Exponential Technologies: Cheer Up World—We Are On the Verge of Great Things

At the recent World Science Festival in New York City, Ray Kurzweil outlined why he is certain that the future isn’t as dreary as it’s been painted, and why we are closer to the incredible than we think: Exponential upward curves can be deceptively gradual in the beginning. But when things start happening, they happen fast. Here are a selection of his predicted trajectories for these “miracles” based on his educated assessment of where science and technology is at in the present.

· Within 5 years the exponential progress in nanoengineering will make Solar power cost-competitive with fossil fuels

· Within 10 years we will have a pill that allows us all to eat whatever we feel like and never gain any unwanted weight

· In about 20 years 100% of our energy will come from clean and renewable sources, and a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.

Commenting on the validity of Kurzweil’s predictions, John Tierney notes in the New York Times that Kurzweil has been uncannily accurate in the past:

“It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy. He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind.

In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine. Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud. This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998.”

Kurzweil backed up his claims at the conference with charts and graphs that showed some of the exponential advancements of the past. One graph showed how computing power started with the first electromechanical machines over a century ago. Initially they doubled every three years. At mid-century, they began to double every two years, which was the rate that inspired Moore’s Law. It now takes only a year. Another graph showed technological changes going back millions of starting with stone tools working its way up to modern computers.

“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” Kurzweil noted. Hopefully, the popular sci-fi plot where uncontrolled science and technology dooms mankind has gotten it backwards. If Kurzweil is right, the future isn’t as bleak as many claim, and science may well turn out to be our savior.

Deep thinkers see how things will be in 2058
MSNBC | April. 18, 2008 | Alan Boyle
Posted on 04/20/2008 1:22:29 PM PDT by kingattax
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2004451/posts

Inventor Kurzweil Aiming to Live Forever
Technology - AP | 2/13/2005 | JAY LINDSAY
Posted on 02/13/2005 5:40:05 AM PST by wingblade
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1342203/posts

A Theory of Everything?
Stephen Wolfram’s Rule 110 May Change How We Understand the World
ABC News.com | May 28, 2002 | Michael S. Malone
Posted on 05/28/2002 3:59:26 PM PDT by John H K
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/690880/posts

K sez:

Within 5 years the exponential progress in nanoengineering will make Solar power cost-competitive with fossil fuels
Within 10 years we will have a pill that allows us all to eat whatever we feel like and never gain any unwanted weight
In 15 years, life expectancies will start rising faster than we age
In about 20 years 100% of our energy will come from clean and renewable sources
a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.

The only way photovoltaics can overtake liquid hydrocarbon fuels is if the price of crude continues upward to $1000 a barrel (give or take).

I'd like to see the magic diet pill, but I'd much rather see something done about hair loss. There are plenty of ways to lose weight.

Kurzweil has been powering down supplements in an attempt to live forever, and I'll predict that he'll wind up shortening his life as a result. He's also said that all of our brain contents would someday be downloadable into a computer (that's #3 and #5 on this list), showing that he read too many comic books and pulp sci-fi as a kid.

In #1 he makes an unlikely claim about photovoltaics, then pretty much repeats himself in #4. Obsession, or dementia?

#5 is another comic book reader response. There was a book a few years back about the chess-playing machine from a hundred years ago, which turned out in retrospect to be a fraud (a human chess player was hidden inside). Chess programs have improved. Have poker programs? ;') Creativity may be simulated eventually, but I very much doubt it will happen in my lifetime.

Here's five from me:

Within 5 years fuel economy will rise at least 15 per cent, and electric vehicles in a number of forms will outshine progress made on fuel cell vehicles
Within 10 years genetically-engineered food will be commonplace, and considered healthier than fresh, organically-grown produce picked by people with TB
In 15 years, life expectancies will start to move back up, after having fallen for up to five years
In about 20 years, our energy will come the same sorts of sources as now, with some additional sources such as plasma waste disposal and neighborhood natural gas-powered fuel cells
In about 20 years, typical CPU sizes will be smaller than the Mac Mini, use a superconducting substrate, and be cheap enough and sufficiently multifunctional that they will be found in each room of the house (and then some).

The World Question Center 2004

Zangger's First Law

Most scientific breakthroughs are nothing else than the discovery of the obvious.

Zangger's Second Law

Truly great science is always ahead of its time.

Although there seems to be a slight contradiction in my laws, historical evidence proves them right:

The Hungarian surgeon Ignaz Semmelweiss in 1847 reduced the death rate in his hospital from twelve to two percent, simply by washing hands between operations -- a concept that today would be advocated by a four year old child. When Semmelweiss urged his colleagues to introduce hygiene to the operating rooms, they had him committed to a mental hospital where he eventually died.
The German meteorologist Alfred Wegener discovered in 1913 what every ten year old looking at a globe will notice immediately: That the Atlantic coasts of the African and South American continents have matching contours and thus may have been locked together some time ago. The experts needed sixty more years to comprehend the concept.
When Louis Pasteur stated that bacteria could cause disease, colleagues treated the idea as "an absurd fantasy'!
The theories of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were called "a case for the police" during a neurologists' congress in Hamburg in 1910.
Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, only eight years before Orville and Wilbur Wright left the ground in an aeroplane, remarked: "Machines that are heavier than air will never be able to fly!"
German physicists Erwin Schrödinger's PhD thesis, in which he first introduced his famous equation, was initially rejected.
When the Spanish nobleman de Satuola discovered the Late Ice Age painted cave at Altamira, established scholars described him as a forger and a cheat.
The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean Francois Champollion in 1822 was still rejected by scholar twenty years after his death.
And when Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered the bones of a Neanderthal in a cave near Duesseldorf in 1856, the president of the German Society of Anthropology considered it a bow-legged, Mongolian Cossack with rickets, who had been lucky enough to survive multiple head injuries, but who, during a campaign by Russian forces against France in 1814, had been wounded, and (stark naked) had crawled into a cave, where he died.
Heinrich Schliemann's excavation of Bronze Age Mycenae and Tiryns in Greece was considered by English archaeologists in The Times' as the remains of some obscure barbarian tribe' from the Byzantine period. In particular, the so-called prehistoric palace in Tiryns was labelled "the most remarkable hallucination of an unscientific enthusiast that has ever appeared in literature."

Scientific breakthroughs will always be held hostage to the lag needed to overcome existing beliefs. Lucius Annaeus Seneca realized this already two thousand years ago, when he said: "The time will come, when our successors will be surprised that we did not know such obvious things."

Gary Arlen Kildall had a PhD and an operating system that only needed to be converted to run on the IBM PC. But Kildall had a PhD and therefor was no match for a pennyless college drop out named Bill Gates

Kildall was defeated and his company distroyed by a guy who dropped out of college and who bought the rights to DOS 1.10 with 50 grand of borrowed money.

You make my point. A man with a PhD and a successful operating system company, could not beat a college drop out who had some creativity left undamaged and a tiny (at the time) start up called Microsoft.

I thought we were talking about creation of advances, not who is better at shady business practices. Dr. Kildall is the one who created the product. Bill Gates is the one who bought and marketed a ripoff of it. Why is the latter supposed to be viewed as the one who has advanced our technology and is so creative?

I also note that you neglected to mention a large trust fund of poor-little-rich-kid Bill Gates.

"Ask Bill why function code 6 (in DOS) ends with a dollar sign . . . . No one in the world knows that but me." --Gary Kildall, PhD

Who deserves the most credit for the automobile? The man who invented it -- Charles Duryea? Or the man who changed the way the world got around -- Henry Ford?

Don't dismiss what Gates did just because he didn't invent DOS.

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