Trendsdencies

SECOND HALF OF THE CHESS BOARD (TECHNOLOGIES, Part one)

January 4, 2017
“Real progress is the one that puts Technology within everyone’s reach”. Henry Ford.

Progress in technology is exponential and unstoppable and it seems to follow, in most areas, Moore’s Law, according to which the processing power for computers doubles up approximately every 18 months.

Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, described it in a more illustrative way: “we are in the second half of the chess board”, he said with regard to the reward that the inventor of the chess game asked to his Emperor: put a single grain of rice in the 1st square of my chess board, two on the 2nd, four on the 3rd and so on. The final result: 18,4 trillion grains of rice, enough to cover the entire surface of the earth with such precious grass.

In both cases, the chart that shows the evolution of the technology is similar to the one below, representing the annual additions to computing power and where it can be checked that the genuine revolution did not start until 2005 and that from that date the progress has been dramatic.

This explains why many predictions made some time ago (i.e. the robots), have had no feasibility until now.

Thus, technological evolution such as internet of things, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), genetics and biotechnology, amongst other, will suffer such a strong progress in the forthcoming years that necessarily will not only change the economy but work as we understand it now and definitively our lifestyle. In the end, a total metamorphosis of the social organization model.

Vernor Vinge, mathematician and science fiction author made popular the word “technological singularity”, referring to the fact that due to the exponential progress of the processing power for computers and, in general, because of technology, it would be possible to build machines more intelligent than mankind (“super intelligence”) which will be capable of making inventions and innovations beyond our current understanding and therefore difficult or impossible for us to predict how human life will be in a post-singularity world.

Although technological singularity is not widely accepted and many technologists and prominent academics discuss its plausibility, it is very likely to become a reality in the future.

Will be continue in the next post: SUMMONING THE DEMON