The Exponential Rise of Technology

A fas­ci­nat­ing video from TedTalks by Ray Kurzweil on the expo­nen­tial growth of Tech­nol­ogy. Kurzweil explains how easy it is to pre­dict the evo­lu­tion of tech­nol­ogy (con­trary to the stock mar­kets), and how the speed of new dis­cov­er­ies grows expo­nen­tially. Sci­ence fic­tion future is just a cor­ner away! Ever wished you could sit at the bot­tom of your pool for 4 hours? It may be pos­si­ble as soon as 2020!

‘Inven­tor and futur­ist Ray Kurzweil illus­trates the increas­ingly expo­nen­tial evo­lu­tion of tech­nol­ogy, pre­dict­ing a sharp rise in com­put­ing capa­bil­ity, robot­ics and life expectancy within the next 15 years. He out­lines the shock­ing ways we’ll use tech­nol­ogy to aug­ment our own capa­bil­i­ties, for­ever blur­ring the lines between human and machine. A pro­lific inven­tor, Kurzweil devel­oped the first Opti­cal Char­ac­ter Recog­ni­tion (OCR) sys­tem, the first text-to-speech reader for the blind, one of the first speech-recognition sys­tems, and numer­ous elec­tronic instru­ments. He’s writ­ten sev­eral books explor­ing the social impact of tech­nol­ogy, includ­ing The Age of Spir­i­tual Machines and The Sin­gu­lar­ity is Near: When Humans Tran­scend Biology’.

(Recorded Feb­ru­ary 2005 in Mon­terey, CA. Dura­tion: 23:41)

Share on Facebook