Point: Exponential trends in technology make the future more – not less — predictable.
Story: At the World Innovation Forum in June, Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the first CCD scanner and author of The Singularity is Near, talked about the ease of predicting the future by spotting and extrapolating exponential trends. Although Gordon Moore uttered his famous Law around 1970, Kurzweil found that the exponential trends in computation and data transmission predate Moore’s Law by many decades. Moore spoke of the rate of evolution of semiconductor chips, but the trend started in earlier generations of computing and communications technologies including mechanical relays, vacuum tubes, and the first transistorized devices. Even wars and depressions failed to halt the exponential progress in performance. Trends in miniaturization and mass production meant information technologies improved at a steady pace across the decades.
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