The Law of Accelerating Returns

It is clear that technology is now developing faster than ever before. In fact, it is reasonable to expect more change in the next 10 years than we’ve seen in the past 100.

Moore’s Law predicts the exponential growth of technology, stating that that computer hardware doubles in price-performance every two years. The trend has remained incredibly accurate since it was discovered by the co-founder of Intel in 1965.

“Moore’s law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.”
– Wikipedia

This exponential trend is applicable to much more than just computer hardware – it is also predictive of the growth of knowledge. Copied below is a logarithmic plot of key events in human history. It shows that as time progresses, paradigm shifts occur more frequently.

Ideas Grow Faster than Biology

For the most part, biological evolution has remained linear.^[1] Information, however, has gone exponential: It is not limited by the constraints of space and time. STEM compression has our species going in a new direction, and we aren’t slowing down.

Technology is self-perpetuating; it fuels its own expansion. The continued development of technology further accelerates its diffusion. In other words, ideas contribute to other ideas in a synergistic manner.

An example of synergism – ideas accelerating themselves: show

This happens because technology is iterative – it constantly adds to itself, sustaining its own growth. For instance, the invention of the printing press accelerated the rate of scientific progress not only because it facilitated the spread of new ideas, but also because a much larger audience could then read those ideas and subsequently improve upon them.

Ideas evolve faster in the company of others. The diffusion of ideas has a network effect. The more interconnected a society is, the faster a new idea (or technology) will spread through it – and consequently become improved. Thus, in a highly networked society – one in which ideas are exchanged near-instantaneously – the society we are becoming — the rate of scientific progress will reach a theoretical “maximum”.^[2]

The growth of human intelligence is directly linked to the growth of technology. Because technology grows exponentially, so does human knowledge. We are informed by our instruments: All human knowledge is derived from qualia (i.e. sensory perception), and our qualia are enhanced by technology.^[3] Therefore, as our technologies improve (as our tools become able to see smaller, predict further, compute faster than a human), we improve with them, and biological evolution continues its growth in a third derivative  – i.e., the rate of acceleration accelerates. This raises questions for the future of our species. If information (the “global mind”, or noosphere) is growing so rapidly, what does this mean for states, society, the environment, and the future of the human condition?