We've all been humbled and are not feeling too talkative.
If Ray Kurzweil is to be believed—there’s hope for our portfolios if we can just manage to survive a couple of more decades.
Kurzweil always twists one’s synapses, and he’s done it again in The Singularity Is Near. The book is not yet available (at least on Amazon), but from the precis it will soon be an addition to the “must reads” for carpetologists especially as he includes some nifty charts to illustrate his major points. kurzweilai.net
Kurzweil takes us “back to the future,” and claims it’s widely misunderstood. And the reasons behind this claim shed some light on network effects. What we have been calling “network effects” may, in fact, if Kurzweil is right, be simply a characteristic of how complex systems change.
Kurzweil contends that exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process. He puts technology in that category and includes an interesting discussion of the “S” curve adoption cycle. Technology, he believes, is a self-organizing system. Imbedded information with feedback loops leads to exponential increases as effectiveness begets greater effectiveness at an increasing pace until displacement produces another path to increased effectiveness.
His chart on mass use of inventions is mind boggling, albeit he starts with the technologically challenged Cro-Magnum man. Early in the cycle—when our furry ancestors were playing with fire and tinkering with iron—there were few clues about the explosive growth as the changes were modest enough within a short time frame to mask the exponential territory ahead.
And most important, Kurzweil finds, even if we had a glimpse of the exponential time ahead, we wouldn’t like it and would argue our way out of it. “Although technological growth is in the exponential world, we humans live in a linear realm.” It’s easy to call the 1990s a bubble: It sure looks that way extrapolating from past performance, but predictions based on today’s rate of progress—i.e., linearly—will always fall short. (Here he cites the Fed and other economists who are so fond of linear comparisons. These hold up over short time periods, but fall apart when a longer frame is used for measurement.) We’re doubling the rate of progress every decade. At this accelerating rate, we’ll realize a century of progress—at today’s rate—in only 25 calendar years.
What may have greater implications for G&Ks than his overarching views are the places where he sees exponential growth taking place: computational power, miniaturization, etc.
--Judith Williams |
