The Pace of Change

A few days ago I registered to attend my 15th college reunion this June. This is one of those events that naturally causes you to step back and take stock of how much has changed in your life over time: the pounds you've gained or the hair you've lost, the addition of a wife, a house, kids, a dog. But after reading Glenn Reynolds' new book, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths, signing up for the reunion had me pondering the other remarkable changes that have taken place since I left my alma mater.

At this very moment fifteen years ago I was hammering out my senior thesis (rather frantically, I might add) on a first generation Macintosh computer which was, at the time, considered state of the art. I can recall lugging the thing, all forty-plus pounds of it, back and forth that year on the plane between Seattle and New Jersey in a huge carrying case along with the five or so floppy disks I needed to back up the data.

Fifteen years ago lap top computers and email were nonexistent as a practical matter; the Internet was still largely inaccessible to the public, and wi-fi was something us future Starbucks addicts could only dream about. I wouldn't get my first cell phone, which looked like an old walkie-talkie and weighed about three pounds, for another five years after leaving school.

Today it's absolutely commonplace to see people chatting away on cell phones with wireless ear pieces, typing out emails on Blackberries, or listening to one of hundreds of their favorite songs downloaded off the Internet onto an iPod. As consumers we don't even blink as companies constantly roll out high-tech gadgets that many of us couldn't even conceive of five or ten years ago, and we take as a given that we can now purchase laptops with more computing power in a single machine that some small countries possessed fifty years ago.

As Reynolds deftly points out, not only do we often take for granted the changes happening around us, but we also fail to appreciate the ever-growing magnitude of those changes:

"Much as we get "velocitized" in a speeding car, so we've become accustomed to a rapid pace of technological change. This change isn't just fast, but continually accelerating. The science-fiction future isn't science-fictional. Sometimes, it's not even the future any more."

In other words, even as we step back and recognize the startling pace of change in technology that has occurred over the last fifteen years, "we ain't seen nothin' yet."

Reynolds posits that we'll soon see changes coming at an even thicker and faster rate going far beyond the current computer revolution that will provide "not only intellectual but physical powers previously unavailable to individuals."

Such exponential growth of change is a precursor to a concept called "the Singularity," which author Ray Kurzweil defines in an interview with Reynolds as "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Kurzweil envisions a point in the not so far distant future where artificial intelligence will acquire the ability to improve itself and that "technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it."

Needless to say, this is a rather mind-blowing idea for those of us not used to contemplating where the cutting edges of technology will lead us in the future. It's also one of the reasons that Reynolds' book is such a refreshing and thought-provoking read.

Change is not only constant and inevitable, but it's now coming at us faster than at any point in human history. Who knows what the world will look like in 2021 when, God willing, I sign up to attend my thirtieth college reunion. One thing is for sure, the changes we'll see in the next fifteen years will dwarf those we've seen in the previous decade and a half, and probably in ways we can't even begin to imagine.