In August, Richard Dell and Alan Rich from the Google Lunar X-Prize team STELLAR came to our school to talk about their proposal for lunar exploration. In the course of the discussion, some students questioned whether or not the progress Mr. Dell and Mr. Rich were talking about could possibly occur so quickly. Mr. Dell argued that we can expect that rate of progress, and referred to Kurzweil’s law. It might be worth looking into what that “Law” really is.
In a nutshell, it proposes exponential growth in technological progress. But a nutshell doesn’t really do it justice, so we must step back a bit first. Have you heard of Moore’s Law? This states that the capabilities of digital electronic devices will increase exponentially, doubling every two years. Capabilities include such factors as computer processing speed, but also things that are found in consumer electronics such as memory storage capacity, or pixels in a digital camera. Moore’s law was formulated and stated in a paper by Intel co-founder in 1965. It has pretty much been true for electronic hardware. (an argument has been made that software complexity slows things down faster than hardware speeds things up, but that’s another blog entry…)
Ray Kurzweil takes this idea one step farther, and extrapolates to before the invention of the integrated circuit, and beyond to technologies that haven’t yet been invented. He argues that the rate of change is accelerating; that the technological progress during the 20th century (think: Henry Ford and the Wright brothers to Bill Gates and the Space Shuttle) will be exceeded by a factor of a THOUSAND in the 21st century. It even suggests a “technological singularity”, technological progress hastened beyond anything ever seen as a result of machines smarter than humans learning to improve their own designs…
This is not to say that everyone accepts Kurzweil’s Law, there are plenty of criticisms and you can find them in some of the web sites referenced below. Thanks to Richard Dell for helping with the research for this posting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Singularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Kurzweil#The_Law_of_Accelerating_Returns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0610.html?m%3D1
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2 comments:
When the two astronomers came to school in the fall I was one of the students who was unsure about how realistic the structures on the moon were. The proposal was for human nature to possibly live and study on the moon; how is this going to happen in less than five years? Besides how much money is this going to cost! Although this would hurt an astronomers feeling… why are we spending so much time and money on other planets when we can’t even upkeep and fully respect our earth? I think that if we can’t even take care of our home and our earth, why are we going to go to other planets and change theirs with human pollution. I think eventually we will be able to visit other planets, but, the focus of time and money needs to go to saving what we already have.
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