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The Intuitive Linear View Versus the Historical Exponential View: Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of history rather than the "historical exponential" view. My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade, as I will discuss in the next chapter. Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today's rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We'll make another twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won't experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today's rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century. Misperceptions about the shape of the future come up frequently and in a variety of contexts. As one example of many, in a recent debate in which I took part concerning the feasibility of molecular manufacturing, a Nobel Prizewinning panelist dismissed safety concerns regarding nanotechnology, proclaiming that "we're not going to see self-replicating nanoengineered entities [devices constructed molecular fragment by fragment] for a hundred years." I pointed out that one hundred years was a reasonable estimate and actually matched my own appraisal of the amount of technical progress required to achieve this particular milestone when measured at today's rate of progress (five times the average rate of change we saw in the twentieth century). But because we're doubling the rate of progress every decade, we'll see the equivalent of a century of progress—at today's rate—in only twenty-five calendar years. Similarly at Time magazine's Future of Life conference, held in 2003 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, all of the invited speakers were asked what they thought the next fifty years would be like.5 Virtually every presenter looked at the progress of the last fifty years and used it as a model for the next fifty years. For example, James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA, said that in fifty years we will have drugs that will allow us to eat as much as we want without gaining weight. I replied, "Fifty years?" We have accomplished this already in mice by blocking the fat insulin receptor gene that controls the storage of fat in the fat cells. Drugs for human use (using RNA interference and other techniques we will discuss in chapter 5) are in development now and will be in FDA tests in several years. These will be available in five to ten years, not fifty. Other projections were equally shortsighted, reflecting contemporary research priorities rather than the profound changes that the next half century will bring. Of all the thinkers at this conference, it was primarily Bill Joy and I who took account of the exponential nature of the future, although Joy and I disagree on the import of these changes, as I will discuss in chapter 8. People intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods. Even for those who have been around long enough to experience how the pace of change increases over time, unexamined intuition leaves one with the impression that change occurs at the same rate that we have experienced most recently. From the mathematician's perspective, the reason for this is that an exponential curve looks like a straight line when examined for only a brief duration. As a result, even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, typically extrapolate the current pace of change over the next ten years or one hundred years to determine their expectations. This is why I describe this way of looking at the future as the "intuitive linear" view. But a serious assessment of the history of technology reveals that technological change is exponential. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example. You can examine the data in different ways, on different timescales, and for a wide variety of technologies, ranging from electronic to biological, as well as for their implications, ranging from the amount of human knowledge to the size of the economy. The acceleration of progress and growth applies to each of them. Indeed, we often find not just simple exponential growth, but "double" exponential growth, meaning that the rate of exponential growth (that is, the exponent) is itself growing exponentially Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity is near