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.