The Acceleration of Global Paradigm Shifts or: The One Poster Everyone Should Have

In my first post I made reference to a graph that clearly shows the exponential growth of not only technological progress but information technology and evolution in general. Allow me to explain why this is the most important image in the world right now a few of the implications of truly exponential growth.

This graph shows the time between significant points of change in human history or paradigm shifts according to not just one source but fifteen different sources. These sources include notable historians, the American Museum of Natural History, Encyclopedia Britannica, Carl Sagan and more. Each of them has compiled a list of significant events of great change such as the big bang, the formation of Earth, arrival of single celled organisms, first eukaryotes, first mammals, first humans, widespread use of stone tools, invention of fire, rise of agriculture and finally the widespread use of science and the proliferation of the internet. The graph is plotted on two logarithmic axes showing the time to the next event versus the time before present.

The conclusions of this trend are inescapable. If I were to turn this graph into a poster I would put a trend-line on the part of the graph that clearly shows a trend and have that line coming out the back of a rocket which would be placed in the lower right corner with a little one of those signs that say, "You Are Here." If this graph were not logarithmic it would not be possible to fit everything on one page because the events at the beginning of time took billions of years to take place. However, billions turn to millions, turn to thousands, turn to hundreds. In recent years we have seen massive global changes take place in a matter of several dozen months. For instance, a modern American child can barely fathom a world without texting, an invention that has only been around since 2006. (In fact the program I am using to write this says that texting is not even a word, yet it seems impossible to picture a world without instantaneous global connection from a device in my pocket that I can barely function without).

Technological progress is accelerating and if we extrapolate this graph it leads to some truly profound conclusions. We are going to see the Time to Next Event approach zero as the Time Before Present approaches zero as well. Try if you can to picture a world where world changing paradigm shifts on the scale of the invention of fire start occurring every day, then ten times a day, then one hundred times a day, etc. However the fact of the matter is we won't even get a chance to see ten shifts, or one hundred shifts in a day, the shifts will just take a tenth of a day, then a hundredth of a day to occur. That means after the event that only takes 2 hours and 24 minutes to occur the next one should only take about 14 and a half minutes, the next less than two minutes and so on. It will be a day to remember, to put it lightly.

The nature of progress can be seen as occurring in steps like this only when evaluated objectively several years after the fact. Real progress consists of a million little steps that transition smoothly from one stage to the next. These paradigm shifts will probably not occur in all one field either but they will build off one another and complement each other. For instance, completing the Human Genome project will likely be an event that goes on this graph some day and that would not have been possible without the rising power of the internet and the ability to share massive amounts of data across the planet in less than a second. We can see this trend continued very vividly in "Moore's Law" the observation that computational price-performance doubles every year and grows by a factor of billions over a few decades. In the next twenty years we will see another billion-fold increase in price-performance and computers that once cost millions and took up the size of a building will go from something that now costs a few hundred dollars and fits in your pocket to something that costs pennies and fits in your bloodstream or the space between your neurons.

Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse: Book Review

In the relatively quick read Conversations On the Edge of the Apocalypse: Contemplating the Future with Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, and Others, an author by the name David Jay Brown interviews twenty-one brilliant thinkers and asks them questions about the future of humanity, the ways in which psychedelics have shaped their views on the world and how they see consciousness evolving over time. It is in some ways a follow-up to his previous book Mavericks of the Mind which features interviews with Terrence McKenna, Timothy Leary, John C. Lilly and more.

Two of the best passages are the back-to-back interviews with Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec. Kurzweil gives a fairly good summary of his observations of reality and describes how neural implants are right around the corner that would give one the ability to temporarily, "shut down the signals coming from our real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were in [a] virtual environment, [and] these can be as realistic, detailed and compelling as real reality." He describes the acceleration of evolution which is something worthy of its own post but can be almost entirely explained with this one graph.

Kurzweil and Moravec both discuss what they think consciousness is and acknowledge that even though there will be a philosophical question to whether or not you can believe the computers of 2030 when they claim that they are conscious, you will have to interact with them like they are so the question of whether you believe them or not will not really matter.

Throughout the next several years, Ray says, "We're going to reverse-engineer our own intelligence and understand in detail how it works. We're going to re-create it then in our technology. We will, in the process of doing that, greatly amplify it and merge with it. We will basically re-create who we are-both our bodies and our brains-through nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and vastly expand human intelligence."

Although Ray is optimistic, he does acknowledge that there is a lot of dangerous possible outcomes of exponentially growing technology but the fact humans have had the ability to nuke ourselves off the planet for more than fifty years and haven't yet is a good sign that we're not as foolish as we seem.

On the question of what he thinks happens to consciousness after death, he asks if he is even the same consciousness that Ray Kurzweil was a year ago. Sure he looks the same but nearly every cell in the human body is replaced every several months and even though brain cells live much longer they have their molecules swapped in and out meaning everyone is a completely different person every few months. The only thing that really stays the same is the pattern and a pattern is information. And information cannot be destroyed. In a few years it will be possible to upload that pattern to the internet which will extend our lives to lengths that we cannot yet imagine.

Dr. Hans Moravec is a professor at Carnegie Mellon where he directs the world's largest robotics research program. In his section he discusses robot consciousness and the nature of subjective experience. He has written two fantastic books called Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. I have currently only read Robot but would recommend it to anyone who's willing to finish it. It may start slow but it is necessary to build a foundation in the history of robotics in order to truly understand the incredible heights that technological progress will reach within just a few decades.

Some of the other interviews that stood out to me were Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist who has studied psychic (psi) phenomena and collected an astonishing amount of scientific evidence in support of it, Dean Radin, a psychologist and engineer who has studied psi phenomena at Princeton.

Another one that stood out was with Robert Anton Wilson, a philosopher and author of over thirty-five books dealing with themes such as quantum mechanics, the future evolution of the human species, weird unexplained phenomena,synchronicity, altered states of consciousness and the nature of belief systems. He earned his doctorate of psychology from Paideia University and some of his popular nonfiction includes Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology.

The late comedian George Carlin gives a fantastic interview with some witty and insightful points about society as well as the interviews with spiritual teacher Ram Dass, founder of the most highly praised medical marijuana collective in California, Valerie Corral, magician Jeff McBride and the visionary artist Alex Grey.

Overall this is a fascinating collection of interviews with amazing people that will hopefully be seen as a guidebook for those trying to ask the right questions and do genuinely interesting research into some of the greatest mysteries of our world in the twenty-first century. All of the uncut interviews can be found on David Jay Brown's website Mavericks of the Mind.