Required listening: Ray Kurtzweil on Accelerated Returns

You know that feeling we all have these days?  That boy, things sure are different than a few years ago?  Where we can type a few keystrokes, get a recommended restaurant, its location on the map, directions to it, a photo of its storefront?

All from a beautiful little phone?

For free?

In 2007 we take this for granted, and consider the pre-Google Maps world of 2004 to be the olden days. (The pre-Facebook, pre-blog, pre-e-commerce days are already ancient history.)

Is that wonderment of rapid change just a feeling of the current times?  Will it fade as we take for granted the innovations that have changed our lives so much over so few years?

The answer is no, we won't lose that feeling of wonderment over new things, because there is no end in sight to them.  Innovations will continue to arrive at our doorstep in brown cardboard boxes at  a faster and faster pace.  

2007 will feel like the olden days even sooner than 2004 did.  It's the nature of the accelerating returns of technology.  This much is obvious after watching Ray Kurzweil's 2005 seminal, mind-blowing talk on the idea.

The concept is that every generation of technology makes the subsequent generation faster and cheaper.  

Moore's Law (which predicts the doubling of computing power every 18 months or so) is one example.  So is the evolution of life on the planet.  And the extension of life into technology.  And the inevitable future integration of technology into life.  And, for that matter, life made out of technology.  

Imagine, if you can, the same accelerating curve in medicine, energy and machine intelligence, leading to some unimaginable singularity.  If you have trouble, let Kurtzweil do it for you.  

You can watch an abridged 20 minute TED video (Feb 2005) of his talk.  But I recommend you immerse yourself in the 90 minute Long Now talk (Sept 2005.  The Ogg Vorbis audio version* is loud and clear; skip the first 5 minutes of announcements.  (The quality of the video and MP3 versions is bad.)

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(*The iPod is not smart enough to play Ogg Vorbis files, but you can convert the Ogg file to MP3 using Audacity or other tools.)