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fellowship . Before all of that, he went to Yale, got his doctorate from the
Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and did
graduate work in mathematics at Brandeis. I'm thoroughly intimidated
by these biographies and with that, we turn it over to Ray Kurzweil.
Ray
Kurzweil :
Thanks for inviting me; it's great to be here. I'd like to
share with you some of my reflections on where we're going in the next
century. I have been reading your book, Ed.
It
has some fascinating rela–
tionships between music and mathematics, which my father liked to talk
about (he was a musician), and as an amateur musician myself, I have
long been fascinated by the link between the order implied by mathe–
matics and the order we find in music. Your book is quite eloquent in
describing this in some detail.
I'd like to talk about the next century and the impact it will have on
our civilization, and the impact technology will have, which will not
stay in the technological realm, but will infuse the other spheres of our
lives. In order to appreciate the next century, we need to have some
understanding of where we've been, what trends we have seen, and what
trends will continue. There has long been a debate about exponential
growth versus what's called the "5" curve, where a particular paradigm
will seem
to
take off exponentially and then level off. One trend that has
been noted in the computer field is something called Moore's Law; how
many of you have heard of Moore's Law? [Many people raised their
hands.] That's quite a change from, I'd say, even three or four years ago.
Even when I was talking to a technical audience, not that many people
had heard of it, and now it's widely known. What Moore's Law says,
literally, is that the size of a transistor, which is microscopic in size,
shrinks by
50
percent every two years. We can pack twice as many tran–
sistors on a chip, and because they're smaller, the electrons don't have
to go as far, so they run twice as fast. That actually quadruples the
power of computation every twenty-four months. And so, one question
is: how long can this go on and what impact does this have? I will come
back to that but first I would like to make a few general observations
about the nature of futurism and trying to anticipate the future.
A lot of people who comment on the future, including well-known
futurists, fail to take into account one of three different phenomena that
I think are important to account for. They are afraid
to
look at more
than one or two iterations of progress in a particular field. When you
ask people to comment on the next twenty-five years, they'll say, "Well,
screens will be a little higher resolution, and computers will be a little
smaller." They see one or two iterations of progress, as if in the future
