Law of Accelerating Returns
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In futures studies and the history of technology, the law of accelerating returns, proposed by Raymond Kurzweil in his 2001 essay of the same name, is an extension of Moore's law describing an exponential growth of technological progress. Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Kurzweil extends this to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of technology. Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He cites numerous past examples of this to substantiate his assertions. He predicts that such paradigm shifts have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history." He believes the Law of Accelerating Returns implies that a technological singularity will occur before the end of the 21st century.
The essay begins:
- "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense 'intuitive linear' view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The 'returns,' such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."
Kurzweil's Law has in many ways altered public perception of Moore's. It is a common (but mistaken) belief that Moore's law makes predictions regarding all forms of technology, when really it only concerns semiconductor circuits. Many futurists still use the term "Moore's Law" to describe ideas like those put forth by Kurzweil.
According to Kurzweil, since the beginning of evolution, more complex life forms have been evolving exponentially faster, with shorter and shorter intervals between the emergence of radically new life forms, such as human beings, who have the capacity to engineer (to intentionally design with efficiency) a new trait which replaces relatively blind evolutionary mechanisms of selection for efficiency. By extension, the rate of technical progress amongst humans has also been exponentially increasing, as we discover more effective ways to do things, we also discover more effective ways to learn, i.e. language, numbers, written language, philosophy, scientific method, instruments of observation, tallying devices, mechanical calculators, computers, each of these a major advance in our ability to account for information occurring increasingly close together. Already within the past sixty years, life in the industrialized world has changed almost beyond recognition except for living memories from the first half of the 20th century. This pattern will culminate in unimaginable technological progress in the 21st century, leading to a singularity. Kurzweil elaborates on his views in his books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near.
Precursors
Many sociologists and anthropologists have created social theories dealing with social and cultural evolution. Some, like Lewis H. Morgan, Leslie White, and Gerhard Lenski, declare technological progress to be the primary factor driving the development of human civilization.
Morgan's concept of three major stages of social evolution (savagery, barbarism, and civilization) can be divided by technological milestones, like fire, the bow, and pottery in the savage era, domestication of animals, agriculture, and metalworking in the barbarian era and the alphabet and writing in the civilization era.
Instead of specific inventions, White decided that the measure by which to judge the evolution of culture was energy. For White, "the primary function of culture" is to "harness and control energy." White differentiates between five stages of human development: In the first, people use energy of their own muscles. In the second, they use energy of domesticated animals. In the third, they use the energy of plants (agricultural revolution). In the fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In the fifth, they harness nuclear energy.
White introduced a formula P=E*T, where E is a measure of energy consumed, and T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilizing the energy. In his own words, "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased." The Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev extrapolated this theory to create the Kardashev scale, which categorizes the energy use of advanced civilizations. A Dyson sphere is Type II on this scale, and humanity is currently at about 0.72.
Lenski takes a more modern approach and focuses on information. The more information and knowledge (especially allowing the shaping of natural environment) a given society has, the more advanced it is. He identifies four stages of human development, based on advances in the history of communication. In the first stage, information is passed by genes. In the second, when humans gain intelligence, they can learn and pass information by experience. In the third, the humans start using signs and develop logic. In the fourth, they can create symbols, develop language and writing. Advancements in the technology of communication translates into advancements in the economic system and political system, distribution of goods, social inequality and other spheres of social life. He also differentiates societies based on their level of technology, communication and economy: (1) hunters and gatherers, (2) simple agricultural, (3) advanced agricultural, (4) industrial (5) special (like fishing societies).
Finally, from the late 1970s sociologist and anthropologists like Alvin Toffler (author of Future Shock), Daniel Bell and John Naisbitt have approached the theories of postindustrial societies, arguing that the current era of industrial society is coming to an end, and services and information are becoming more important than industry and goods. Some of the more extreme visions of the postindustrial society, especially in fiction, envision the elimination of economic scarcity and are strikingly similar to the visions of near and post-Singularity societies.
Criticisms
Some claim the exponential growth of technological progress may become linear or inflected or may begin to flatten into a limited-growth curve. In this model, instead of an overall acceleration of progress, technological advance jumps forward whenever there is a human "buy in" and stalls whenever there is no benefit large enough to profit the technologists, and therefore never gets steep enough to be considered a singularity.
Examples of large human "buy-ins" into technology include the computer revolution, as well as massive government projects like the Manhattan Project and the Human Genome Project. The foundation organizing the Methuselah Mouse Prize believes aging research could be the subject of such a massive project if substantial progress is made in slowing or reversing cellular aging in mice.
Both Theodore Modis and Jonathan Huebner have argued—each from different perspectives—that the rate of technological innovation has not only ceased to rise, but is actually now declining. The validity of their conclusions has been [criticized] by John Smart.
Choosing technological "milestones", defining the meaning of technological "growth", and similar semantic exercises often include significant subjectivity, and are therefore easily criticized. For example, it can be claimed that inventions are generally created by a fixed population of human inventors at a constant rate, regardless of their current technological prowess, and therefore technological "progress" is actually a function of population growth, not past inventions (at least until non-human inventors are invented).
Are prophecies of a coming singularity just a side-effect of memory compression? Juergen Schmidhuber calls the Singularity Omega, referring to Teilhard de Chardin's Omega point (1916). For Omega = 2040 he says the series Omega - 2^n human lifetimes (n<10; one lifetime = 80 years) roughly matches the most important events in human history. But he also questions the validity of such lists, suggesting they just reflect a general rule for "both the individual memory of single humans and the collective memory of entire societies and their history books: constant amounts of memory space get allocated to exponentially larger, adjacent time intervals further and further into the past." He suggests that this may be the reason "why there has never been a shortage of prophets predicting that the end is near - the important events according to one's own view of the past always seem to accelerate exponentially."
Gallery
Kurzweil created the following graphs to illustrate his beliefs concerning and his justification for his Law of Accelerating Returns.See also
- Diminishing returns
- Logarithmic timeline
- [Modelling Wikipedia's growth]
- Prometheus Rising
- Manhood of Humanity by Alfred Korzybski
External links
- [Kurzweil's official site]
- [Essay: The Law of Accelerating Returns]
- [Is History Converging? Again?] by Juergen Schmidhuber: singularity predictions as a side-effect of memory compression?
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