Knee of the Curve
The Economist ran a biography of serial inventor Ray Kurzweil in the last installment of its Technology Quarterly. This guy has produced a slew of revolutionary advances in fields as diverse as optical character recognization and electronic keyboards, mostly centered around the idea of using pattern recognition techniques in new and innovative ways. His current fascination is with the use of technology to extend the human lifespan (potentially indefinitely), a meme which I seem to be encountering more and more often recently.
Most interesting to me was his theory about the “knee of the curve”. The idea is that when you’re near the beginning of a trend that’s based on exponential growth, you feel like growth is linear. Suddenly you reach a turning point and the curve shoots upwards. Boing Boing had a nice take on this a while back. Kurzweil’s point was that this sudden shift makes it easy to underestimate the impact of technological trends.
What struck me about this is that it’s exactly the principle that I wrote about the other day in the context of online content sales. Great minds think alike, and apparently mine does too, sometimes.
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