Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Ray Kurzweil's Charts on The Singularity


This site has all the charts from Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity Is Near', which is all about the significance of the fact that a lot of technological stuff grows (or shrinks) at logarithmic speeds: that means it takes the same amount of time to grow (or shrink) by the same percentage. For example, if computer memory is 10 times faster now that it was five years ago, in five more years it will be 10 times faster again, or 100 times faster than it was five years ago. If the computer memory speed was 1 unit at the beginning, it would grow by 9 units in the first five years (to be ten times faster) but it would grow by 90 units in the next five years (to be a hundred times faster). The rate of growth is constant, so the amount of growth increases continually.

The chart above is one of the only charts that is not shown with logarithm units; it shows that the time between technological advance decreases at a logarithmic rate. This means that changes that used to be spaced centuries apart will soon come to be spaced seconds apart. Yikes! You can see the linear version of the same chart here, where this rate of change looks like a straight line because of the logarithmic units.

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