Super-Exponential Long-Term Trends in Information Technology

Interesting read for the day:
Super-exponential long-term trends in Information Technology by B. Nagy, J.D. Farmer, J.E. Trancik, & J.P. Gonzales, shows that which Kurzeil suggested in his earlier work on “technology singularities” is true: We are experiencing faster-than-exponential growth within the information technology area.

Nagy et al. are careful to point out that their work indicates a “mathematical singularity,” not to be confused with the more broadly-sweeping notion of a “technological singularity” discussed by Ray Kurzweil and others.

Kurzweil’s now-famous book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcent Biology, was first released as a precis on his website in approximately 2000. His interesting and detailed graphs, from which he deduced that we were going “beyond exponential growth,” had data points up through approximately 2000. In contrast, Nagy et al. are able to produce data points typically through 2005.

The notion of “singularity” is both interesting and important now. Sandberg (2009) has published an interesting and readable paper, An overview of models of technological singularity”.