, or more importantly change itself, becomes too much for the average person to handle, and what this means for individual power, liberty, and privacy.
We may have to grapple with the presently inconceivable, with mind-stretching discoveries and concepts.The mathematician Vernor Vinge popularized his ideas about exponentially accelerating technological change in the science fiction novel Marooned in Realtime (1986), set in a world of rapidly accelerating progress leading to the emergence of more and more sophisticated technologies separated by shorter and shorter time intervals, until a point beyond human comprehension is reached.
His subsequent Hugo award-winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) starts with an imaginative description of the evolution of a superintelligence passing through exponentially accelerating developmental stages ending in a transcendent, almost omnipotent power unfathomable by mere humans.
In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil proposed "The Law of Accelerating Returns", according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including but not limited to the growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially.
[10] In it, Kurzweil, after Moravec, argued for extending Moore's Law to describe exponential growth of diverse forms of technological progress.
He predicts that such paradigm shifts have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history".
According to Kurzweil, since the beginning of evolution, more complex life forms have been evolving exponentially faster, with shorter and shorter intervals between the emergence of radically new life forms, such as human beings, who have the capacity to engineer (i.e. intentionally design with efficiency) a new trait which replaces relatively blind evolutionary mechanisms of selection for efficiency.
By extension, the rate of technical progress amongst humans has also been exponentially increasing: as we discover more effective ways to do things, we also discover more effective ways to learn, e.g. language, numbers, written language, philosophy, scientific method, instruments of observation, tallying devices, mechanical calculators, computers; each of these major advances in our ability to account for information occurs increasingly close to the previous.
Already within the past sixty years, life in the industrialized world has changed almost beyond recognition except for living memories from the first half of the 20th century.
This clearly makes it possible to realize that if an increase with acceleration is observed over a certain period of time, this does not mean an endless continuation of this process.
[13] The physical processes that generate an acceleration such as Moore's law are positive feedback loops giving rise to exponential or superexponential technological change.
If the rise of superhuman intelligence causes a similar revolution, argues Robin Hanson, then one would expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly on a weekly basis.
