........This one is hot...
................The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
~William JamesGeorge Weimer, Contributing EditorTechnological change is something we are used to in America.We expect manufacturing to offer a whole new computer chip technology every year and a half. We expect new and different cars to be produced every three years. We expect bigger and clearer televisions and smaller and cheaper hand-held communications devices every year or so. We expect new and more effective drugs, more precise implants like pacemakers and hearing aids. We expect new products all the time.We expect all this because its been the way things have been for generations ever since the Industrial Revolution began way back in 1850 or so.But what if somebody told you that that those new and improved cycles were going to shrink to half the time, a third of the time, or a tenth of the above rates? What if the pace of technological change is actually accelerating and keeps on accelerating - exponentially? What if somebody told you that at the rate of change in the year 2000, we would have invented everything in the previous century in 20 years? Well that is what one of our most acclaimed futurists and inventors, Ray Kurzweil, is saying in his new and challenging book, The Singularity is Near from Viking of the Penguin Group.Accelerating Rate Of Change
Information technology, for example, is doubling in power every year at todays rate of change. That means computers 1,000 times as powerful as those we use today for the same cost in just 10 years. Kurzweil further predicts that by the year 2014 we will have made as much progress as the entire 20th Century. To express it in another way, we wont experience 100 years of technological advance in the 21st Century; we will witness in the order of 20,000 years of progress when measured by the rate of progress in 2000, or about 1,000 times that achieved in the 20th Century.Kurzweil notes also that while the above example is about the fastest changing of technologies, ultimately everything of value will become an information technologyour biologymanufacturing and many other fields. An example? Nano-technology-based manufacturing will enable us to apply computerized techniques to automatically assemble complex products at the molecular level. For one thing, this means we will be able to make very cheap nano-technology-based solar panels and capture the energy of 0.03% of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, which is all we need to meet our projected energy needs in 2030.In 15 years, he adds, we will be making computers that equal the cps (computations per second) of the human brain. A few years later, in the 2020s, nano-technology will enable us to create almost any physical product we want from inexpensive materials, using advanced information technology.Accelerating Exponentially
What Kurzweil is saying is that technological change is accelerating exponentially, not linearly. In other words, fantastic developments in medicine and in manufacturing, in communications and in research and development are right around the corner and even more fantastic events right around the next corner. Yes, were used to change, but can we accommodate super-fast, accelerating change?It might behoove all of us in manufacturing and the shop world to stop worrying so much about the business cycle and all those new competitors from Asia. Maybe we need to start wondering again about how exciting the fairly near-term future might be. Many of us will be around and still working in industry over the next 10, 20 or 30 years. Kurzweil is suggesting that those who can learn to live with and embrace and contribute to ever-accelerating technological change in the world will be the ones called successes in coming years.What do you think? Will you be one of those?
