Acceleration Towards What?

In 1965 Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, remarked that the number of transistors that can be cheaply placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. This phenomenon has kept up for fifty years and seems to show no signs of slowing, though some theoretical limit must exist. 

Author Ray Kurzweil has famously extrapolated on Moore's law, extending its purview to a broader stretch of computer technology, and proposing that a machine's calculations per second per thousand dollars spent on its construction also follows an exponential rate.

Kurzweil has written extensively about the logical end of this exponential curve, which he believes to be the creation of artificial "superintelligences" that will alter forever humanity's relationship to the universe in which it resides. Writer Vernor Vinge coined the phrase "Technological Singularity" to describe a tipping point in which artificial intelligences discover ways to build machines more intelligent than themselves, which leads to near-instantaneous leaps in technological sophistication as radical as the difference between the industrial and computer eras.

All of which naturally leads to speculation about just what the superintelligent machines will do with their increasingly obsolete and probably pesky hominid creators. This vein of robot-paranoia, which has been mined effectively in pop culture by films like 2001, A Space Odyssey and The Terminator, is interestingly absent from Kurzweil's strangely utopian vision of the post-singularity future, which, eerily, involves what he refers to as "spiritual machines." 

Before dismissing the man as a crank, it's important to note that his 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines predicted that by 1998 a computer would be programmed that could defeat the best chess players in the world. Kurzweil was proven right in May of 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue defeated world champion Gary Kasparov. 

The science and technology community, as in most things, is divided on the issue. Mitch Kapor of the Lotus Development Corporation sees Kurzweil's view as "fundamentally...driven by a religious impulse"

and Gordon Moore himself has publicly distanced himself from the man who made his "law" famous. Of course this may prove nothing more than that certain secularists are disturbed by predictions with apocalyptic overtones, and that some people are incapable of following even their own ideas through to their logical conclusions. Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems has agreed with Kurzweil's predictions for rates of technological advancement, though he sees the future of Artifical Intelligence and Nanotechnology in a far more dystopian light than Kurzweil. 

What can't be denied is that it took nearly half a million years for world human population to reach 1 billion. That was in the 1800s. The next billion only took 122 years. The next 5 billion took less than 100 years. 

If technology follows a pattern of growth anything like what population is demonstrating, the future may be distressingly unlike the present, in ways impossible to imagine.