OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, JANUARY 2015Imagine technologies so powerful they will transform society into something unimaginable. Today’s world has been spectacularly modernized by products and processes that save labor, entertain, and socially connect us. We savor ever more sophisticated smartphones, pin-size sensors, GPS, and notebook computers. We appreciate vaccines that have wiped out smallpox and almost done in polio. We enjoy clean water and hygienic food. All of this—this bounty of enriched and long lives—has been bestowed on us by science and technology.
Back in 1965 Gordon Moore recognized that the number of transistors that can be fit into an integrated circuit was doubling about every two years. He penned Moore’s law, predicting that this rate of change would continue for at least a decade. But he was wrong: He failed to fully imagine the possibilities. The exponential explosion in electronic complexity has been unceasing ever since. Technology seems to be following a never-ending slope of advancement that is less like walking up a hill than it is like jumping straight into the sky. Our future, if Moore’s law continues to hold, will be an era of technological sophistication that will continue to go beyond what our minds can now fathom. According to Ray Kurzweil, leading futurist and ...
