[bksvol-discuss] Re: Fw: How to Predict the Future
- From: "Pratik Patel" <pratikp1@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:54:37 -0500
Just commenting on the title, ... One way to predict the future is by
actually being there (i.e., by not being dead).
Prat
-----Original Message-----
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Grandma Cindy
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2007 7:07 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Fw: How to Predict the Future
It is an interesting article. Maybe nanotechnology
will enable the technology like the K1000 to be more
affordable. smile
Cindy
--- "Shelley L. Rhodes" <juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Fascinating article on Ray Kurzweil.
>
> Shelley L. Rhodes B.S. Ed, CTVI
> and Judson, guiding golden
> juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Guide Dogs For the Blind Inc.
> Graduate Alumni Association Board
> www.guidedogs.com
>
> Dog ownership is like a rainbow.
> Puppies are the joy at one end.
> Old dogs are the treasure at the other.
> Carolyn Alexander
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "News related to blindness"
> <blindnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 10:55 PM
> Subject: How to Predict the Future
>
>
> INC.com, New York USA
> Wednesday, February 21, 2007
>
> How to Predict the Future
>
> By Ray Kurzweil
>
> A good sense of timing is key to success.
> Fortunately, it's easier to see
> the future--and to plan for it--than you may think.
>
> From: Inc. Magazine, February 2007
>
> In 2002, I had a conversation with Marc Maurer,
> president of the National
> Federation of the Blind. I had first worked with the
> NFB in 1976, helping
> build the first print-to-speech reading machine.
> Over the years, the various
> models of that device got smaller, but it remained a
> scanner-based system
> that required blind users to bring reading material
> to their desks. There is
> a lot of reading material that you can't bring to
> your desk, of course, like
> a sign on a wall or the bank ATM display. You could
> bring a menu back to
> your desk, but you'd probably prefer to read it in
> the restaurant.
>
> For years, I had been predicting that someday, blind
> men and women would be
> able to use a pocket-size reader to read anything
> they wanted as they went
> through the day, from the labels in their clothing
> to the baking
> instructions on the back of a muffin-mix box. Now
> Maurer wanted to know when
> I thought that day would come, and I predicted that
> the actual hardware for
> sufficiently powerful digital cameras and pocket
> computers would be ready in
> four years, by the second quarter of 2006.
> Developing the software, I added,
> would also take four years, so the Kurzweil Cos. and
> the NFB had better get
> started on the project right away.
>
> Right on schedule, the digital cameras and pocket
> computers with the specs
> that we needed became available last spring. Our
> software development
> project was completed on time, and so we introduced
> a new, portable reading
> machine for the blind this past July. Today, there
> are on the order of a
> thousand blind people reading all the print they
> encounter as they go
> through the day. Other companies have taken notice
> and are starting to
> develop competing products. As a result of our
> technology forecasting,
> however, we have a nice jump on the market.
>
> To what do I owe this exquisite sense of timing? The
> simple truth is that
> timing is key to success as an inventor, so I've
> spent the past 30 years
> studying the rate by which information technology
> advances. Being an
> engineer, I gathered data on technology trends in
> different fields and built
> mathematical models. What I discovered is that
> understanding the timing of
> technological change is not as mysterious as most
> people think it is. In
> fact, I found that the models were surprisingly
> predictive, and today I have
> a group of 10 people at the Kurzweil Cos. helping me
> gather data and build
> these models.
>
> The common wisdom that you can't predict the future
> is not all wrong. We
> can't predict specific things, such as whether
> Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock
> will be higher or lower three years from now. But
> within information
> technology there are meaningful patterns. The
> evolution of information
> technology follows such exquisitely smooth
> exponential trajectories, in
> fact, that I can say with confidence that all
> information technology doubles
> its price performance and capacity pretty much every
> year. If you ask me the
> cost of a MIPS (million instructions per second) of
> computing in 2010, the
> cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA in 2012, or
> the spatial resolution of
> brain scanning in 2014, I can give you detailed
> figures and they are likely
> to be accurate. This has proved true for computation
> for more than 100
> years, going back to the first data processing
> equipment used to automate
> the 1890 census.
>
> One way to think about the patterns in information
> technology is to look at
> science, where we see other examples of remarkably
> predictable effects
> resulting from the interaction of inherently
> unpredictable phenomena. The
> laws of thermodynamics provide an example. The path
> of each molecule in a
> gas is modeled as a random walk. Yet the properties
> of the overall gas, made
> up of many chaotically interacting particles, is
> predictable to a high
> degree of precision. Technology evolution is,
> similarly, a chaotic system
> with remarkably predictable properties.
>
> There's another wrinkle to keep in mind. When I say
> that information
> technology doubles in price performance and power
> each year, remember that
> the rate itself is expanding at an accelerated rate.
> It took three years to
> double the price performance of computing equipment
> in 1900, two years in
> 1950, and we're now doubling it every year. At
> today's exponential rate,
> doubling every year means multiplying by a thousand
> in 10 years and a
> billion in 30 years. But with the rate of
> acceleration continuing to grow,
> we will actually hit the billion mark in only 25
> years. Consider the
> pervasive influence of information technology in
> today's world and multiply
> that by a billion in a quarter century--while we
> shrink the size of both
> electronic and mechanical technology by a factor of
> 100,000 in the same time
> frame--and you'll get some idea of how revolutionary
> information technology
> will be in the future.
>
> All sorts of industries will be affected, beyond
> what we think of
> conventionally as computing. Take energy for
> example. Today, it seems like
> an area of grave concern, with implications from
> global warming to pollution
> to geopolitical instability. The fact that demand
> for energy is projected to
> triple within 20 years heightens our worries. Based
> largely on the
> 19th-century technology of fossil fuels, energy is
> not what we would
> consider an information technology. Not yet anyway.
> But when we have fully
> programmable nanotechnology, through which we can
> reorganize matter and
> energy at the molecular level, then we will see a
> revolutionary
> transformation.
>
> Here's what I mean: Today we produce 14 trillion
> (about 1013) watts of
> power, 78 percent of which comes from fossil fuels.
> We have, however, plenty
> of energy in our midst. About 1017 watts of sunlight
> fall on the earth, or
> roughly 10,000 times more energy than we regularly
> consume. Solar panels
> today do a poor job of capturing this energy because
> they are inefficient,
> expensive, heavy, and difficult to integrate with
> building materials. Today
> production of solar power costs on average $8 per
> watt, much more than other
> energy sources.
>
> The economics of solar power are poised to change
> dramatically, however, as
> a new generation of solar panels made with
> nanomaterials comes of age.
> Developed by a series of venture-backed companies
> eagerly jockeying to
> disrupt that $1.9 trillion worldwide oil industry,
> these innovative panels
> are projected to drop in price within a few years.
> And whether or not any of
> the known businesses now developing them are
> successful, once we have
> full-scale molecular nanotechnology-based
> manufacturing, we'll be off to the
> races.
>
> At this point, energy will become an information
> technology dominated by
> massively parallel, computation-controlled molecular
> manufacturing
> processes. In 20 years, I believe solar panels will
> be as inexpensive as a
> penny per square meter. We will be able to place
> them on buildings and
> vehicles, build solar energy farms, and incorporate
> them into clothing for
> powering mobile devices. Converting 0.0003 percent
> of all sunlight hitting
> the earth, which will be feasible at that time, will
> let us meet 100 percent
> of our energy needs two decades from now. In yet
> another welcome change, we
> will be able to store the energy in nanoengineered
> fuel cells that will be
> tiny and widely distributed, a great improvement
> over the centralized,
> dangerous energy storage facilities we rely on
> today, such as liquid natural
> gas tanks.
>
> Most discussions of global warming make no mention
> of the ability of
> nanotechnology to solve this problem within 20
> years. Al Gore's movie An
> Inconvenient Truth never mentions nanotechnology,
> which in my view is a
> rather big oversight. The inclination to project the
> current rate of change
> into the future, what I call the "intuitive linear
> view," is hard-wired in
> us. The reality is that transformative changes
> happen faster and faster
> today. The telephone took 50 years to be adopted by
> a quarter of the U.S.
> population. The cell phone did that in thirteen
> years. Only five years ago,
> most people did not use search engines. Just three
> years ago we did not hear
> the terms "blog," "podcast," or "social network."
> And three years ago,
> people thought that it was impossible for a business
> to make money on
> Internet advertising. Today, we have Google, a
> company with a $157 billion
> market cap that does just that.
>
> The pace of change is already so fast that the world
> will be a very
> different place by the end of the three-year
> planning cycle of typical
> business projects currently under way, let alone the
> six- or seven-year
> venture capital horizon. In my own technology
> projects, we bake into our
> development and business plans projections that call
> for the rapid
> advancement of technology, on a quarter-by-quarter
> basis. One pleasant
> result of doing this is that we often find that
> today's difficult tradeoffs
> dissolve within a short period of time. With the
> doubling of price
> performance each year in every kind of information
> technology, you just need
> to wait a short while to find that you can have your
> cake and eat it too.
>
> The past is an accurate guide to the future only if
> we take these
> exponential progressions into account. But
> relatively few people do. We see
> what is right in front of us and expect that pace to
> continue. But a studied
> look at history shows that progress is exponential,
> not linear, and the
> difference is profound.
>
> Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, the co-founder of the
> Kurzweil Cos., and the
> author of five books, including The Singularity Is
> Near.
>
> Copyright C 2006 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights
> reserved.
> Inc.com, 375 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017
>
>
>
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070201/column-guest_Printer_Friendly.html
>
>
>
>
>
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