It's the time of the year again when technology experts are breathlessly telling us about the technology and innovations that would take place in the year 2013. When it comes to future technology that has a stronger track record till now; that is really great but it could have some hopelessly wrong predictions by the end of the month of March. In fact, out of the 147 predictions that the Kurzweil has already made since the late 1990’s. Moreover, 115 of them have been correct and another 12 have been turned out to be “essentially correct” by giving a prediction of 86% of accuracy rate. So, how does he made it?
The fact behind this is that Ray has a system and the system is called as the Law of Accelerating Returns. In his new book, How to create a mind- the secret of human thought revealed. Here, Kurzweil points out that “every fundamental measure of information technology follows predictable and exponential trajectories.” The most famous of these trajectories, of course, has been the price/performance path of the computing power for over 100 years. Thanks to the paradigms such as the Moore’s Law, which later reduces computing powers to a problem of how many transistors you can embed on a chip. With such advancements, anyone can easily understand that why the computer systems are getting exponentially fast and cheap with the passage of time.
The thing is that it is not only about the sheer computing power or the growth of the Internet. The Chapter 10 of the Kurzweil’s latest book, How to Create Mind explains that it includes 15 other charts that show these exponential growth curves during work.
The actual accelerating feature of this Law of Accelerating Returns is that it automatically assumes that one exponential technology gets built on top of the next exponential technology.