This is part one in a five-part series called "The Limits of Accelerating Returns" that focuses on the limitations of Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns when applied to molecular biology and biomedical technology, including longevity treatments. The other articles in the series are "Biology is not Digital," "Garbage In, Garbage Out," "Some Rates are Fixed," and "Implications of Fixed Returns."
Ray Kurzweil is a very smart man who sees the world differently than most of us. We see linear growth, he sees exponential. Kurzweil outlines, for the lay person, what exponential growth means for the future in an opinion piece in the Washington Post called “Making the World a Billion Times Better” [hattip: Siggi Becker via FriendFeed]. Kurzweil says that any information technology is “subject to what I call the ‘law of accelerating returns,’ a continual doubling of capability about every year.” In his use of the term, “information technology” isn’t limited to traditional computer science but also includes nanotechnology and biology.
Kurzweil is absolutely correct that biology is increasingly an information technology. Thanks to high-throughput technologies, research labs are generating incredibly amounts of data, more than anyone really knows how to analyze in any meaningful way. Kurzweil, however, jumps the gun a bit when he says, “The important point is this: Now that we can model, simulate and reprogram biology just like we can a computer, it will be subject to the law of accelerating returns, a doubling of capability in less than a year.” I think he’s right about the amazing things that biomedical technology will achieve—I fully expect to celebrate my 125th birthday in the year 2100—but he misses some important distinctions between biology and computers. These differences place some limits on Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns. It’s important to understand these limitations so that we have a more accurate idea of what amazing advances we can reasonably expect.
