THE ASCENDANCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
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three or four years later. So I became an ardent student of technology
trends and began to develop models, ultimately some mathematical
models, on how technology in different areas evolved. That interest
took on a life of its own, so I began to develop scenarios built from these
models that actually allowed me to invent with the resources of the
future, because if we have some idea of what communications, compu–
tations, life sciences, the size of technology, and the cost-effectiveness of
technology will be twenty or thirty years from now, we can build sce–
narios which essentially invent with the technologies of the future.
Perhaps the most startling or important trend that I've become acutely
aware of is that the pace of progress, what I call the paradigm shift rate,
is itself accelerating. Now, if I just say that, people are very quick to
agree, but very few people really internalize the profound implications of
it, namely that the last thirty years are not a good guide to the next thirty
years. We're doubling the paradigm shift rate approximately every
decade. So the last century, which saw quite a bit of profound change,
was equivalent to about twenty years of progress at today's rate of
progress, because we've been speeding up to this point. And we'll make
twenty years of progress at today's rate of progress in the next fourteen
years. The twenty-first century, because of the explosive power of expo–
nential growth, will be equivalent to twenty thousand years of progress
at today's rate of progress, which is far greater than all of recorded his–
tory. So exponential trends start out slowly. It looks like nothing's hap–
pening at all, then suddenly there's a veritable explosion as you reach
what I call the knee of the curve. We're now achieving that knee of the
curve in a lot of different areas, and we'll hear a lot more from our other
panelists about the era we're now embarking upon in terms of the inter–
section of biology and information sciences. We are beginning to under–
stand the information processes underlying life and disease; we're going
to be able to manipulate those with profound effects. There are obvi–
ously a lot of ethica l concerns that come up. I think we'll get into that in
the discussion. But I want to quickly share with you some of the trends
which I've been exploring.
Electricity and the telephone took decades to be adopted by a quarter
of the U.S . population; the World Wide Web was adopted in just a few
years' time. It's part of that overall acceleration. The whole phenomenon
of technological evolution is a continuation of the biological evolution
that led to the technology-creating species in the first place. Evolution
works by indirection. It creates some new products, and these products
then create the next stage; so evolution works indirectly through these
products. Primitive DNA was created, then the DNA was able to record
