Evolutionary and technological processes accelerate, with each advance shortening the time to the next.
Kurzweil proposed the law in The Age of Spiritual Machines in 1999 and elaborated it in a 2001 essay. The contested part is the extrapolation rather than the historical pattern.
In practice
- A forecaster who plots thirty years of processor counts and extends the line to 2060 has assumed the thing in question.
- Which technologies are plotted largely determines the curve, and the same method applied to transport speed or crop yields produces a decelerating one.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is compounding: each generation of tools is used to build the next, so capability grows exponentially rather than linearly.
- In its favour
- Some measured series do fit it over decades, including computing cost per operation, and the observation that tools build tools is uncontroversial.
- Against it
- Which series are plotted largely determines the curve, many technologies have stalled for decades, and the extrapolation to future dates rests on selecting the ones that have not.
- Standing
- Critics note that the choice of which technologies to plot largely determines the curve.
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- How technologies spread, scale, decay and frighten us