CB, progress for the first billion years was trivial. Then chimpoids came up with fire, the stone club, sharpened to an ax, then after a few millennia of cranial struggle, they came up with the wheel. Battling through their R&D programmes of the day, they finally came up with a little clay distillation pot. Not to mention melting some iron ore in fires and whacking it into swords and ploughshares.
A few 10s of millions of not very bright people were obviously going to take a long time to get that stuff done when they had to spend a lot of time defending their hunting grounds and their wives and daughters' honour, not to mention harvesting the crops they tried to grow.
During the last couple of thousand years though, a seriously impressive process got under way. By the industrial revolution, there were quite a few million people living in Europe and the USA who were able to live in cities and do R&D while the peasants kept them in the manner to which they'd become accustomed. The British Empire boomed. The French did okay too, albeit hindered by their guillotine revolution and the barbarian Germans coming over the fence.
The USA took off!
By the beginning of the 20th century, there were a LOT of people around the world who were inventing all sorts of stuff, but still only 1000s of them, supported by a few 100 million others. The rate of invention really accelerated through the 20th century, as did the population.
By the beginning of the 21st century, there were millions of people inventing, supported by 6 billion people and average intelligence has rapidly increased [refer to Flynn Effect] and I suppose the smart fraction lagriffedulion.f2s.com has increased even more. Wars are pretty much over. Genocidal pestilence, disease and famine are a thing of the past, more or less [civil war famines, AIDS, sars and chicken flu notwithstanding].
Al Q are like the village idiots who have a grudge against the rest. They aren't like the USSR, Hirohito's military, the Nazis, or the Kaiser, all of whom were seriously dangerous. Being scared of them is pathetic when we have had MAD in progress with the USSR for half a century.
Note that the markets ignored the latest threats to New York [Citibank, Prudential, Stock Exchange]. The reaction was, "If that's the worst they can do, then there's nothing much to worry about". Even the spectacular jackpot strike on the Twin Towers was trivial in the grand scheme of things.
People misunderstand and misuse the word exponential. But exponential is the process of the last 10,000 years, with the last century being the culmination of the process, with the exponential curve going into zoom mode in the last few decades as the long, arduous process of getting to here has finally come into its own.
The Club of Rome and Luddite Malthusians see the process as ending in catastrophe, just as a swarming of rabbits, locusts or other sudden success is limited by nature using death on a grand scale, due to limited resources. Humans are smarter than rabbits and locusts and especially so in the last hundred years, and we have synergy with each other. It's 6 billion of us versus nature, whereas 100 years ago it was 1 billion of us versus nature and each other, with most of us living in agricultural subsistence lifestyles.
Al Qaeda and other Luddite fascists don't understand what's happening. They don't have a chance. It's like the opening scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey with Chimpoids versus Hal. They don't have a chance. Nature has passed them by. Ted Kaczynski understood what's happening, but the chimpoids put him in gaol.
I'd bet on somebody wielding a CDMA2000 phragmented photon cyberphone light sabre against some medieval maniac whacking away with a wootz sword.
In the UK in 1900, there were about 38 million, in 2000 about 59 million. In 1800 only 10.5 million. Inventions, discoveries and ideas were created in the 1800s by only a small proportion of the 20 million or so, who lived only about 45 years, and had a substantially lower intelligence than now. In China, India, Africa and elsewhere, not a lot was going on in the way of brainpower-based development.
Now, there are 5 billion hot-wired people. No wonder the pace has picked up. But wait, there's more. Those 5 billion have a super-turbo-charging effect with umpty billion ASICs and fibre connections powering the process. This is exponentiality writ large. Al Q is a joke. A rearguard Kaczynski club trying to bring back the past.
Even if Al Q hits the trifecta and comes up with a few nukes in major cities, that'll only slow the process a little, and maybe even accelerate it by doing away with national borders as the USA and globalizing citizens decide that there is a better way than manning the Maginot Line at their borders.
Scientific and other progress thousands of years ago was near-zero. It was almost nothing everywhere until the 19th can 20th centuries. It's really cooking now.
Even human DNA evolution is today faster than ever because there are 6 billion people all battling to have their DNA in the soup next time around [or not battling, in which case they won't]. With genetic engineering thrown in, the process will speed up even more. In 1800 there were only 1 billion and 1900 only 1.8 billion.
What's weird is that for all that, things seem almost normal, and even a bit boring on a day to day basis. I suppose as we near the speed of light, time slows down and things go slower and slower, until when we hit top speed, things come to a stop!
Mqurice |
