The World in 2030

The World in 2030 47
I agree with these views about constant increase in the velocity
of development, both technological and social, and it is for
this reason that I have coupled such seemingly tautologous
terms as ‘accelerating’ and ‘exponential’ in my heading for
this section.
But ‘exponential’ is an easy concept to understand in
theory (a doubling every so often – usually over a set, regularly
recurring period) but it is hard to appreciate fully how powerful
exponential effects are. When a small number doubles the
change is almost unnoticeable; when a large number doubles
the effect is overwhelming. We are now moving into a period
when the effects of exponential technological development
will be very noticeable indeed.
Ray Kurzweil also makes the apparently astonishing claim
that such exponential development is a natural part of human
evolution. In his 2005 book ‘The Singularity Is Near’ he writes:
The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears
expected it to be pretty much like their present, which
had been pretty much like their past. Exponential
trends did exist one thousand years ago, but they
were at that very early stage in which they were so
flat and so slow that they looked like no trend at all.
As a result, observers’ expectation of an unchanged
future was fulfilled. Today, we anticipate continuous
technological progress and the social repercussions
that follow. But the future will be far more surprising
than most people realise, because few observers have
truly internalised the implications of the fact that the
rate of change itself is accelerating.