The Dark Side of the Law of Accelerating Returns

If you only knew the power of the Darkside...

Credit: Lucasfilm

First things first

You may or may not have heard of Ray Kurzweil and his theory of the Law of Accelerating Returns, however if you are a student of history, science, economics, social behavior, or paying any attention at all to the rate at which a new marvel hits the market, it's probable you acknowledge technology exponentially progress in the 20th century and beyond.

For those looking for a fast and dirty synapses on Ray Kurzweil avoiding the embedded links, he is a futurist, inventor, and computer scientist who has authored a number of essays, books, blogs, etc. with an impressive list of awards, honors, and praise. Kurzweil was hired by Google in 2012 as the Director of Engineering leading a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

Impressive...

The Age of Intelligent Machines was a publication by Kurzweil in 1990. He predicts computers will beat the best human chess player by the year 2000. In 1997, Gary Kasparov, the World Champion in chess, is defeated by IBM's computer, Deep Blue.

Not a big deal? Alright...

Kurzweil also predicts a boom in growth of worldwide internet use, not to mention content growth, via the preferred method of wirelessly connected systems in the same book. Or how about this: Publishing another book on the subject, The Age of Spiritual Machines going into greater detail about his vision of the future and segments a section of the book into four chapters (2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099 respectively) with a decade of projected outcomes in the first three, and on to the next millennia on the final chapter. A nice little page turner to check his accuracy for events that have happened thus far.

But I digress...

Countdown to Singularity courtesy of Ray Kurzweil and Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. and Wikimedia

I presented this for you to contrast the Law of Accelerating Returns, which is an exponential curve of technology graphed by Ray Kurzweil (along with the essay linked above), with my ever dark visions of the dystopian future following the same curve. To be fair, I'm not the first person (or the last for that matter) to identify this pattern, though I would say I'm in good company with the likes of folks such as Bill Joy.

The meat of the matter

The chart shown above with special thanks to Ray Kurzweil, Kurzweil Technologies Inc., and Wikimedia Creative Commons, you can see a projected line across a graph from the dawn of life to the Personal Computer. This illustrates key events rapidly evolving exponentially in human history as time progresses per the aforementioned book The Age of Spiritual Machines. This should allow for a guide of speed of technological advances.

There is no darkness without light

For every point listed on the graph, there is a war in some form or fashion. War for survival, power, territory, resources, intellectual properties, and outright destruction. It is without question you were already aware of this, however it's the direct correlation to impact of the war that should be considered. Survival of the fittest on a scale versus global nuclear war. This follows the very pattern Kurzweil has shared, the same points, and in the event we develop the ability to fly to the stars, eliminate disease, extend life, and merge with machines to a new 'singularity', new wars will be fought on exponentially higher scales with greater causalities mounting beyond measure. This could be our point of eradication in the Fermi Paradox (credit @liberosist for the Fermi link).

The singularity.

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