A Primer on Technological Evolution

Minor Update: Thursday April 7 2005


Technology is self-accelerating. In an ever quickening loop, technology inherently accelerates in speed, magnitude and global impact while dropping in cost. That's because technology is driven by innovation, and the whole point of innovation is to find better ways to do things. If it isn't faster, more powerful, useful to more people, cheaper etc., it isn't any better. And so the speed, power and social impact of technological evolution, feeding on itself, ever accelerate.

Introduction

The world seemed as still as stone for thousands of years, and technology advanced as slow as amber. It wasn't until our grandparents incredulously shook their heads at the moon landing, microwave ovens that heated only the food and not the container, nuclear bombs and computers. Theirs was the first generation to feel technology speeding up. A mere half generation later, immortality, crude replicators, new forms of Intelligence, and the very reigns of evolution are suddenly within our grasp.

By 1970, Alvin Toffler (author of "Future Shock" "The Third Wave" and "Power Shift") pinpointed that technology naturally becomes increasingly powerful and able to affect greater numbers of people in deeper ways.

And finally, he illustrated how three basic forces, the speed, magnitude and global impact of technological change were accelerating so fast, inflexible world systems would crack. Centralized control of power, military, political, economic, social, utilities, education, you name it ... would distribute away from the hands in which it once congealed and toward the masses.

Many of these ideas sparked by Toffler stirred me. In 1998, I began pecking articles to cast my reflections upon this body of thought. Email and magazine readership grew into the thousands as I wrote about "The Dark Side of the Information Age", "When Intelligence is Everywhere", "What Happens when an Entire World Accelerates", "The Coming Torrent of Ingenuity" and more. But as the first Internet bubble burst, sponsorship blew away in the hot dry exhaust, and I returned to a life of calloused hands.

I mentally analyzed emerging global and technological events while lifting baskets of crackling chicken from the fryers. I liked physical work that made me sweat. 30 pounds dropped off like candle wax in the kitchen heat.

Evenings found me studying and stabbing thoughts onto a keyboard. Ray Kurzweils insights into a technological singularity, drawn from Tofflers and Verner Vinges work shone like a search light. Toffler, Vinge and Kurzweil all pointed to the bizarre but conceivable near future scenario of runaway technological evolution.

How Technology Accelerates over Time

Take a 100,000 year walk back into the dim recesses of human history with me.

Notice how the engines of technology began silently, slowly chugging as ancient hands transformed logs into levers, wheels and axles. Watch these three simple innovations morph into a wheelbarrow.

Fast forward as these simple tools multiplied across the centuries into ever more powerful machines. Wheelbarrows transforming into wagons going 2 miles per hour, chariots at 20 mph, cars at 100 mph, trains at 300 mph, planes at 2000 mph, rockets at 4000 mph, spacecraft at 18000 mph... Innovations beget ever more and powerful innovations because each advancement illuminates a new set of still greater possibilities.

Why Technology Speeds Itself Up

Key inventions ever increase in frequency over time.

The wheel 5000 years ago, Paper 2000 years ago, Printing Press 700 years ago, Telescope 500 years ago, Microscope, 425 years ago, Steam Engine 300 years ago, Camera 275 years ago, Electricity 250 years ago, Light bulb and Telephone 225 years ago, Car, Radio, and Air Travel 100 years ago, Television and Penicillin 75 years ago, Computers and Nuclear Weapons 50 years ago, Internet 30 years ago, Personal computers 20 years ago, World Wide Web 15 years ago, Cloning 10 years ago...

Innovation means making something better by creating higher value. And time is of the highest value. We want faster solutions, service, and satisfaction. Technological speed-up is inextricably woven into progress.

Why Technology Power Grows in Magnitude

Innovations compound into increasingly powerful innovations as the knowledge and abilities gained from each new advance fuel the next.

Centuries ago the pool of innovations we sipped from was small. Today we draw from an ever deepening ocean of innovations, discoveries and inventions. The latest automobiles draw from inventions, knowledge and processes as far back as fire and the wheel, to the internal combustion engine developed 300 years ago, to mass production assembly lines 100 years ago, to computer chips, software and metallurgy advances developed over the past year.

Space travel, Genetic engineering, Nanotechnology and the rise of Artificial Intelligence are recent examples of the accelerating magnitude of technological innovation.

Why Technology Expands in Global Impact

Technology ever widens it's reach and impact because it increasingly connects more and more people. That means the next key innovation has a greater social impact than the last, economically, geographically, emotionally ... Globalism, feminism, CNN, computers and the Internet illustrate the scope of change.

These three forces of technological evolution; the acceleration in speed, magnitude and scope, continually compound the impact technology has upon us.

Did we Come to Laugh or Cry?

We are entering an extremely unstable part of history.

When events speed up, that means more events happen during shorter windows of time. The three accelerating forces of technological evolution mean virtually simultaneous events of great magnitude and scope will increasingly happen at or near the same time. The likelihood of perfect storms grows as the waves of multiple, global, colossal events combine.

The September day that became known as "The day the world changed" deeply shook the entire world within seconds. Markets and masses shrunk back in horror. Governments toppled. Droves cocooned at home. The shock waves are still large enough to topple governments. Other events of this or greater magnitude and scope occurring within the shock waves of each other set the stage for rapid breakdown of social support systems.

Even multiple concurrent positive changes of great magnitude and scope could tear the glue holding existing systems apart so forcefully that order could catastrophically collapse.

But the question nearly everybody eventually asks goes something like this...

How Long Can Technology Continue to Accelerate?

It takes time to design, manufacture and distribute things. So how, for example, would it be possible for computers to double in power in say, a month or less?

The short answer: As automated design converges with desktop manufacturing, the loop speeds up dramatically. But artificial intelligence is really the missing link.

Vinge drew our attention to runaway non-biological intelligence self-advancing and compounding so rapidly it quickly becomes smarter that it's best engineers. Intelligence, accelerating in speed, magnitude and scope within months, then weeks, then days spreading through our global networks.

The world has yet to absorb the implications of emergent artificial intelligence, but it makes it possible to conceive of technology literally continuing this juggernaut pace forever. Transforming life, merging with humans, heading out into space...

The rise of viable self replicating artificial intelligence strikes madness into the minds of many futurists. But it needn't. Great disruption lies ahead and no attempt to fuzz the picture will change that. But technology DOES always seek a better way to answer our collective desires.

There is a clear underlying bias in the direction technology takes. There is a built in order, right there from the beginning which bodes well for our species. That's because ...

Technological Evolution Follows Maslows Hierarchy of Needs

Not just the thrust of technology is driven by innovation. The direction it follows is too. And the direction can be decoded with a few simple rules. They are found in Maslows Hierarchy of Needs

The ever gnawing hunger to survive, thrive and self actualize. To live in security, without fear, to realize our potential as beings. To belong. To have exciting sex and adventures. If new innovations don't address these drives hidden within all of us, they aren't progress. And when we reach these touchstones of development it feels good.

The collective intelligent engineering that emerges from societies of bees, ants and termites is the result of members simply following their hierarchy of needs.

In a similar manner, simply by answering the call of our common innate drives, we have been building a mighty hive connected across millennia. The groundwork to realize every prophecy of heaven on Earth is in place. It seems we are in for some very good times ahead.

Could be, anyway.

The Rise of Computing Intelligence

The Computer will soon be smarter than the brightest minds who build them.

Since 1965, the computer chip, embedded with intelligence, has doubled in power roughly every 2 years. As we slept to the implications of compounding intelligence, computers quickly evolved from calculators to communications devices and from word processors to global idea processors. Only short decades later, we awaken to an accelerating world, the heart of which now beats with this growing intelligence.

Computers double in cost effectiveness with each new generation, evolving exponentially because they can be enlisted in huge numbers to propogate their own next generation. Whatever they can do today, they'll do it twice as fast, efficiently, and detailed or half the size and cost tomorrow. One billion instructions per second becomes 2 billion, then 4 billion and so on.

Within our lifetime, $1000 will buy unlimited access to computational power equivalent to a human brain. And that computational power will continue to compound again and again with no end in sight.

The exponential growth of computational intelligence is what allows you to carry around (and afford) vastly more computing power than was used in the entire Apollo space program. The laptop tucked under the student's arm can contain a searchable library of electronic textbooks that would weigh several tons in hardcover.

The computer is driving the convergence between Nanotechnology, Biotechnology and the Cognitive Sciences and Itself. It's the reason knowledge in these fields is doubling roughly every year now, causing the rate of discovery to speed up in lockstep with the evolution of computing intelligence.

While we wrestle with the imminent implications of curing all diseases, a vastly extended "quality of life" span, a new world order of increasing complexity, awesome weapons being manufactured in basements, and personal computers with more computational power than our brains, computing will continue to accelerate in power until we are building them atom by atom.

Biotechnology: Reprogramming Evolution

We wear the same body and brains as Cro-Magnon humans did. The same people who rubbed sticks together for fire, driven by hunger to the hunt, worked with tools of bone and stone, bedding down in huts of skin and branches. But this 40,000 year old piece of soft clay is about to become it's own sculptor. This is not just a turning point in history. It's also the fulcrum upon which technology balances our very evolution..

For billions of years, evolution virtually restricted the transfer of DNA to members of the same species through sexual reproduction. But through Biotechnology, virtually any trait found in nature can be, in principle, wantonly transferred across species. That means you can take DNA from any organism, transfer it to another and new creatures emerge.

For Example:

- Sheep with human brains and other organs.
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- The glow from the firefly has been inserted into tobacco plants making them glow in the dark.
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- A human embryo cloned using a cell from a man's leg and a cow's ovum lived and developed for twelve days until it was terminated.
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- Goats bred with a spider gene produce milk which is processed to make "BioSteel".. The US military has set up their own goat farm to make bulletproof vests, aerospace and medical supplies.
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- Extended Life Spans
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As of January 2008, Human/Animal Hybrid Embryos have gone mainstream.

The Case for Human Evolution Through Technology

Through Human intervention over thousands of years, modern dogs from toy poodles, greyhounds, pit bulls, great danes - all of them - descended from wolves. With the decoding of the human genome, (and in a dramatically shorter time), a far richer variation of humans beings is equally as possible.

But Will We?

Will we, as a species begin to evolve ourselves on purpose? Tummy tucks, breast implants, competitive steroid drugs and gender selection foreshadow the pent up demand for personal selection over natural selection. Cro Magnon is poised to become stronger, faster, and smarter, with a vastly extended life span. Some WILL elect to become entirely new creatures.

DNA Computing

Evolution has harnessed DNA to reliably store the programming instructions for every known biological cell since the first. In 1994, Leonard Adleman proved that we too could use DNA to compute.

Because DNA can replicate itself, it can work on a problem as it replicates with each new strand crunching the numbers. Very quickly DNA can perform collosal computational feats. A DNA computer about this size could hold 10 terabytes of data more than enough to store everything you look at for a year and perform 10 trillion calculations at the same time. By comparison, the Human brain is capable of roughly 100 trillion calculations per second.

What's Next?

Evolutionary intelligence has brought forth human intelligence. The very brain assembled through evolutionary forces now seeks to create it's own rival. The computer will soon become smarter than it's maker. It's only a matter of time.

Your Inkjet Printer as a Replicator

In a jag of hardware hacking, the humble inkjet printer is transformed into a crude fabricator. Disgorging a growing array of computer parts, complete working gadgets and solar cells is so... yesterday. Read on. The innovative twists emerging from Inkjet technology will stun you.

(This is part of a developing story about the rise of personal desktop fabrication and replicators).

3D Printing has been around since the 90's producing physical models directly from a computer version. The computer model is divided into thousands of extremely thin slices. Each slice is then printed out one on top of the other, normally in polymer. Large and very expensive.

However the technology which enables Inkjet printers to form images and text on paper can also be adapted to 3d modeling. Instead of ink, ANY material that can be powderized, (meaning practically everything) can be used.

Here are some examples of various materials including ceramics stainless steel, tungsten and tungsten carbide with complex internal structures as well as external and very rich textures

Complete Working Gadgets

Inkjet technology has also printed out entire working gadgets with the internal circuitry and the external housing as one fused whole. By printing layer upon layer of conducting and semiconducting polymers, the complete circuitry and housing are built in one go.

'Gadget printer' promises industrial revolution
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An example of how an electronic remote control will be printed out
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Printing Electronic Circuits

Instead of drops of cyan, magenta and yellow ink, a uniquely charged drop of polymer becomes a nano pixel in a working printed electronic circuit. Working solar cells, lighting, even batteries have already emerged from the humble inkjet. A computer printing computer circuits simply from software instructions. That's only a stone's throw away from self replication.

Wearable Embedded Intelligence

Circuits can also be printed on cloth.
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And yet another genie has emerged from the bottle...

Researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack at Brandeis University have coupled inkjet technology and software to autonomously design and fabricate robots without human intervention.
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The software simulates a variety of rudimentary virtual robots. In an accelerated Darwinian contest of survival over hundreds of generations, the most successful robotic designs are then physically prototyped. Robots autonomously designing, testing and manufacturing robots.

Coming Soon From a Printer Near You

Hewlett-Packard is poised to "aggressively enter a range of new markets beyond printing, including television and computer displays, printed electronic circuits, automotive fuel-injection systems and even drug delivery for treatment of diseases like diabetes."
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In yet another "vein" inkjets are coughing up tissue.

Here's the very latest news on Rapid Prototyping technology

The Implications

The implications of 3d printing are perhaps more in the questions inspired than in what is produced.

What will be the effect of open source hardware? What happens when a desktop peripheral as economical as your printer manufactures custom computer circuitry, solar cells and batteries as cheap as wallpaper? Or when distributors ship a product as software, with the end user supplying the raw material. No distribution costs and instant delivery of a physical item. Or when autonomous robots fitted with accelerating computational intelligence design and manufacture their own next generation.