The Future Is Faster Than You Think

The rate of technological progress is about to shift into warp speed.

Mind-boggling gadgets and concepts, like flying cars, lab-grown steaks, quantum computers and robot surgeons, are moving from the pages of science fiction into reality. Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, predicts that in the next century, technology will advance as much as it has in the previous 20,000 years – from the dawn of agriculture to the introduction of the internet.

In the past, technology evolved in a slow, linear fashion, and human society didn’t change drastically over the course of a few generations. But the digital technology that arose in the 20th century was different. Its evolution was exponential: It regularly doubled its capacity while lowering its costs. Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, identified this phenomenon in 1965 when he noticed that the number of transistors on integrated circuits was doubling every 18 months. He predicted that this pattern would continue for up to 10 years. Dubbed Moore’s law, the prediction has held true for more than 40 years. The result: Computers double their power every year and a half, while their costs ...