Sunday, February 14, 2010

The Implications of Exponential Change

Ray Kurzweil wrote a "Big" book: The Singularity is Near. He makes a lot of frankly fantastic predictions but he bases them on a very specific insight: Technological change is not arithmetic in nature (2, 4, 6, 8) but exponential (2, 4, 8, 16) and over a long enough timescale the implications are truly stunning. For example: the computing power of a $1,000 PC roughly doubles every year (combining processor, RAM, storage media, WAN and software gains), this means the processing power grows by a factor of 1,000 each decade and 1,000,000 every 20 years.

Think about your business, indeed your life tethered to technology that will be a million times more powerful (and ubiquitous) in two short decades.

Very little will remain the same.

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