Ray Kurzweil, radical futurist and prophet of innovation, holds up a smartphone. "This device is a billion times more valuable per constant dollar than the computer I used as a student at MIT in the late '60s," he says. "In 25 years, it will be the size of a blood cell. And it will be a billion times more powerful."
The famously far-thinking inventor and author — critics would say too-far thinking — is addressing 37 executives from around the world who have assembled at the NASA Ames campus in Mountain View, California. Teleconferencing from Boston on October 2, 2011, Kurzweil appears onscreen like Oz the Great and Powerful in high def. His urgent message: Technology progresses at an exponential rate. Humans, having evolved to hunt game and avoid predators, are designed to think linearly.
"It took the printing press 400 years to reach a large audience," he says. "It took the telephone 50 years, the mobile phone seven years, and social networks only three." The pace of innovation will only continue to accelerate, he says, because exponential evolution is built into the very nature of technology.
Kurzweil's audience is the latest Executive Program class at Singularity University, an institution he co-founded with Peter Diamandis of X Prize fame. The school's mission is to prepare the world take advantage of exponential change rather than being crushed by it. Drawn from C suites around the world — including Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chair and CEO Jim Gianopulos, SunPower CTO Tom Dinwoodie, and representatives of IBM, Investec, and the Brazilian military — students will spend the coming week learning how to think in exponential terms.
Kurzweil begins plotting technological progress in the early '80s and soon determined that progress, from the discovery of fire through today's headlines, follows a steady exponential curve. The curve originates, he says, from the fact that we use the last generation of technology to build the next, multiplying past gains with each advance. The cycle inevitably brings smaller hardware, greater capability, and falling prices in a ladder of interlocking s-curves.
"I projected it out for 60 years," he says, "and we're right on the curve I laid out 30 years ago. How can this be? We're measuring competition, innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship. These things are unpredictable individually. It's like thermodynamics. Any given molecule is unpredictable, but the aggregate effect is consistent. There are millions of people involved in this curve, and the overall impact is remarkably predictable."
Examples are everywhere. Processing power is following the exponential path outlined by Moore's Law. 3D scanning and printing is turning manufacturing into a matter of bits and bytes; engineers have printed functional violins, airplanes, even 70 percent of the parts necessary to build a new 3D printer. The human genome project has brought medicine under the yoke of high-performance computation. Digital imaging equipment is scanning brains and fueling efforts to reverse-engineer the cortex. Nanotechnology is dependent on digital modeling, leading to the prospect of health-promoting, blood-borne nanobots. Speaking of nanobots, Kurzweil recalls: "ESPN asked me, 'we're going to ban these, right?' I answered that steroids are bad for health long term, but these are good for your health. If you ban them, you'll be forcing athletes to ignore something useful and high school students will outperform Olympic athletes."
It's a mark of how nonintuitive the exponential frame of mind is that Kurzweil himself is still surprised by his conclusions. Researching ereaders recently, he studied the trajectories of processing power, wireless communications, and display resolution. "Even I'm amazed at where we'll be in 2013," he says.
