by Ted Greenwald, Forbes
Kurzweil’s audience is the latest Executive Program class at Singularity University, an institution he co-founded with Peter Diamandis of X Prize fame. The school’s mission is to prepare the world take advantage of exponential change rather than being crushed by it. Drawn from C suites around the world — including Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chair and CEO Jim Gianopulos, SunPower CTO Tom Dinwoodie, and representatives of IBM, Investec, and the Brazilian military — students will spend the coming week learning how to think in exponential terms. Kurzweil begins plotting technological progress in the early ’80s and soon determined that progress, from the discovery of fire through today’s headlines, follows a steady exponential curve. The curve originates, he says, from the fact that we use the last generation of technology to build the next, multilpying past gains with each advance. The cycle inevitably brings smaller hardware, greater capability, and falling prices in a ladder of interlocking s-curves.
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