2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal Technology: Exponential Growth and Decay By: Lev Grossman February 10, 2011 TIME Magazine

1) The accelerating pace of change… Agricultural Revolution… –8000 years later Industrial Revolution… –120 years later Light bulb… –90 years later Moon landing… –22 years later World Wide Web… –9 years later Human genome sequenced

2) …and exponential growth in computing power… Computer technology, shown here climbing dramatically by powers of 10, is now progressing more each hour than it did in its entire first 90 years.

Analytical Engine – Charles Babbage 1837; designed to solve computational and logical problems

Colossus – 1943; electronic computer, with 1500 vacuum tubes, helped the British crack German codes during WW II

ENIAC – 1946; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer; first general- purpose electronic computer; called “Giant Brain”

UNIVAC I – 1951; UNIVersal Automatic Computer I; first commercially marketed computer, used to tabulate the U.S. Census, occupied 943 cubic feet

Apple II – 1977; at a price of $1,298, the compact machine was one of the first massively popular personal computers

IBM PC – 1981; IBM Personal Computer

Power Mac G4 – 1999; the first personal computer to deliver more than 1 billion floating-point operations per second

Mac Pro – 2006

Macbook Air 2008 Ipad 2010 Remember this from 1837?

Exponential Growth Rising clock speed of microprocessors Rising number of Internet hosts Rising number of nanotechnology

Exponential Decay (fall) Falling cost of manufacturing transistors Plummeting price of dynamic RAM Falling cost of sequencing DNA Falling cost of wireless data service

From the article… “He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress… Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.”

From the article… “Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity.”

From the article… “Here’s what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence… In 2045,…the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.”

Raymond Kurzweil 4Neivqp2K4 I’ve Got a Secret February 15, 1965

46 years later… Watson on Jeopardy Computer beats humans February 15, versus-watson-computer http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/video/jeopardy-pits-man- versus-watson-computer watson-wins-million-man-machine/story?id= http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/jeopardy-ibm-computer- watson-wins-million-man-machine/story?id= bm.jeopardy.cnn?iref=videosearchhttp:// bm.jeopardy.cnn?iref=videosearch jeopardy.ibm.cnn?iref=videosearchhttp:// jeopardy.ibm.cnn?iref=videosearch

What’s the difference between exponential and linear?

Let’s graph these! 1.Cost of computers 2.Speed of computers (calculations per second) 3.Page load speed 4.Number of Internet hosts

Cost of computers – Exponential decay

Calculations per second – Exponential growth

Page load speed – Exponential decay

Number of Internet hosts – Exponential growth