Technology acceleration acceleration

The rate of technology advancement is accelerating.  It has now reached the point where changes are happening faster than our ability to not only predict them, but faster even than our ability to recognize the technology changes that have already happened.  I’m speaking of the average person who attempts to keep informed of how the world is evolving, and specifically how human-created tools and systems are metamorphosing.  Even those of us who spend time trying to understand and keep abreast of all the changes are woefully behind.  I consider myself one of those interested, engaged students of the future.  I got a wake-up call upon visiting my daughter and her husband a couple of weeks ago.  I’m way behind.

Serra, my son-in-law and I sat in their living room playing a Wii video game.  The consoles we used were not attached to the game unit by any wires.  As we moved the consoles in three-dimensional space, our avatars on the projected wide screen not only changed position, they changed perspective.  We could throw objects, drive cars, move about a virtual world as easily as we walked down their neighborhood street.

Benjamin is a computer animation specialist working on films that employ stop-action,  motion capture and other animation techniques, so he’s “plugged in” to these technologies quite heavily.  The application of such tools is far beyond computer games, however.  Benjamin educated me.

Imagine implanted consoles, little gadgets embedded just under the skin at your temple, with sensors that track your eye movements and translate those signals to telemetered instructions that control your wheel chair, your car or your fighter airplane.  Imagine clothing that you wear which takes in electromagnetic radiation signatures from the world around you, in the form of infrared, ultraviolet, sonic and even magnetic data streams, then translates those into the visible spectrum, projected to your retina.  You can know more about your physical environment than your sight ever provided you.  You can even be blind if the signals are sent directly to your occipital cortex, and illuminate your world more completely than when you were sighted.  Imagine further that you have a constant, wireless broadband receiver built into your sunglasses, which double as a display screen, and have a computer included that allows you to use voice activated control of internet access.  Think of it as an iPhone in your Maui Jims.

These are not fanciful dreams.  These are available with current technology, although not being sold to the consuming public just yet.  One of the challenges of technology advancement is getting the most return on investment of an “old” technology before a supplier introduces a new format.  The recent developmental history of the iPhone, to pick on that product for a bit, is an example.  It was introduced in early 2007, for a price tag of about $600.  By October, it had been improved significantly and the price reduced to about $400.  Irritated a lot of early adopters.  They thought “early” meant buying in the first years of a new product’s life cycle.  Not months.  But wait.  The iPhone then comes out with dramatically improved functionality, performance and capacity less than a year later.  And the price is now about $300.  The iPhone is an example of the difficulty a product’s creator has in gaining market share and keeping customer loyalty when they introduce changes too quickly.  But Apple had little choice.  Why?  Because if they didn’t introduce the improvements in performance and price when they did, they would lose out to someone else who was hot on their tail with mimicry.

One audacious prophet of the future is Ray Kurzweil, who wrote “The Singularity is Near”.  This book is Kurzweil’s treatise on why he feels there will be a convergence of three technologies by 2045 which will result in the creation of the first non-biological intelligence equivalent to the human mind.  The three technologies he identifies are biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence (software).  By tracking the rate of technology acceleration, such as Moore’s law and other algorithms, Kurzweil determined that the computing power, the micro-scalability and the blurring of the separation of “living” versus “non-living” material will meet at a nexus of capability in that year, allowing the existence of a thinking entity that is in all material, information-processing ways equal to the mind of a person.

When I think about the Wii game I played and the truth of what is technologically possible today as compared to just 20 years ago, I have a hard time disputing Kurzweil’s assertions.  And as I now have completed my sixth decade on this planet, I find the prospect of exchanging my abused equipment for a more durable and flexible vehicle quite enticing.  Bring it on.  Just please make it affordable.  I’ll be an early adopter.

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