210
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ray Kurzweil:
Yes. I think the most important point I'm trying to make,
as you indicate, is describing a methodology of thinking about the
future, and moving towards understanding some very powerful trends
and forces that are accelerating technology forward, towards under–
standing the nature of the power of, let's say, computational capabilities
in the future. It's very difficult to paint scenarios. Very often magazine
editors ask me, "Well, just write a little scenario about what joe's doing
in the morning in the year
2035."
I hate trying to write something like
that because then you get into details that are invariably going to be
wrong. There are going to be a lot of inventions and innovations. By
definition we can't anticipate these now because we haven't come up
with all the ideas of the twenty-first century. But we can say that there
are going to be more ideas in the twenty-first century than there were in
the twentieth. I'm talking about it all in terms of basic principles.
Jacob Weisberg:
In your book you quoted, I think from a
1949
issue of
Fortune
magazine: "By next year a computer will weigh as little as one
and a half tons."
Ray Kurzweil :
Well, very few people anticipated the nature of exponen–
tial growth. Turing had an inkling of it.
Edward Rothstein :
One other question: Ray, could you just review why
you think this abstract principle of exponential growth will not itself
reach some limit?
Ray Kurzweil:
Well, people are quick to cnticIze exponential trends
because they run out of resources. The classical example is rabbits in
Australia. A new species happens upon a new habitat and its numbers
spread exponentially but then hit the limits of its environment so it has
to be asked: what are the resources that any exponential trend is using?
The resources of this exponential trend are twofold. First is the order of
the evolutionary process itself. It's not necessarily trivial to define what
the order is-in, let's say, biological evolution-but if you look at it you
see increasingly intricate entities, first single-celled organisms and then
more complex ones. Secondly, human beings represent an enormous
amount of order that has emerged in the chaos of the world. And one
level of order provides the foundation and the tools to create the next
generation of that evolutionary process.
The other resource needed is chaos in the environment in which the
evolutionary process takes place, because that provides the options for
