The World in 2030

48 The World in 2030
Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible
in future time periods dramatically underestimate
the power of future developments because they are
based on what I call the ‘intuitive linear’ view of history
rather than the ‘historical exponential’ view. 97
Kurzweil is a man whose views should be taken seriously.
As well as being a noted futurist 98 and best-selling author
he is an inventor and engineer, recipient of 12 honorary
doctorates, the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the US National
Medal of Technology. He was the principal developer of the
first omni-font optical character recognition, the first printto-speech
reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed
scanner and the first text-to-speech synthesiser.
His suggestion that exponential technology development
is a natural evolutionary trait that has, until recently, been
masked from view by slow progress during its early phase,
appears to be borne out by an examination of the history of
technological progress.
The agricultural revolution began about 12,000 years ago
but it took another 6,000 years before humans developed
the three virtual technologies that have shaped our modern
world; alphabetic writing, mathematics and the invention
of money. (When I describe these technologies as ‘virtual’ I
use the word in its original meaning, not in the computing
sense of ‘virtual reality.’ The English word ‘virtual’ derives
its etymology from the Latin word ‘virtualis’, which implies
something which has an essence or an effect without
necessarily having a physical existence.)