La aceleración y los medios

Este artículo no es nuevo. Pero plantea un tema que cada día se hace (aparentemente) más imprescindible: la velocidad de los cambios y el modo de no quedar abajo. "El futuro no nos necesita", tituló alguna vez Billy Joy, editor de Wired y la verdad los medios muchas veces parecen enfrentarse a esta máxima con resignación. Cómo hacemos para que los contenidos, la continuidad de la información y la adaptación a las nuevas plataformas logren la velocidad de los cambios tecnológicos. Hasta ahora hemos ido a la retaguardia de los cambios, desde la educación, pasando por el diseño y, por supuesto, la implementación. La teoría dice que el progreso exponencial de las tecnologías durante el Siglo XXI será igual a la suma de los XXI siglos anteriores. Entonces ¿es lógico pensar que podremos avanzar a esa velocidad?Parece que no. Pero quizás, los medios (y los periodistas), no debiéramos asumir que estas transformaciones deben ser recogidas en su totalidad. Y lo mejor es pensar cómo podemos seguir satisfaciendo a nuestras audiencias que buscan buenos contenidos, identidad, análisis y perspectiva. Pero también creatividad y diversión. No cabe duda, que la tarea de entender el negocio es más complejo que armar una página web con una buena interfase, crear una aplicación en Facebook y generar contenidos para plataformas móviles.

Por Ray Kurzweil
Artículo Aceleración

You will get $40 trillion just by reading this essay and understanding what it says. For complete details, see below. (It's true that authors will do just about anything to keep your attention, but I'm serious about this statement. Until I return to a further explanation, however, do read the first sentence of this paragraph carefully.)

Now back to the future: it's widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected the future to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Although exponential trends did exist a thousand years ago, they were at that very early stage where an exponential trend is so flat that it looks like no trend at all. So their lack of expectations was largely fulfilled. Today, in accordance with the common wisdom, everyone expects continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. But the future will be far more surprising than most observers realize: few have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

The Intuitive Linear View versus the Historical Exponential View
Most long range forecasts of technical feasibility in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future technology because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of technological progress rather than the "historical exponential view." To express this another way, it is not the case that we will experience a hundred years of progress in the twenty-first century; rather we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (at today's rate of progress, that is).

This disparity in outlook comes up frequently in a variety of contexts, for example, the discussion of the ethical issues that Bill Joy raised in his controversial WIRED cover story, Why The Future Doesn't Need Us. Bill and I have been frequently paired in a variety of venues as pessimist and optimist respectively. Although I'm expected to criticize Bill's position, and indeed I do take issue with his prescription of relinquishment, I nonetheless usually end up defending Joy on the key issue of feasibility. Recently a Noble Prize winning panelist dismissed Bill's concerns, exclaiming that, "we're not going to see self-replicating nanoengineered entities for a hundred years." I pointed out that 100 years was indeed a reasonable estimate of the amount of technical progress required to achieve this particular milestone at today's rate of progress. But because we're doubling the rate of progress every decade, we'll see a century of progress--at today's rate--in only 25 calendar years.