La Plus Ca Change

The faster change changes the faster change changes: Since I was in Israel, I had to miss a talk by Ray Kurzweil in San Francisco Friday evening, sponsored by the LongNow Foundation. But Stewart Brand provided a summary of the talk that included the following:

"Kurzweil's Law of accelerating returns: 'technology and evolutionary processes progress in an exponential fashion.' Thus, since the rate of progress doubles every ten years or so, we will see changes in the next 90 years equivalent to the last 10,000 years, and in the next 100 years changes equivalent to the last 20,000 years.  It is always the later doublings where the ferocious action is.  The many skeptics about the Human Genome project being done in 15 years thought they were being proved right at year 10.  They were astounded when the project came in on schedule.  'People look at short sections of an exponential growth curve and imagine they are straight lines,' said Kurzweil."

Comments

[david grady]

Something similar applies to the way software projects finish, btw. Projects drag on forever, then finish fast. Two months before it's supposed to be final, you'd swear there's no way, and at one month things still seem pretty scary. Then stability emerges, and out the door it goes -- not bug free, to be sure, but good enough to ship.