Ray Kurzweil: “Technology changes exponentially”
Iventor and Futurist Ray Kurzweil shows us in the graph below, how technology innovation is not changing in a linear way as most people assume, it changes exponentially. This means that we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress.
His graph shows the number of calculations per second, for $1000 dollars of computing investment. Assuming the trend that has stayed constant for the past 100 years remains so, we can expect that a $1,000 computer will be able to conduct more calculations per second than a human brain sometime within the next 15 years. In fact Ray Kurweil predicts that by 2045 the power of computers will exceed the collective power of all human brains combined.
There has been so much change in computers and technology in just the last 60 years. Remember when Thomas Watson (Chairman of IBM, 1943) said “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Today most people have a smartphone in their pocket, a computer at home, and one at work and have multiple channels open to them on how to communicate with others.
[briotube]http://www.youtube.com/v/1uIzS1uCOcE?[/briotube]
The future is exciting and I can’t wait to implement strategies for communication that can leverage on these advances.
To read more of Kurzweil’s work, check out The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence on Amazon or Book Depository
Yours in Technology,
Belinda
