We live in exponential times.
Probably a decade ago, I became entranced with the work of Ray Kurzweil. Most people have never heard of him but he has been on the forefront of technology since, as a teenager in 1965, he went on the TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” and performed a composition on the piano. The “secret” was that the piece was composed by a computer program that Kurzweil had written that analyzed patterns in the work of classical composers and then “wrote” new pieces based on those patterns. Back in the ’80s, all of us band geeks lusted after one of his keyboards because it could actually sound like an acoustic piano to the point that most people could not tell a difference between a Kurzweil and a Steinway.
Kurzweil is a big proponent of something he has called the “Singularity.” Put as simply as possible, it is a theoretical point at which the processing power of a single computer is greater than the computing power of a billion human beings.
He has predicted a computer with the power of a human brain by 2029 and the billion-fold singularity by 2045. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a piece exploring the idea and the possibility that the recent emergence of generally available artificial intelligence tools such as Chat-GPT might mean we are getting there even faster than predicted.
The thing about all of this that hooked me was the idea of the rate of change accelerating. I distinctly remember being in junior high school in the mid-’70s and having a classmate tell me, as we were doing a required one-mile jog around the PE area about how, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the amount of knowledge humans would have about the universe would double almost constantly.
The increase in knowledge that had once taken 100 years would become 50 and then 25 and then 10 and get to the point where it doubled almost daily. The idea always stuck with me. (Yes, I’m weird.)
It may be that the same personal weirdness that made the whole idea of acceleration stick with me has also made me very aware of — while totally unable to understand — the way most people are drawn so strongly to some kind of static ideal of “perfection.”
The drive for something that doesn’t change is a common thread in everything from most religious traditions to pop culture.
“Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens” was sung by the Talking Heads on their great album “Fear of Music” (although I always liked the “Simply Red” cover better …). The idea of finding one perfect moment and freezing time there was the aim of the bad guys in “12 Monkeys.” The unchanging, eternal ideal drove thinkers from Plato to Milton.
There are too many examples of this kind of thinking to list.
And I don’t get it. Never have. (Remember, I have already admitted to being weird.)
I have many friends and family members who are very religious which, for most of them, seems to mean working toward some kind of eternal, unchanging, perfect state. Meanwhile, the only religious tradition I have ever been drawn to is the single Western faith that teaches progression and change are the real natural order.
I may be the prototypical Old Dude with a penchant for music from another era but, I kind of dig change.
I have, for as long as I can remember, been an “early adopter.” I created my first website for a newspaper in about 1994, about the same time I started doing all of my banking online. I’m constantly trying to learn new things and new ways of doing old things.
I can honestly think of nothing more boring than a world where, to cop the phrase from Talking Heads’ Mr.’s Byrne and Harrison, “nothing ever happens.”
I got to thinking about this big idea again when I read the piece in a recent issue of the Boulder City Review by Rod Woodbury about businesses in town and how they had changed names and locations over the years. Even as a guy who has only been around town for a few months, I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t have a clue about most of the businesses discussed, but I loved the way it balanced a kind of nostalgia for the past with a curiosity about what comes next.
At least that is what I took away from it. (Plus, I now know why I always thought there was a Sonic out here, which has evidently not been the case in a fair number of years…).
This town is an odd place. And odd in a kinda cool way. It was founded on the construction of a technological marvel that was totally focused on the future and has, at the same time, found a way to hang on to much of the character of the past while existing a veritable stone’s throw away from a city that quite literally tears itself down, reimagines and rebuilds on a regular basis. It’s a pretty neat trick.
How long that trick can be pulled off is a separate subject.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The only constant is change. Three cliches that seem contradictory but that are all true.
Exponential times. Change keeps coming faster and faster and faster. We are at the point where educators have a hard time planning what to teach because the jobs that college students expect to compete for upon graduation may not even exist by the time they get that degree.
Scary? Maybe. I prefer to think of it as exciting. The times they are a-changin’ and they are doing so at an ever-increasing speed. I just wonder how much I’m gonna get to see.
Contact reporter Bill Evans at wevans@bouldercityreview.com or at 702-586-9401.