Guest Speaker: How to Predict the Future
A good sense of timing is key to success. Fortunately, it's easier to see the future--and to plan for it--than you may think.
Published February 2007
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEIn 2002, I had a conversation with Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind. I had first worked with the NFB in 1976, helping build the first print-to-speech reading machine. Over the years, the various models of that device got smaller, but it remained a scanner-based system that required blind users to bring reading material to their desks. There is a lot of reading material that you can't bring to your desk, of course, like a sign on a wall or the bank ATM display. You could bring a menu back to your desk, but you'd probably prefer to read it in the restaurant.
For years, I had been predicting that someday, blind men and women would be able to use a pocket-size reader to read anything they wanted as they went through the day, from the labels in their clothing to the baking instructions on the back of a muffin-mix box. Now Maurer wanted to know when I thought that day would come, and I predicted that the actual hardware for sufficiently powerful digital cameras and pocket computers would be ready in four years, by the second quarter of 2006. Developing the software, I added, would also take four years, so the Kurzweil Cos. and the NFB had better get started on the project right away.
Right on schedule, the digital cameras and pocket computers with the specs that we needed became available last spring. Our software development project was completed on time, and so we introduced a new, portable reading machine for the blind this past July. Today, there are on the order of a thousand blind people reading all the print they encounter as they go through the day. Other companies have taken notice and are starting to develop competing products. As a result of our technology forecasting, however, we have a nice jump on the market.
To what do I owe this exquisite sense of timing? The simple truth is that timing is key to success as an inventor, so I've spent the past 30 years studying the rate by which information technology advances. Being an engineer, I gathered data on technology trends in different fields and built mathematical models. What I discovered is that understanding the timing of technological change is not as mysterious as most people think it is. In fact, I found that the models were surprisingly predictive, and today I have a group of 10 people at the Kurzweil Cos. helping me gather data and build these models.
The common wisdom that you can't predict the future is not all wrong. We can't predict specific things, such as whether Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock will be higher or lower three years from now. But within information technology there are meaningful patterns. The evolution of information technology follows such exquisitely smooth exponential trajectories, in fact, that I can say with confidence that all information technology doubles its price performance and capacity pretty much every year. If you ask me the cost of a MIPS (million instructions per second) of computing in 2010, the cost of sequencing a base pair of DNA in 2012, or the spatial resolution of brain scanning in 2014, I can give you detailed figures and they are likely to be accurate. This has proved true for computation for more than 100 years, going back to the first data processing equipment used to automate the 1890 census.
One way to think about the patterns in information technology is to look at science, where we see other examples of remarkably predictable effects resulting from the interaction of inherently unpredictable phenomena. The laws of thermodynamics provide an example. The path of each molecule in a gas is modeled as a random walk. Yet the properties of the overall gas, made up of many chaotically interacting particles, is predictable to a high degree of precision. Technology evolution is, similarly, a chaotic system with remarkably predictable properties.
There's another wrinkle to keep in mind. When I say that information technology doubles in price performance and power each year, remember that the rate itself is expanding at an accelerated rate. It took three years to double the price performance of computing equipment in 1900, two years in 1950, and we're now doubling it every year. At today's exponential rate, doubling every year means multiplying by a thousand in 10 years and a billion in 30 years. But with the rate of acceleration continuing to grow, we will actually hit the billion mark in only 25 years. Consider the pervasive influence of information technology in today's world and multiply that by a billion in a quarter century--while we shrink the size of both electronic and mechanical technology by a factor of 100,000 in the same time frame--and you'll get some idea of how revolutionary information technology will be in the future.
