{"id":3090,"date":"2001-05-09T17:36:32","date_gmt":"2001-05-09T22:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smperformance.wordpress.com\/2013\/07\/30\/stratvantage-consulting-llc-mikes-take-on-the-news-050901\/"},"modified":"2001-05-09T17:36:32","modified_gmt":"2001-05-09T22:36:32","slug":"stratvantage-consulting-llc-mikes-take-on-the-news-050901","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stratvantage.com\/index.php\/2001\/05\/09\/stratvantage-consulting-llc-mikes-take-on-the-news-050901\/","title":{"rendered":"StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05\/09\/01"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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From Evernote:<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

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StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05\/09\/01<\/h1>\n

Clipped from: http:\/\/www.stratvantage.com\/news\/050901.htm<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

T<\/strong>he News \u2013 05\/09\/01<\/h1>\n

The Accelerating Pace of Change<\/h2>\n

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and a deep thinker about the future.<\/strong> He\u2019s also perhaps a bit odd, having performed White Rabbit <\/a><\/em> as a virtual reality female named Ramona at the recent TED XI Conference in Monterey, CA in February.<\/strong> He\u2019s invented many innovative things, from synthesizers to speech recognition.<\/strong> And he\u2019s finally put into words something which we all have probably sensed: the rapidly accelerating pace of change.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a book pr\u00e9cis for his upcoming book, The Singularity is Near<\/em>, Kurzweil asserts that we\u2019re doubling the rate of progress every decade, which will result in a century\u2019s worth of technological change in only 25 calendar years.<\/strong> He says that we tend to think of the rate of change as constant, and adjust to this acceleration automatically.<\/strong> When people make predictions about how long it will take to accomplish some innovation, they unconsciously base their estimates on a constant rate of change.<\/strong> Kurzweil argues that the rate of change is actually exponential, and this is the characteristic of any evolutionary system.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kurzweil calls this the law of accelerating returns and he claims it has been in effect since the beginning of the evolution of life.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel–took tens of thousands of years.<\/strong> For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years.<\/strong> By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two.<\/strong> In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it.<\/strong> Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century.<\/strong> Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time.<\/strong> The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn’t exist at all a decade ago.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially).<\/strong> So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries.<\/strong> In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 25 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates.<\/strong> So the twenty-first century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I often ask a question of my audience when I speak: \u201cHow many of you think the pace of change will slow in the future?<\/strong>\u201d I\u2019ve never had a hand go up. Businesses need to understand that they can\u2019t stick their heads in the sand and hope that the paradigm shift of the day (dotcoms, B2B exchanges, peer-to-peer computing, wireless, whatever) will blow over and they can go back to the old ways of doing things.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The obvious joy felt by the bricks and mortar businesses at the dotcom implosion may have been a smug pleasure (\u201cI told you they wouldn\u2019t last\u201d), but the innovations the Internet has introduced won\u2019t go away.<\/strong> Sure, lots of essentially worthless dotcoms have blown away.<\/strong> And it\u2019s fun to ridicule the excesses of the 20-something dotcommies and their lack of class in handling their short-lived success.<\/strong> But the reality is, something has fundamentally changed about business, and that bell can\u2019t be unrung.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Your business\u2019 ability to absorb change and to recognize paradigm shifts will be its most critical success factor in the coming years.<\/strong> Those who can\u2019t foresee how the need for their products can disappear are doomed to go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers of last century.<\/strong> Heck, forget the buggy whip companies, they\u2019ll go the way of modern long distance providers, who have seen Internet long distance providers drive rates to under 7 cents a minute, generating a problem so severe that the Baby Bells no longer hunger for the long distance market.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What new idea is sprouting in a garage somewhere that will threaten your business?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kurzweil <\/a><\/p>\n

Briefly Noted<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00b7 IBM has announced they\u2019ve created transistors using nanotubes <\/a> of carbon that are 10 atoms across.<\/strong> This yields transistors 500 times smaller than today\u2019s silicon-based ones.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00b7 Think that\u2019s small? How about packing a terabyte <\/a> (1,000 gigabytes) into a cubic centimeter?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00b7 Today I spoke at the Eleventh Annual EC Breakfast with Executives sponsored by the Twin Cities Electronic Commerce Forum.<\/strong> My topic was Boom or Gloom? The Future of B2B Exchanges<\/em>, and the PowerPoint is available here <\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Can\u2019t Get Enough of ME?<\/h2>\n

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I\u2019ve started a Weblog.<\/strong> It\u2019s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I\u2019m doing it too.<\/strong> A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page.<\/strong> If you\u2019d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog.<\/strong> You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com <\/a>.<\/strong> This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve dubbed my Weblog entries \u201cStratlets\u201d, and they are available at www.stratvantage.com\/stratlets\/ <\/a>.<\/strong> Let me know what you think. Also check out the TrendSpot <\/a> for ranking of the latest emerging trends.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Return <\/a> to Mike\u2019s Take<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Evernote: StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 05\/09\/01 Clipped from: http:\/\/www.stratvantage.com\/news\/050901.htm The News \u2013 05\/09\/01 The Accelerating Pace of Change Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and a deep thinker about the future. He\u2019s also perhaps a bit odd, having performed White Rabbit as a virtual reality female named Ramona at the … <\/p>\n

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