2045: The Year Man 2045: The Year Man Becomes ImmortalBecomes Immortal
Technology:Technology:
Exponential Growth and DecayExponential Growth and Decay
By: Lev GrossmanBy: Lev Grossman
February 10, 2011February 10, 2011
TIME MagazineTIME Magazine
1) The accelerating pace of change…
• Agricultural Revolution…– 8000 years later
• Industrial Revolution…– 120 years later
• Light bulb…– 90 years later
• Moon landing…– 22 years later
• World Wide Web…– 9 years later
• Human genome sequenced
2) …and exponential growth in computing power…
Computer technology, shown here climbing
dramatically by powers of 10, is now progressing
more each hour than it did in its entire first 90 years.
Colossus – 1943; electronic computer, with 1500 vacuum tubes, helped the British crack German codes during WW II
ENIAC – 1946; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer; first general-purpose electronic computer; called “Giant Brain”
UNIVAC I – 1951; UNIVersal Automatic Computer I; first commercially marketed computer, used to tabulate the U.S. Census, occupied 943 cubic feet
Apple II – 1977; at a price of $1,298, the compact machine was one of the first massively popular personal computers
Power Mac G4 – 1999; the first personal computer to deliver more than 1 billion floating-point operations per second
Exponential Growth
• Rising clock speed of microprocessors
• Rising number of Internet hosts• Rising number of nanotechnology
Exponential Decay (fall)
• Falling cost of manufacturing transistors
• Plummeting price of dynamic RAM• Falling cost of sequencing DNA• Falling cost of wireless data service
From the article…
“He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating
progress… Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological
progress happens exponentially, not linearly.”
From the article…
“Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they
predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his
mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward
infinity.”
From the article…
“Here’s what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the
end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence…In 2045,…the quantity of artificial
intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.”
Raymond Kurzweil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4
I’ve Got a SecretFebruary 15, 1965
46 years later…Watson on Jeopardy
Computer beats humans
February 15, 2011
1.http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/video/jeopardy-pits-man-versus-watson-computer-12841538
2.http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/jeopardy-ibm-computer-watson-wins-million-man-machine/story?id=12940205
3.http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2011/01/14/pepitone.ibm.jeopardy.cnn?iref=videosearch
4.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12464447
5.http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/02/15/carroll.jeopardy.ibm.cnn?iref=videosearch
Let’s graph these!
1. Cost of computers2. Speed of computers (calculations
per second)3. Page load speed4. Number of Internet hosts
Cost of computers – Exponential decay
http://www.freeby50.com/2009/04/cost-of-computers-over-time.html
Page load speed – Exponential decay
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-speed-are-you-fast-does-it-matter