Law Of Accelerating Returns
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In
futures studies Futures studies, futures research or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social and technological advancement, and other environmental trends, often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and wor ...
and the
history of technology The history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques by humans. Technology includes methods ranging from simple stone tools to the complex genetic engineering and information technology that has emerged since the 19 ...
, accelerating change is the observed
exponential Exponential may refer to any of several mathematical topics related to exponentiation, including: * Exponential function, also: **Matrix exponential, the matrix analogue to the above *Exponential decay, decrease at a rate proportional to value * Ex ...
nature of the rate of
technological change Technological change (TC) or technological development is the overall process of invention, innovation and diffusion of innovations, diffusion of technology or business process, processes.From ''The New Palgrave Dictionary otechnical change by S. ...
in recent history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change.


Early observations

Writing in 1904,
Henry Brooks Adams Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Franc ...
outlined a " law of acceleration." Progress is accelerating including military progress. As coal-output of the world doubles every ten years, so will be the world output of bombs both in force and number. The bomb passage follows the "revolutionary" discovery of radium--an ore of
uranium Uranium is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Ura ...
--and states that power leaps from every atom. Resistance to the law of acceleration is futile and progress might outpace the mind. "If science were to go on doubling or quadrupling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics would soon succumb. An average mind had succumbed already in 1850; it could no longer understand the problem in 1900." But Adams remains optimistic because "bombs educate vigorously". Thus far in history, states his bottom line, the mind had successfully reacted and can keep this way, but it "would need to jump". In 1910, during the town planning conference of London,
Daniel Burnham Daniel Hudson Burnham (September 4, 1846 – June 1, 1912) was an American architect and urban designer. A proponent of the ''Beaux-Arts architecture, Beaux-Arts'' movement, he may have been "the most successful power broker the American archi ...
noted, "But it is not merely in the number of facts or sorts of knowledge that progress lies: it is still more in the geometric ratio of sophistication, in the geometric widening of the sphere of knowledge, which every year is taking in a larger percentage of people as time goes on." And later on, "It is the argument with which I began, that a mighty change having come about in fifty years, and our pace of development having immensely accelerated, our sons and grandsons are going to demand and get results that would stagger us." In 1938,
Buckminster Fuller Richard Buckminster Fuller (; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more t ...
introduced the word ephemeralization to describe the trends of "doing more with less" in chemistry, health and other areas of
industrial development Industrialisation ( UK) or industrialization ( US) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial society. This involves an extensive reorganisation of an economy for the ...
. In 1946, Fuller published a chart of the discoveries of the chemical elements over time to highlight the development of accelerating acceleration in human knowledge acquisition. By mid-century, for
Arnold J. Toynbee Arnold Joseph Toynbee (; 14 April 1889 – 22 October 1975) was an English historian, a philosopher of history, an author of numerous books and a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's Coll ...
it was "not an article of faith" but "a datum of observation and experience history" that history was accelerating, and "at an accelerating rate". In 1958,
Stanislaw Ulam Stanislav and variants may refer to: People *Stanislav (given name), a Slavic given name with many spelling variations (Stanislaus, Stanislas, Stanisław, etc.) Places * Stanislav, Kherson Oblast, a coastal village in Ukraine * Stanislaus County, ...
wrote in reference to a conversation with
John von Neumann John von Neumann ( ; ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. Von Neumann had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, in ...
:


Moravec's ''Mind Children''

In a series of published articles from 1974 to 1979, and then in his 1988 book ''Mind Children'', computer scientist and futurist
Hans Moravec Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is a computer scientist and an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial inte ...
generalizes
Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...
to make predictions about the future of
artificial life Artificial life (ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline ...
. Moore's law describes an
exponential growth Exponential growth occurs when a quantity grows as an exponential function of time. The quantity grows at a rate directly proportional to its present size. For example, when it is 3 times as big as it is now, it will be growing 3 times as fast ...
pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Moravec extends this to include technologies from long before the integrated circuit to future forms of technology. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in which robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030–2040. In ''Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind'', published in 1998, Moravec further considers the implications of evolving robot intelligence, generalizing Moore's law to technologies predating the
integrated circuit An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...
, and also plotting the exponentially increasing computational power of the brains of animals in evolutionary history. Extrapolating these trends, he speculates about a coming "mind fire" of rapidly expanding
superintelligence A superintelligence is a hypothetical intelligent agent, agent that possesses intelligence surpassing that of the brightest and most intellectual giftedness, gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to a property of advanced problem- ...
similar to the explosion of intelligence predicted by Vinge.


James Burke's ''Connections''

In his TV series '' Connections'' (1978)—and sequels ''Connections2'' (1994) and ''Connections3'' (1997)— James Burke explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g., profit, curiosity, religious) with no concept of the final, modern result to which the actions of either them or their contemporaries would lead. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels. Burke also explores three corollaries to his initial thesis. The first is that, if history is driven by individuals who act only on what they know at the time, and not because of any idea as to where their actions will eventually lead, then predicting the future course of technological progress is merely conjecture. Therefore, if we are astonished by the connections Burke is able to weave among past events, then we will be equally surprised to what the events of today eventually will lead, especially events we were not even aware of at the time. The second and third corollaries are explored most in the introductory and concluding episodes, and they represent the downside of an interconnected history. If history progresses because of the synergistic interaction of past events and innovations, then as history does progress, the number of these events and innovations increases. This increase in possible connections causes the process of innovation to not only continue, but to accelerate. Burke poses the question of what happens when this rate of innovation, or more importantly change itself, becomes too much for the average person to handle, and what this means for individual power, liberty, and privacy.


Gerald Hawkins' ''Mindsteps''

In his book ''Mindsteps to the Cosmos'' (HarperCollins, August 1983), Gerald S. Hawkins elucidated his notion of ''mindsteps'', dramatic and irreversible changes to
paradigms In science and philosophy, a paradigm ( ) is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. The word ''paradigm'' is Greek ...
or world views. He identified five distinct mindsteps in human history, and the technology that accompanied these "new world views": the invention of imagery, writing, mathematics, printing, the telescope, rocket, radio, TV, computer... "Each one takes the collective mind closer to reality, one stage further along in its understanding of the relation of humans to the cosmos." He noted: "The waiting period between the mindsteps is getting shorter. One can't help noticing the acceleration." Hawkins' empirical 'mindstep equation' quantified this, and gave dates for (to him) future mindsteps. The date of the next mindstep (5; the series begins at 0) he cited as 2021, with two further, successively closer mindsteps in 2045 and 2051, until the limit of the series in 2053. His speculations ventured beyond the technological:


Vinge's exponentially accelerating change

The mathematician
Vernor Vinge Vernor Steffen Vinge (; October 2, 1944 – March 20, 2024) was an American science fiction author and professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He was the first wide-scale popularizer of the technolo ...
popularized his ideas about exponentially accelerating technological change in the science fiction novel '' Marooned in Realtime'' (1986), set in a world of rapidly accelerating progress leading to the emergence of more and more sophisticated technologies separated by shorter and shorter time intervals, until a point beyond human comprehension is reached. His subsequent
Hugo Award The Hugo Award is an annual literary award for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year, given at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) and chosen by its members. The award is administered by th ...
-winning novel ''
A Fire Upon the Deep ''A Fire Upon the Deep'' is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium re ...
'' (1992) starts with an imaginative description of the evolution of a
superintelligence A superintelligence is a hypothetical intelligent agent, agent that possesses intelligence surpassing that of the brightest and most intellectual giftedness, gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to a property of advanced problem- ...
passing through exponentially accelerating developmental stages ending in a transcendent, almost
omnipotent Omnipotence is the property of possessing maximal power. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence only to the deity of their faith. In the monotheistic religious philosophy of Abrahamic religions, omnipotence is often listed as ...
power unfathomable by mere humans. His already mentioned influential 1993 paper on the
technological singularity The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the ...
compactly summarizes the basic ideas.


Kurzweil's ''Law of Accelerating Returns''

In his 1999 book '' The Age of Spiritual Machines'',
Ray Kurzweil Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, text-to-speech synthesis, spee ...
proposed "The Law of Accelerating Returns", according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including but not limited to the growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially. He gave further focus to this issue in a 2001 essay entitled "The Law of Accelerating Returns". In it, Kurzweil, after Moravec, argued for extending Moore's Law to describe
exponential growth Exponential growth occurs when a quantity grows as an exponential function of time. The quantity grows at a rate directly proportional to its present size. For example, when it is 3 times as big as it is now, it will be growing 3 times as fast ...
of diverse forms of
technological Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word ''technology'' can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible tools such as ute ...
progress. Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He cites numerous past examples of this to substantiate his assertions. He predicts that such
paradigm shift A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. It is a concept in the philosophy of science that was introduced and brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist a ...
s have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history". He believes the Law of Accelerating Returns implies that a
technological singularity The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the ...
will occur before the end of the 21st century, around 2045. The essay begins: The Law of Accelerating Returns has in many ways altered public perception of
Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...
. It is a common (but mistaken) belief that Moore's law makes predictions regarding all forms of technology, when really it only concerns semiconductor circuits. Many
futurist Futurists (also known as futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners and horizon scanners) are people whose specialty or interest is futures studies or futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities ...
s still use the term "Moore's law" to describe ideas like those put forth by Moravec, Kurzweil and others. According to Kurzweil, since the beginning of
evolution Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...
, more complex life forms have been evolving exponentially faster, with shorter and shorter intervals between the emergence of radically new life forms, such as human beings, who have the capacity to engineer (i.e. intentionally design with efficiency) a new trait which replaces relatively blind evolutionary mechanisms of selection for efficiency. By extension, the rate of technical progress amongst humans has also been exponentially increasing: as we discover more effective ways to do things, we also discover more effective ways to learn, e.g.
language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
, numbers, written language,
philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
,
scientific method The scientific method is an Empirical evidence, empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has been referred to while doing science since at least the 17th century. Historically, it was developed through the centuries from the ancient and ...
, instruments of observation, tallying devices, mechanical calculators, computers; each of these major advances in our ability to account for information occurs increasingly close to the previous. Already within the past sixty years, life in the industrialized world has changed almost beyond recognition except for living memories from the first half of the 20th century. This pattern will culminate in unimaginable technological progress in the 21st century, leading to a singularity. Kurzweil elaborates on his views in his books ''The Age of Spiritual Machines'' and ''
The Singularity Is Near ''The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology'' is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. A sequel book, '' The Singularity Is Nearer'', was released on J ...
''.


Limits of accelerating change

In the natural sciences, it is typical that processes characterized by exponential acceleration in their initial stages go into the saturation phase. This clearly makes it possible to realize that if an increase with acceleration is observed over a certain period of time, this does not mean an endless continuation of this process. On the contrary, in many cases this means an early exit to the plateau of speed. The processes occurring in natural science allow us to suggest that the observed picture of accelerating scientific and technological progress, after some time (in physical processes, as a rule, is short) will be replaced by a slowdown and a complete stop. Despite the possible termination / attenuation of the acceleration of the progress of science and technology in the foreseeable future, progress itself, and as a result, social transformations, will not stop or even slow down - it will continue with the achieved (possibly huge) speed, which has become constant. Accelerating change may not be restricted to the
Anthropocene ''Anthropocene'' is a term that has been used to refer to the period of time during which human impact on the environment, humanity has become a planetary force of change. It appears in scientific and social discourse, especially with respect to ...
Epoch, but a general and predictable developmental feature of the universe. The physical processes that generate an acceleration such as Moore's law are positive feedback loops giving rise to exponential or superexponential technological change. These dynamics lead to increasingly efficient and dense configurations of Space, Time, Energy, and Matter (STEM efficiency and density, or STEM "compression"). At the physical limit, this developmental process of accelerating change leads to black hole density organizations, a conclusion also reached by studies of the ultimate physical limits of computation in the universe. Applying this vision to the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (usually shortened as SETI) is an expression that refers to the diverse efforts and scientific projects intended to detect extraterrestrial signals, or any evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth. ...
leads to the idea that advanced intelligent life reconfigures itself into a black hole. Such advanced life forms would be interested in inner space, rather than outer space and interstellar expansion. They would thus in some way transcend reality, not be observable and it would be a solution to Fermi's paradox called the "transcension hypothesis". Another solution is that the black holes we observe could actually be interpreted as intelligent super-civilizations feeding on stars, or "stellivores". This dynamics of evolution and development is an invitation to study the universe itself as evolving, developing. If the universe is a kind of superorganism, it may possibly tend to reproduce, naturally or artificially, with intelligent life playing a role.


Other estimates

Dramatic changes in the rate of economic growth have occurred in the past because of some technological advancement. Based on population growth, the economy doubled every 250,000 years from the
Paleolithic The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic ( years ago) ( ), also called the Old Stone Age (), is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents almost the entire period of human prehist ...
era until the
Neolithic Revolution The Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period in Afro-Eurasia from a lifestyle of hunter-gatherer, hunting and gathering to one of a ...
. The new agricultural economy doubled every 900 years, a remarkable increase. In the current era, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the world's economic output doubles every fifteen years, sixty times faster than during the agricultural era. If the rise of superhuman intelligence causes a similar revolution, argues
Robin Hanson Robin Dale Hanson (born August 28, 1959) is an American economist and author. He is associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a former research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Hanson is k ...
, then one would expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly on a weekly basis.
Long-Term Growth As A Sequence of Exponential Modes
/ref> In his 1981 book ''Critical Path'', futurist and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller estimated that if we took all the knowledge that mankind had accumulated and transmitted by the year One CE as equal to one unit of information, it probably took about 1500 years (or until the sixteenth century) for that amount of knowledge to double. The next doubling of knowledge from two to four "knowledge units" took only 250 years, until about 1750 CE. By 1900, one hundred and fifty years later, knowledge had doubled again to 8 units. The observed speed at which information doubled was getting faster and faster. In modern times, exponential knowledge progressions therefore change at an ever-increasing rate. Depending on the progression, this tends to lead toward explosive growth at some point. A simple exponential curve that represents this accelerating change phenomenon could be modeled by a doubling function. This fast rate of knowledge doubling leads up to the basic proposed
hypothesis A hypothesis (: hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. A scientific hypothesis must be based on observations and make a testable and reproducible prediction about reality, in a process beginning with an educated guess o ...
of the
technological singularity The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the ...
: the rate at which technology progression surpasses human biological evolution.


Criticisms

Both
Theodore Modis Theodore Modis (born August 11, 1943) is a strategic business analyst, futurist, physicist, and international consultant. He specializes in applying fundamental scientific concepts to predicting social phenomena. In particular, he uses the law of ...
and Jonathan Huebner have argued—each from different perspectives—that the rate of technological innovation has not only ceased to rise, but is actually now declining.


See also

* * * * * * * *


Notes


References

*TechCast Article Series, Al Leedahl
Accelerating ChangeHistory & Mathematics: Historical Dynamics and Development of Complex Societies
Edited by
Peter Turchin Peter Valentinovich Turchin (; born 22 May 1957) is a Russian-American complexity scientist, specializing in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics—mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics o ...
,
Leonid Grinin Leonid Efimovich Grinin (; born in 1958) is a Russian philosopher of history, sociologist, political anthropologist, economist, and futurologist. Born in Kamyshin (the Volgograd Region), Grinin attended Volgograd State Pedagogical University, w ...
,
Andrey Korotayev Andrey Vitalievich Korotayev (; born 17 February 1961) is a Russian anthropology, anthropologist, economic history, economic historian, comparative politics, comparative political scientist, demography, demographer and sociology, sociologist ...
, and Victor C. de Munck. Moscow: KomKniga, 2006. *Kurzweil, Ray (2001),
Essay: The Law of Accelerating Returns
* .


Further reading

* Link, Stefan J. ''Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order'' (2020
excerpt


External links


Accelerating Change
TechCast Article Series, Al Leedahl.
Kurzweil's official site


by
Ray Kurzweil Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, text-to-speech synthesis, spee ...

Is History Converging? Again?
by Juergen Schmidhuber: singularity predictions as a side-effect of memory compression?
Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends


{{emerging technologies, topics=yes Evolution Futures studies Social change History of technology Sociological theories Technological change Linear theories