Amazing Exponentials, The Speech
By popular demand (well, Stephen asked for it, and he’s a popular guy) here’s the text of my recent speech, which expands on the ideas presented in the original exponentials post.
Mr. Toastmaster, my fellow Toastmasters and guests, our story begins with the invention of a game called Chaturanga in India some 1400 years ago. Chaturanga is the precursor to the game we call chess; it’s played on a board similar to the one used today for chess, checkers, and backgammon. The ruling prince of the region where the game was developed was so taken with Chaturanga that he summoned the game’s inventor and offered to reward him for his genius.
Now the man who invented Chaturanga was, indeed, a genius. He asked the prince that he be given only a very modest reward. Just one grain of rice placed in the first square of the Chaturanga board. That’s all. Oh, and then two grains of rice in the second square and four in the third and eight in the fifth and so on, doubling until all 64 squares were filled.
Well,
the prince was pretty shocked that his subject should ask for such a paltry
reward, but he felt he had to comply. So he dispatched one of his stewards to
fulfill the order. It took the steward a while to report back, and when
he did the news was not good. Although harvest was just completed, the gift
was going to completely exhaust the royal granaries. And they were only on the
40th square!
In fact, it turns out that if you were to keep doubling until you reached the 64th square, you would have an amount of rice greater than the total yield of every rice crop in the history of the planet earth. The inventor of Chaturanga had trapped the prince with what mathematicians call a geometric progression. As we follow the progress of the rice as it doubles with each step, we’re witnessing what’s called an exponential increase.
As the example with the rice grains shows, any time we witness an exponential increase, we’re in for quite a show. Things start out small and get crazy really quickly. Let’s look at a few exponential trends that are unfolding in our world today. (My first three examples come from an article by Rodney Brooks that appeared recently in MIT Technology Review.)
We’ll start with what the computer industry calls Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel, observed that the size of each transistor on a computer chip is cut in half every two years. When the transistors get smaller, they get faster. Plus you can fit more of them on a chip. This means that computer processing power is increasing exponentially -- basically quadrupling every 24 months. Over the past 40 years, Moore’s Law has proved to be amazingly accurate. We have seen exactly the increase in processing power that Moore predicted.
So where will that take us? If processing power keeps quadrupling, we will eventually have computers with the same processing power as the human brain. I remember when I was in college, one of my professors explained that if a computer were ever built to match the human brain, it would occupy a building 180 stories high and require enough electricity to power a large city. Now they’re talking about computers with that kind of processing capability sitting on desktops. Within the next few years! And if Moore’s Law holds out, we’ll be seeing computers with many times that power shortly thereafter.
Personally, I hope that prediction is accurate. If it is, I’m going to get one those computers, teach it how to do my job, and go fishing. Talk about outsourcing.
But maybe thinking computers are a kind of spooky example. Let’s look at computer storage. This is my iPod. It holds 20 gigabytes of memory, or about 500 songs. Last year’s model could hold only 10 gigabytes, about 250 songs. If I were using my iPod to hold text rather than music, it could hold about 20,000 books. And at the rate its capacity is growing, by the year 2020 my little iPod could hold the entire Library of Congress — text, graphics, everything.
Imagine what life will be like for a college student in the year 2020. Imagine what it will be like for a first grader! This thing is smaller and lighter than any single textbook any of us ever had to lug to school. Let me pass it around. Imagine holding virtually all human knowledge in the palm of your hand.
Of course, not all exponential developments are related to computers. The cost of sequencing DNA is diminishing exponentially. By next year, the cost of sequencing one person’s genome, one person’s individual genetic code — is going to be only one cent per base pair of genes. In 1990, it was $10 dollars per base pair. At that rate, by the year 2020, sequencing a person’s 3.2 billion base pairs will cost only $32,000. Within a few years after that, sequencing your entire genetic code will be no more expensive than, say, having a simple blood test done. Imagine how much more effective medical treatments will be when doctors are able to understand our bodies down to the molecular level.
So super-smart computers and portable libraries and advanced medical treatments are all very well, but how are we going to pay for all this stuff? Economist Robin Hanson made an interesting observation a while back, one that I referred to in the Inspiration talk I gave around Labor day. What the economists call Total World Product — the average wealth per person times the number of people — has grown exponentially over the last century, doubling about every fifteen years. That means it’s increasing about sixty times faster than it did before the Industrial Revolution. And the transition isn’t over yet. It won’t be long before the world’s total wealth doubles every six years. And if it keeps up, eventually, every year. Hanson goes even further than that, demonstrating that (if the trend holds) we will one day see total global wealth doubling every week. That one is pretty hard to picture, isn't it?
So if we want to be healthy, wealthy, and wise it would appear that all we have to do is sit back and let the exponentials do the work. Of course, nothing is ever quite as simple as that. I'm reminded of the story of the New York city planner who, in the 1890's published a report that included dire predictions of a coming ecological disaster for the city. Looking at the current growth numbers of the day, he predicted that the city would be uninhabitable within fifty years. What’s interesting is that his population predictions were pretty accurate. What he got wrong was his prediction that, by 1950, Manhattan would be three stories deep in horse manure.
Guess he just didn't see that whole "car" thing coming.
On a similar note, you may be wondering whatever became of the man who invented Chaturanga. Well, there are two versions of the story. One says that the prince was so impressed by the man’s wisdom that he made him his most trusted advisor, and as a result the man got to live the rest of his life amid great pomp and splendor. The other version says that the prince got annoyed and had him beheaded for being a wise guy.
Let that be a lesson to us all. When we base predictions of the future on extrapolations of current trends, we stand to gain tremendous insights into the world that's coming. But at the same time, we risk putting our heads on the chopping block. Or worse yet, we run the risk of peddling thousands of tons of imaginary horse sh— er, manure.
It's a fine line. So be warned.
Thank you very much.