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historians as "Adams's Law of Acceleration." He also identified the
underlying cause for his law, namely that the more people know, the eas–
ier it is for them to take the next step forward.
Fourth, in the 1960s, I used to try my hand at futurism, and the one
argument that was absolutely forbidden among futurists was the proposi–
tion that your prediction is unlikely
to
come true because some other per–
sons had been wrong previously in making some similar prediction. This
argument was considered unprofessional, because it killed all further con–
versation. Anyone who wants to be taken seriously in a professional dis–
cussion about the future and in his or her rejection of some prediction has
to come up with some rational counterargument other than that some
people have been wrong before in making a similar prediction.
Fifth, I doubt Mr. Kurzweil's prediction that, having accumulated an
enormous mass of relevant data about the brain, such as its detailed
anatomy and timed patterns of neurotransmitter profiles and neuronal
activity we will have reached, by the middle of the twenty-first century,
an understanding of the brain sufficient to make a working artificial
replica of it. My counterargument is not that others have tried to repli–
cate a brain and failed, but that the complexity of the brain transcends
that limit beyond which one cannot be sure that one has all the data nec–
essary for replicating that object. Consider the weather, for example. We
still don't have an adequate meteorological theory for making reliable
long-term forecasts, and the weather seems like a much simpler system
than our brain.
Edward Rothstein :
I wasn't actually making the argument that because
predictions of the future have been wrong in the past Ray's must be
wrong as well. I was pointing out that even though predictions about
technology are almost always wrong, we have an urge-a need- to
make them. I was trying to outline the context in which such predictions
take place. I did not make the argument that wrong predictions in the
past necessarily imply wrong predictions in the future, or even that they
do in this particular case.
The other issue raised is this idea of progress. I was arguing that
technology has become the repository for the idea of progress. Yes, I
agree with you about the religious past. Progress has its origins in a reli–
gious notion of time. And in that sense it is ancient. But the modern idea
of progress, I think, developed long before the Industrial Revolution. I
think it must have been of some importance during, for example, the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-eras of exploration in which mod–
ern science began. Before the sixteenth century, China had a more
