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Marvin talked about some of the early stages of evolution. It starts out very slow, but then something with some power to sustain itself and to overcome other forces is created and has the power to self-replicate and preserve that structure. Evolution works by indirection. It creates a capability and then uses that capability to create the next. It took billions of years until this chaotic swirl of mass and energy created the information-processing, structural backbone of DNA, and then used that DNA to create the next stage. With DNA, evolution had an information-processing machine to record its experiments and conduct experiments in a more orderly way. So the next stage, such as the Cambrian explosion, went a lot faster, taking only a few tens of millions of years. The Cambrian explosion then established body plans that became a mature technology, meaning that we didn't need to evolve body plans any more. These designs worked well enough, so evolution could then concentrate on higher cortical function, establishing another level of mechanism in the organisms that could do information processing. At this point, animals developed brains and nervous systems that could process information, and then that evolved and continued to accelerate. Homo sapiens evolved in only hundreds of thousands of years, and then the cutting edge of evolution again worked by indirection to use this product of evolution, the first technology-creating species to survive, to create the next stage: technology, a continuation of biological evolution by other means. The first stages of technologies, like stone tools, fire, and the wheel took tens of thousands of years, but then we had more powerful tools to create the next stage. A thousand years ago, a paradigm shift like the printing press took only a century or so to be adopted, and this evolution has accelerated ever since. Fifty years ago, the first computers were designed with pencil on paper, with screwdrivers and wire. Today we have computers to design computers. Computer designers will design some high-level parameters, and twelve levels of intermediate design are computed automatically. The process of designing a computer now goes much more quickly. Evolutionary processes accelerate, and the returns from an evolutionary process grow in power. I've called this theory "The Law of Accelerating Returns." The returns, including economic returns, accelerate. Stemming from my interest in being an inventor, I've been developing mathematical models of this because I quickly realized that an invention has to make sense when the technology is finished, not when it was started, since the world is generally a different place three or four years later. One exponential pattern that people are familiar with is Moore's Law, which is really just one specific paradigm of shrinking transistors on integrated circuits. It's remarkable how long it's lasted, but it wasn't the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide exponential growth to computing. Earlier, we had electro-mechanical calculators, using relays and vacuum tubes. Engineers were shrinking the vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller, until finally that paradigm ran out of steam because they couldn't keep the vacuum any more. Transistors were already in use in radios and other small, niche applications, but when the mainstream technology of computing finally ran out of steam, it switched to this other technology that was already waiting in the wings to provide ongoing exponential growth. It was a paradigm shift. Later, there was a shift to integrated circuits, and at some point, integrated circuits will run out of steam. Ten or 15 years from now we'll go to the third dimension. Of course, research on three dimensional computing is well under way, because as the end of one paradigm becomes clear, this perception increases the pressure for the research to create the next. We've seen tremendous acceleration of molecular computing in the last several years. When my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out about four years ago, the idea that three-dimensional molecular computing could be feasible was quite controversial, and a lot of computer scientists didn't believe it was. Today, there is a universal belief that it's feasible, and that it will arrive in plenty of time before Moore's Law runs out. We live in a three-dimensional world, so we might as well use the third dimension. That will be the sixth paradigm. Moore's Law is one paradigm among many that have provided exponential growth in computation, but computation is not the only technology that has grown exponentially. We see something similar in any technology, particularly in ones that have any relationship to information. The genome project, for example, was not a mainstream project when it was announced. People thought it was ludicrous that you could scan the genome in 15 years, because at the rate at which you could scan it when the project began, it could take thousands of years. But the scanning has doubled in speed every year, and actually most of the work was done in the last year of the project. |