For the most time of human history, life was local and linear. Local in the way that anything that happened was close by, a least within a walking distance. Linear in the way that your life was the same as your father and your children. Nothing changed.
Just like the evolution of man, technology improvements follow an evolutionary progress. New ideas or products are to begin with immature and fragile with slow improvements. Then the progress accelerates until the products become mature and taken for granted. Then the cycle repeats and a new layer of technology is added to the previous. This process is exponential. One such observation of exponential is Moore’s Law.
Any new technology that gets wide acceptance in society needs to be adopted by people. We will explore that type of people are the first to adopt new things, and what types come later.
20. IF PRODUCT PERFORMANCE DOUBLES EVERY YEAR
IN 10 YEARS WE HAVE 1,000 FOLD
INCREASE IN PERFOMANCE
IN 30 YEARS WE HAVE 1,000,000,000 FOLD
INCREASE IN PERFOMANCE
31. 1977
Apple II $1,298
4000 bytes memory
Motorola 6502 1MHz
2007
iMac 17-inch $1,199
1GB memory
Intel 2.0GHz
30 years of product improvements
32. iPad
2
as
fast
as
Cray
2
supercomputer,
fraction
of
the
size
Read
more:
http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/05/10/ipad.2.benches.as.fast.as.cray.2.from.1985/#ixzz1jdOS0Es4
Cray 2 1985 Apple iPad 2 2011
30 years of product improvements
33. Slow growth in the beginning
than accelerates
Exponential Growth
59. The Law of Accelerating Returns
Evolution applies positive feedback in that the
more capable methods resulting from one stage
of evolutionary progress are used to create the
next stage.
As a result, the rate of progress of an evolutionary
process increases exponentially over time.
60. “An analysis of the history of technology
shows that technological change is
exponential, contrary to the common-
sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won't
experience 100 years of progress in the
21st century -- it will be more like 20,000
years of progress
(at today's rate).”
- Ray Kurzweil