The Law of Accelerating Returns: Why the Future is Brighter (And Stranger) Than You Think

It was a sunny evening in 2009 when I was browsing through my Netflix queue hunting for one of my then (and still now) unquenchable addictions: science documentaries. I stumbled across an interesting looking one called The Transcendent Man. Plopping down on my sofa I decided to give it a shot. Little did I suspect that a science documentary was to be one of the most mind shattering experiences that I would ever have.

The film starts with a man named Ray Kurzweil describing a nightmare he often has. In the dream he wanders through a series of empty rooms, which he implies is a sort of metaphor for death. He laments that contemplating death gives him a feeling of utter despair, one that creates an existential anxiety that he cannot bear. But what he said next made me pause: "So I go back to thinking about how I'm not going to die."

Dubious, but never one to dismiss an interesting idea without hearing it out first, I continued watching the film, paying close attention. As it turned out Ray Kurzweil was not some random kook, nor a faux spiritualist looking to make a dime or a charlatan looking to gather a following. He was an inventor - an extremely successful one. He's responsible for the Kurzweil electronic pianos, the first ones to sound like real pianos. He's made devices to help the blind read and be more autonomous, and was a designer of one of the earliest speech recognition systems. This was an intelligent person.

But I wasn't won over so easily. His credentials were interesting, but hardly substituted for an argument as to why immortality was even remotely possible. And after all, there have been scores upon scores of intelligent scientists, inventors, and intellectuals who have thought some very stupid stuff. Thomas Edison believed sleep was an evolutionary throwback to our ancestors and not strictly necessary, for example.

But Ray Kurzweil has a history with predictions. Labeled by Bill Gates as one of the best people at predicting the future, he's predicted the year that a computer would beat a human at chess, the completion of the Human Genome Project (many people at the time thought it would take 100 years, it took less than a decade), and scores of other things (you can look at his predictions in this wikipedia article, or learn more about the man himself here).

But the clincher is this: the idea of immortality is in many ways less significant than the idea that led him there: the law of accelerating returns. His idea is simple: information technologies progress exponentially, not linearly. They always seem linear at first, starting with a very shallow, slow progression, but at some point they hit the "knee" of the curve, the point where in a short space of time they shoot upwards almost incomprehensibly. This was how Ray was able to predict things such as the completion of the Human Genome Project. He could map past trends and use that information to predict where things were headed. Thirty linear steps forward, you're at thirty. Thirty exponential steps, and you're at a billion.

At once this idea was so obvious as to almost seem ridiculous. How had no one noticed and put it into words before? Go back a little over ten years ago, to 2006. Netflix was still mailing discs. Facebook had just come out, and was still competing with Myspace (remember Myspace?). Twitter would have been out for a few months, if at all. No one knew who Elon Musk was. Self driving cars and drone deliveries were a pipe dream. That's how much changed in those ten years.

Now go twenty years before that, to the year 1986. If you really stretch your imagination, you might be able to imagine that as much (technologically) happened between that year and 2006 as happened between 2006 and 2016. The world isn't just changing, the rate at which it's changing is itself changing. It's quite likely that in the decade between now and 2026 we'll have seen more development than we've seen in the past decade. The decade after that one will be even more rapid.

If all of this seems absurd or far fetched, just imagine going back thirty years to 1986 and describing today to someone from that time period. Cell phones that give you access to all the information of humanity, self-driving cars, genome editing, commercial rockets. Imagine how absurd you would sound. You could stroll confidently into an NES cardtridge shop and tell the owner that the phone in your pocket is a device that can hold the entire contents of his store (NES stands for Nintendo Entertainment System, one of the first gaming consoles for those of you who have been under a rock... or who aren't old), and it can do it without breaking a sweat and with room to spare (and yes, I've done the math on that one).

So then, since things are increasing we could expect similarly absurd changes in, perhaps, half that time. Fifteen years. What sort of description would a person from that time (2031) have to give you for you to dismiss it as patently absurd or even insane? This isn't proof of that future coming about, of course, but is a compelling and convincing argument, if somewhat circumstantial.

How does all of this lead Ray to believe in immortality? Well, after the sequencing of the human genome, medicine became an information technology. For the first time instead of randomly testing things, we are beginning to intentionally design them. By now you've probably realized that this doesn't mean you'll live forever, necessarily. But consider this: because of these improvements, life expectancy can be expected to be extended along a smoother and increasingly faster progression as time goes on.

You see, your life expectancy is actually moving away from you. The life expectancy of someone 90 today isn't the same as the life expectancy that you'll have when you're 90. This has always been measurable. So far it's been a matter of months gained for every year, but we'll soon be at a point where for every year you live, a year of life expectancy will be added. This will be a turning point, as medical technologies allow people to survive long enough to receive even better medical treatments and technologies. That's Ray's point.

But putting all of that aside, the implications of the law of accelerating returns are staggering. According to Ray, we're reaching a point of such dramatic change that there is no way to predict what happens beyond it, a point in time that he calls "the singularity" and that he dates at or around the year 2045.

This is a time of great change for humanity, one of peril and promise. The decisions you make and the paths you take can and will echo throughout time. Then again, that's been true of every human being. After all, what is a human if not, among other things, an information process? Ever since The Transcendent Man, I have begun to really feel and pay attention to that change. I want to shout for people to get ready and pay attention. Because things are likely about to change in the most fantastic and terrifying ways.

I'll leave you with this: One day, while browsing YouTube, I came across this clip with sci-fi writer and legend Arthur C. Clarke predicting the future in 1960. It was incredibly surprising, how much he got right. But even more incredible was how utterly impossible it would have been for him to truly see the implications of his predictions. Of course, it would have been hard to predict the advent of something like social networking even in 1980. I now find myself mentally performing this exercise daily, eyes toward the future in an attempt to see though the veil. When you look ahead into that increasingly impenetrable high variable pachinko machine, can you see where the balls come out?

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