Exponential Growth or State-Powered Stagnation: What Will Be Our Future?
Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil wrote an essay in 2001, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” that describes an exponential path to what for many is an unimaginable future.
How certain is the exponential he describes? “We would have to repeal capitalism and every visage of economic competition to stop this progression,” he says.
In today’s world of collapsing currencies and anticapitalistic agendas, that repeal is well underway. Will the exponential be allowed to benefit mankind or will we regress to stagnation and slavery under globalist rule?
The Exponential Explained
According to Kurzweil:
Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example. One can examine the data in different ways, on different time scales, and for a wide variety of technologies ranging from electronic to biological, and the acceleration of progress and growth applies. Indeed, we find not just simple exponential growth, but “double” exponential growth, meaning that the rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially.
Moore’s law—the exponential shrinking of transistor sizes on an integrated circuit—is thought to be nearly synonymous with this observation, but in fact, it is only one example of what Kurzweil calls “a rich model of technological processes.” This has been ongoing “since the advent of evolution on Earth.”
His analysis shows that although “exponential trends did exist a thousand years ago, they were at that very early stage where an exponential trend is so flat that it looks like no trend at all.”
Humans live in a linear world, he reminds us, and often believe progress will continue at the present rate. This is not surprising, since any sufficiently short period on an exponential scale will be experienced as linear. “Even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, extrapolate the current pace of change over the next 10 years or 100 years to determine their expectations.”
The full impact of e
Article from Mises Wire
