Again, the curve of scientific knowledge is exponential simply because it’s only recently that we’ve had the tools needed to really expand our knowledge.
For most of mankind’s history, we made virtually no technological progress, for several reasons. For one, the lack of a permanent record-keeping system prevented knowledge from being passed down from generation to generation. Skills and inventions were passed down through apprenticeship. This prevented knowledge from passing laterally through society. We never learned from each other, and eventually knowledge would simply be lost.
Another reason is that we didn’t get around much. Most people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born, and their experience and knowledge did not germinate and travel. There would be enclaves of people known for their great skills in one area or another, but as they died out, the skills were lost.
Another reason is that we were dirt poor, and people generally had no time for navel gazing. They were too busy trying to keep from starving to death and killing each other. High mortality meant that people died young before they could attain true expertise in anything.
So the first great explosion of knowledge came when we began to travel great distances, and began to pick up knowledge from other civilizations. We’d get the wheel from this bunch, sword-making from another, textile skills over from another group, ceramics from another.
Then we developed the printing press, and started being able to record our knowledge for future generations. But we still didn’t have the capability of building the ever-more sophisticated tools needed to keep expanding our boundaries.
Then we hit the industrial revolution, and rapidly began to expand our capability. This allowed us to build more and better instruments, which helped us learn more, which in turn led to explosions in technologies like electricity, electronics, and computers. That led to the computer age, which saw another huge explosion in knowledge as we leveraged the computing power of our machines to come up with completely new ways of discovering how the world works. Simulations, models, brute-force experimental methods - things we couldn’t do before without great effort.
Finally, we hit the information age. Now we have the internet to disseminate information and to create a ‘hive mind’ of sorts. That’s going to lead to another explosion in knowledge and ability, but how long that will last is not clear.
So that’s where we are today. The beneficiaries of a logical progression of new tools and new ways of collecting, storing, and sharing information. But the big question is, what next? Does this curve have to continue?
Why should it? We can already see some limiters on the horizon. For one, computing science has simply not kept up with advances in hardware. Object oriented programming was a huge step forward, but aside from that the progresss looks kind of linear to me - not exponential. Operating systems take longer and longer to be released, and the improvements are pretty incremental. Our success rate at things like voice and character recognition doesn’t seem that much better than it was 20 years ago. In 1985 I was working with voice recognition software that could be trained to have a vocabulary of hundreds of words. But there was always the annoying error rate, and it’s still there today. We still use keyboards and touch pads and mice to communicate with our computers, because they still suck at understanding speech. OCR software is better than it used to be, but still not good enough that you can feed pages of print into it and expect 100% accuracy.
We still program essentially the same way we did 30 years ago. We write methods and procedures that execute logic statements that all look pretty much the same today as they did then. the ‘C’ language syntax forms the basis of a lot of our newest languages, and it was invented over 30 years ago.
The point is that we are becoming increasingly dependent on the limits of software instead of hardware, and software development just isn’t happening on an exponential curve. That could change if we have a breakthrough in the methods we use to create new software, but I’m not seeing it so far.
Then there are other limits - bandwidth, physical constraints to chip sizes, etc. Moore’s law can’t last forever. As the internet grows in complexity, the demand for bandwidth may grow to the point where it’s a choke point.
But here’s the real worry - the big limiter may not be what we can do, but whether we can do it before forces tear what we’ve built back down again. Can we stay ahead of the hackers and the terrorists? Can we keep growing exponentially while still preserving the planet and finding new resources fast enough?
It’s possible that we may be approaching a different kind of ‘singularity’. One in which the power of destruction that each citizen has is also growing exponentially, and once it reaches a certain level then there will be millions or billions of people who are capable of wreaking vast amounts of destruction on their whim. Bio terror, nuclear terror… How about genetic terror? Nano-terror?
It used to be very difficult to break in to a single bank and physically steal a million dollars. The amount of financial damage crooks used to be able to do was on the order of a few million dollars at most. Now hackers can break into 500 banks at once. Enron and Worldcom can game the system for billions. Can you imagine the news that would be made 50 years ago if some guy managed to shut General Motors down for a day? Well, hackers have shut down eBay and Amazon, and worms and viruses have been released that did hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
It’s not at all clear to me that we will be able to continue growing in power without society itself becoming unstable. It may simply be inevitable that we will expand wildly and then flame out.
Maybe that’s why we’re not finding any galactic civilizations. Maybe the ‘information explosion’ period is almost always fatal to a civilization.