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.

Analytical Engine – Charles Babbage 1837; designed to solve computational and logical problems

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

IBM PC – 1981; IBM Personal Computer

Power Mac G4 – 1999; the first personal computer to deliver more than 1 billion floating-point operations per second

Mac Pro – 2006

Macbook Air 2008

Ipad 2010

Remember this from 1837?

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

What’s the difference between exponential and

linear?

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

Calculations per second – Exponential growth

http://www.singularity.com/charts/page70.html

Page load speed – Exponential decay

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-speed-are-you-fast-does-it-matter

Number of Internet hosts – Exponential growth

http://www.singularity.com/charts/page79.html