Lectures notes for 2010 - KTH

Exponential growth
As Ray Kurzweil points out in Chapter 1 of his book, The Singularity Is Near [10],
the law of accelerating returns implies that the rate of change is increasing 1 .
Up close exponential change is not much different from linear change, but step
back slightly and we see there is a very big difference (see our earlier plot on the
right in Figure 2). For information technologies he states that the growth rate is
exponential, and that is the exponent is increasing and not simply a constant.
He predicts that the 5 th Epoch involves the merger of technology and human
intelligence and that by the end of the 2020s a computer will pass the Turing test.
If this is the case, then shortly computers will combine the strengths of both human
and machine intelligence -- What does this imply about services?
With Google being on a trajectory to having all information available on-line and
offering on-line services with nearly unlimited storage for ~$2/year. What is next?
1. Irving Wladawsky-Berger makes this same point regarding the commoditization of computing in the cloud [31].
Maguire Exponential growth 13: 13 of 91
maguire@kth.se 2010.03.21 Internetworking/Internetteknik