# The Law of Accelerating Returns  ## Metadata - Author: [[Ray Kurzweil]] - Full Title: The Law of Accelerating Returns - Category: #articles - URL: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns ## Highlights - To express this another way, it is not the case that we will experience a hundred years of progress in the twenty-first century; rather we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (at *today’s* rate of progress, that is). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e9re723zkhjwfpj6m23daz)) - When people think of a future period, they intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods. However, careful consideration of the pace of technology shows that the rate of progress is not constant, but it is human nature to adapt to the changing pace, so the intuitive view is that the pace will continue at the current rate. Even for those of us who have been around long enough to experience how the pace increases over time, our unexamined intuition nonetheless provides the impression that progress changes at the rate that we have experienced recently. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e9tp17zjwpy16gkx8dp0vf)) - One can examine the data in different ways, on different time scales, and for a wide variety of technologies ranging from electronic to biological, and the acceleration of progress and growth applies. Indeed, we find not just simple exponential growth, but “double” exponential growth, meaning that the rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially. These observations do not rely merely on an assumption of the continuation of Moore’s law (i.e., the exponential shrinking of transistor sizes on an integrated circuit), but is based on a rich model of diverse technological processes. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e9wj7v4q15b7jkc7c6ep0k)) - Over time, the “order” of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e9z5ymeh99r333f7d833t8)) - the “returns” of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall “power” of a process) increase exponentially over time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e9ywwky8gp1f00cheg42cc)) - • In another positive feedback loop, as a particular evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more effective (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed toward the further progress of that process. This results in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially). • Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5ea00gdpm8nfvpb5tjcgp4n)) - The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5ea3x83h35frc90nt86wfak)) - This is the nature of exponential growth. Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5ea7nbt7jmngvm09m5efe17)) - Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Is there not a point where humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up with it? With regard to unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would a thousand scientists, each a thousand times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating a thousand times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily nonbiological brains is faster) accomplish? One year would be like a millennium. What would they come up with? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5ea8snvbgeyfatbx6md658v)) - The Singularity is technological change so rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. Some would say that we cannot comprehend the Singularity, at least with our current level of understanding, and that it is impossible, therefore, to look past its “event horizon” and make sense of what lies beyond. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5ea9pb57szft82h7agckgdf)) - Then in 1993, Vinge presented a paper to a NASA-organized symposium which described the Singularity as an impending event resulting primarily from the advent of “entities with greater than human intelligence,” which Vinge saw as the harbinger of a run-away phenomenon. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5eah91k2x232aetekha22ps)) - From my perspective, the Singularity has many faces. It represents the nearly vertical phase of exponential growth where the rate of growth is so extreme that technology appears to be growing at infinite speed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5eahh3hvf9tbmze5s07ghqe)) -  ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5ear4x0p1jkpcx5tmazr6yp)) - Note: Each time a paradigm runs out of steam, another one picks up the pace - It is important to note that Moore’s Law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5eam6qaz863j0k2tzsssgec)) - But I noticed something else surprising. When I plotted the 49 machines on an exponential graph (where a straight line means exponential growth), I didn’t get a straight line. What I got was another exponential curve. In other words, there’s exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Computer speed (per unit cost) doubled every three years between 1910 and 1950, doubled every two years between 1950 and 1966, and is now doubling every year. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5eanyrbvgavedstw04abrrj)) - The human brain actually uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital controlled analog computational process. The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization *in three dimensions*. There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions. Nanotubes, for example, which are already working in laboratories, build circuits from pentagonal arrays of carbon atoms. One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the human brain. There are more than enough new computing technologies now being researched, including three-dimensional silicon chips, optical computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to keep the law of accelerating returns as applied to computation going for a long time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5eat56b4rdze74veh928yr3)) - Note: A good exercise for myself would be to see how much progress has been made in these technologies since this article was written. ## New highlights added July 16, 2023 at 12:55 AM - The Singularity results not from the exponential explosion of computation alone, but rather from the interplay and myriad synergies that will result from manifold intertwined technological revolutions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5ebgnqf2j0xx2ayrh9va0m9))