Accelerating change

In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change.

Early observations

In 1910, during the town planning conference of London, Daniel Burnham noted, "But it is not merely in the number of facts or sorts of knowledge that progress lies: it is still more in the geometric ratio of sophistication, in the geometric widening of the sphere of knowledge, which every year is taking in a larger percentage of people as time goes on."^[1] And later on, "It is the argument with which I began, that a mighty change having come about in fifty years, and our pace of development having immensely accelerated, our sons and grandsons are going to demand and get results that would stagger us."^[1]

In 1938, Buckminster Fuller introduced the word ephemeralization to describe the trends of "doing more with less" in chemistry, health and other areas of industrial development.^[2] In 1946, Fuller published a chart of the discoveries of the chemical elements over time to highlight the development of accelerating acceleration in human knowledge acquisition.^[3]

By mid-century, for Arnold J. Toynbee it was "not an article of faith" but "a datum of observation and experience history" that history was accelerating, and "at an accelerating rate".^[4]

In 1958, Stanislaw Ulam wrote in reference to a conversation with John von Neumann:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.^[5]

Moravec's Mind Children

In a series of published articles from 1974 to 1979, and then in his 1988 book Mind Children, computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec generalizes Moore's law to make predictions about the future of artificial life. Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Moravec extends this to include technologies from long before the integrated circuit to future forms of technology. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario^[6][7] in which robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030–2040.^[8]

James Burke's Connections

Main article: Connections (British TV series)

James Burke poses the question of what happens when this rate of innovation, or more importantly change itself, becomes too much for the average person to handle, and what this means for individual power, liberty, and privacy.^[9]

Limits of accelerating change

In the natural sciences, it is typical that processes characterized by exponential acceleration in their initial stages go into the saturation phase. This clearly makes it possible to realize that if an increase with acceleration is observed over a certain period of time, this does not mean an endless continuation of this process. On the contrary, in many cases this means an early exit to the plateau of speed. The processes occurring in natural science allow us to suggest that the observed picture of accelerating scientific and technological progress, after some time (in physical processes, as a rule, is short) will be replaced by a slowdown and a complete stop. Despite the possible termination / attenuation of the acceleration of the progress of science and technology in the foreseeable future, progress itself, and as a result, social transformations, will not stop or even slow down - it will continue with the achieved (possibly huge) speed, which has become constant.^[10]

Accelerating change may not be restricted to the Anthropocene Epoch,^[11] but a general and predictable developmental feature of the universe.^[12] The physical processes that generate an acceleration such as Moore's law are positive feedback loops giving rise to exponential or superexponential technological change.^[13] These dynamics lead to increasingly efficient and dense configurations of Space, Time, Energy, and Matter (STEM efficiency and density, or STEM "compression").^[14] At the physical limit, this developmental process of accelerating change leads to black hole density organizations, a conclusion also reached by studies of the ultimate physical limits of computation in the universe.^[15][16]

Applying this vision to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence leads to the idea that advanced intelligent life reconfigures itself into a black hole. Such advanced life forms would be interested in inner space, rather than outer space and interstellar expansion.^[17] They would thus in some way transcend reality, not be observable and it would be a solution to Fermi's paradox called the "transcension hypothesis".^[18][12][14] Another solution is that the black holes we observe could actually be interpreted as intelligent super-civilizations feeding on stars, or "stellivores".^[19][20] This dynamics of evolution and development is an invitation to study the universe itself as evolving, developing.^[21] If the universe is a kind of superorganism, it may possibly tend to reproduce, naturally^[22] or artificially, with intelligent life playing a role.^{[23][24][25][26][27]}

Other estimates

Dramatic changes in the rate of economic growth have occurred in the past because of some technological advancement. Based on population growth, the economy doubled every 250,000 years from the Paleolithic era until the Neolithic Revolution. The new agricultural economy doubled every 900 years, a remarkable increase. In the current era, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the world's economic output doubles every fifteen years, sixty times faster than during the agricultural era. If the rise of superhuman intelligence causes a similar revolution, argues Robin Hanson, then one would expect the economy to double at least quarterly and possibly on a weekly basis.^[28]

In his 1981 book Critical Path, futurist and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller estimated that if we took all the knowledge that mankind had accumulated and transmitted by the year One CE as equal to one unit of information, it probably took about 1500 years (or until the sixteenth century) for that amount of knowledge to double. The next doubling of knowledge from two to four "knowledge units" took only 250 years, until about 1750 CE. By 1900, one hundred and fifty years later, knowledge had doubled again to 8 units. The observed speed at which information doubled was getting faster and faster.^[29]

Criticisms

Both Theodore Modis and Jonathan Huebner have argued—each from different perspectives—that the rate of technological innovation has not only ceased to rise, but is actually now declining.^[30]

See also

• Accelerando – 2005 science fiction novel by Charles Stross
• Accelerationism – Ideologies of change via capitalism and technology
• Diminishing returns – Economic theory
• Future Shock – 1970 book by Alvin Toffler
• Logarithmic timeline
• Novelty theory – American ethnobotanist, lecturer, and writer (1946–2000)Pages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Simulated reality – Concept of a false version of reality
• Zimmerman's law – Creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)Pages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets