Volume 1, Issue 3 
3rd Quarter, 2006


How We Can Manage Our Way Through the Intertwined Promise and Peril of Accelerating Change

Ray Kurzweil

page 7 of 15

We also see exponential growth in communications technology. There are many ways to measure communications technology, such as Internet data, traffic, the Internet backbone, the size of the Internet, and so on. 

Kurzweil Image
Image 11: Internet Hosts, Logarithmic Plot

I had a little piece of this curve on the number of nodes on the Internet when I wrote my first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, in 1985. We went from 10 thousand nodes serving 2,000 scientists, to 20,000, and then to 40,000 at yearly intervals. Nobody had heard of it; it was ARPANET. It was clear to me that this doubling trend was going to continue. Ten years later, it would be 10 million going to 20 million to 40 million and then it would be on everybody's radar screen. I put a prediction in about that and that is what happened. 

Kurzweil Image
Image 12: Internet Hosts, Linear Plot

Image 12 is a linear graph of the same data. From the linear trend, it looked like the Internet came out of nowhere in the mid-1999's. But you could see these trends emerging if you look at the province in which they really reside, which is exponential progression. 

Kurzweil Image
Image 13: Decrease in Size of Mechanical Devices

Another exponential term is miniaturization, with technology shrinking in size, not just the electronics, but mechanical at a rate of about five per linear dimension per decade, which is over 100 in 3D volume. 

We actually do now little machines for the first time that can do very complex tasks at the molecular level, at least in experiments. There is a little robot that walks with a convincing humanlike gate, built at the molecular level. These are experiments, but they do show the ability to manipulate matter and create machines that are reliable at that level. 

We have reverse-engineered red blood cells. They are fairly simple devices. This brings up an issue regarding biology. Although biology is quite remarkable and intricate, it is actually very suboptimal, because biological evolution made certain assumptions, like building everything out of proteins, which is a very limited class of materials that you can roll up from a linear sequences of amino acids or doing signaling in interneuronal connections at a few hundred feet per second versus electronic, which is a million times faster. 

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