Have a Great Holiday!
This will likely be the last holiday of the year. I wish all the blog readers and their families a Happy Holiday! Since some of you probably already tuned out, I will make today’s blog light and visual.
Technological Change
I read an interesting blog today at waitbutwhy.com, which shares some interesting albeit sometimes extreme thoughts. The illustrations below, borrowed from their blog, are a fun way to think about where we are, where we are going and where we think we are going. While fun, these illustrations also shed light on the coming technological revolution that I have been referring to in my blogs.
- This is where we may be right now:
- That seems like a pretty intense place to be standing, right? Indeed it is, except that we have no idea what is to the right of us on the chart, so it feels like this:
- What is really happening is that human progress is moving on an exponential curve. Think of placing someone from 250 years ago into a time machine. They would arrive in 2016 unable to even comprehend what they see around them. To move back before them to see that same amount of change, they would have to go back 12,000 years. The people from 12,000 years ago would have to go back over 100,000 years for the same effect. Click to watch a piece on humans’ biggest shortcoming -- the inability to understand the exponential function. This is an old video, and does not even refer much to about technological growth, but there is a reason it has millions of views. If you ask most people to project future growth, they will predict based on historical or current observations. However, if they understand the power of exponential growth, their prediction will be like the green line (below). This concept is important not only when it comes to technological change, but also investment returns, natural resources, population growth and anything else that tends to grow at a consistent rate.
- The next illustration shows that even exponential growth does not happen on a perfect curve – think of how a line would look straight if you dissected a small piece of a huge circle. Thinking about this in terms of technology, we experienced incredible change as the internet exploded during the period of 1995-2007. The period of 2008-2015 more resembled a flatter part of the “S-curve” illustrated below. With the convergence of exponentially growing computing power and exponentially growing data – the raw material of artificial intelligence and machine learning – we are quite possibly at the beginning of the next technology revolution. Click to see another way to think about exponential growth in technology.
