Never is about 18 months long. – Buff Duff
Duff and I were discussing various trends yesterday while hanging out at “the office.” At that point he mentioned how in the past he had routinely thought things would not happen (such as his adoption of cellular technology or the wide adoption of wi-fi), and that he had routinely been wrong (by about 18 months). In other words, he would say, “Wireless technology will never be widespread” and around 18 months or so later it had become just that.
Ray Kurzweil, who I mention incessantly, has a helpful distinction when it comes to most trends (at least those related to information growth) that explains the common person’s inability to accurately grasp future possibilities.
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 … 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 measure by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.1
One who has adopted the intuitive linear model will likely assume—knowingly or unknowingly—that the next x number of years (in terms of the rate of progress) will look like the last x number of years. Someone using the historical exponential view rather then simply making that blanket assumption actually looks at the historical data and notices mathematical trends. From this foundation one can then make much more accurate assumption about future trends. Because, as Kurzweil points out information technology trends are exponential, so we can expect the next 5 years to be exponentially different then the last 5 years. This of course is why, as Duff rightly pointed out, never is about 18 months long. And that holds true even for those of us who are well informed but still operating from an intuitive linear model of the future.
- Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, p 11. [↩]
July 28th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Dude, Kurzweil’s book is so long I’ll never finish reading it!
July 28th, 2006 at 11:34 am
I dunno – I fully expected flying cars by now. As a kid I figured – 3in 0 years there would be flying cars.
DUDE, where’s my flying car???
July 28th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Ha Ha Ha,
Kurzweil predicts trends in information technology not the specific applications of that technology. The cars today, if you look at the onboard computer chips, are probably many many times more powerful then those made even 10 years ago (let alone 30).
A “flying car” would be a specific application of technology, which has almost nothing to do with the trends associated with technology. But hey man, maybe one day you’ll have your flying car!
And what are planes by the way, if not big flying cars?
March 10th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
There are many reasons why Global Warming can not be accepted as having been caused by human activity. Only 30 % of the Earth is covered by land and 6 billion people inhabit it. This number of people can live on a very small part of that land, New Zealand has a population density of 15 per km2 and in the Netherlands 465 per km2. The areas available to people in Australia are even greater, but the reality is, that eons ago, there was an ice age. This had nothing to do with human activity and today, while some of the winters we have experienced in various parts of the world, would have been of the coldest temperatures seen for some years, this is blamed on Global Warming and to be truthful, can this be acceptable? If there was no anthropogenic input in the Ice Age, how then can this Global Warming be taken as having been caused by mankind?
March 11th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Hi Ben,
Whoa, buddy. Don’t know what to say, except your arguments are woefully behind the conclusions that the scientific community have arrived at, and don’t account for several of the observations that have been made. You may want to get informed, and do some reading.
May 27th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Hi Vince
Having read many issues on Global Warming and being aware of a consensus of the scientific fraternity, it is just a matter of nature, we exhale CO2 and that is turned into Oxygen through photosynthesis. The reality is, that many scientists do not agree with the anthropogenic causes of global warming and when all avenues have been researched, a coclusion will be arrived at. As an aside, we heard on a local radio station, that the frost in a certain area of New Zealand was as a result of global warming. Here in New Zealand the Kyoto agreement has been signed and aceepted in its entirety and as a result we are not having coal fired power stations but all the coal is exported to China. So the conclusion has to be obvious.Hypocrisy of an unimaginable level.
July 29th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
The speed with which glacier ice on the edge of Greenland is moving, increases strongly as a result of melting.However, in the long term this process is interrupted as a result of melted water flowing through wider channels and then the speed of the movement of ice decreases again.This does not lead to a strong increase of the rising sea level. This is claimed by researchers of the University of Utrecht in the scientific magazine Science of July 4 2008.
The Greenland icecap is being monitored worldwide because speedy melting would increase the sealevel. More melting would cause a quicker movement of ice to lower lying warmer areas and to more melting still. The researchers say that this process in the long term does not operate that way.
GPS Measurements
The Utrecht scientists have since the 90’s been measuring the movement of the icecap in West Greenland. It appears that in warmer weather the ice is moving up to 4 times faster because the melted water acts as a lubricant between the ice and the substrate. As a result the ice slides with increased speed to lower and warmer parts of the icecap. It seems that after some period of time larger canals are formed which then allows the off flow of melted water.This in turn causes the water pressure on the bottom to decrease and as a result also the speed of the movement of the sliding ice. In the long term this mechanism of changing speed between the melting of the ice cap and the movement of the ice cap has little or no influence on the level of the sea.
On Monday in the Otago Daily Times a letter to the editor appeared signed by 5 scientists calling themselves a “Significant Group”, who are debunking Prof. Geoff Kearsley’s article on Global Warming and called it “Opinion”. It would appear that these people have expressed their opinion and based on their assessment of themselves, this would point to some kind of prehistoric chest beating. For obvious reasons these people are closing their minds to common observations and to use calculations based on the theories that have been devised, does not make it correct but the insistence of the group that is benefiting from this strange new “science” means they have to besmear the ones that disagree with their calculations. This is the bottomline and does not bode well for the future of co-operation.