This graph by Ray Kurzweil illustrates his law of accelating change. which basically states that the time interval between paradigm shifts is decreasing. This idea has alarm bells ringing in my head. Surely we see the recent past with a higher resolution than older times, and therefore more paradigm shifts will be visible closer to today than a long time back. Furthermore, things that happened in 1300 which seemed revolutionary and paradigm-shifting in 1320 may seem meaningless today. Who’s to say that the impressive-looking graph isn’t simply the result of these results?
Well, me. I do believe that there is an objective reason to think that such an acceleration is taking place; but simultaneously, I think the concept of paradigm shifts is over-rated.
Allow me to introduce a metaphor. Each tiny little step of progress in the combined field of human knowledge is represented with a single grain of sand, falling into a large box. The box itself is simply our world-view at a given time - our current paradigm. The grains that fall outside the box make no sense to us and the flow of those grains will dry up pretty quickly (if they occur at all). The grains that fall inside the box slowly fill the box up.
Now, the amount of grains being produced has something to do with the amount of questions that can be asked, and the amount of work put into finding an answer. Both these amounts increase with each falling grain of sand, because humanity’s desperate need to communicate is leading to ever-more efficient scientific work – and it’s a well-known principle of science that each answer invariably gives birth to new questions (switching metaphors, the old image of knowledge being an inflating ball in the dark void of ignorance, the surface of the ball, which represent the questions that can be asked but we don’t have an answer to, grows as the volume of the ball grows).
The flow of sand, thus, increases over time, creating a genuine “accelerating knowledge” effect. And what happens is that as the box begins to get filled up, more grains start spilling over outside the box, hinting at something larger than our world-view, until the box is completely buried and we encase the entire system in a new, larger box. What happened here is that we, seemingly instantly, revised our fundamental world view, which is exactly what a paradigm shift is. But there is something rather inevitable about such a shift because the box will fill up sooner or later. The shift itself may be very noticable, but it is a symptom of our limited ability to create world-views rather than something deep and important.
This means, in conclusion, that paradigm shifts will probably appear to happen faster and faster as time goes by, giving the Kurzweilian “accelerating change” effect. But far more interestingly to me is the “accelerating knowledge acquisition” which causes the change. This is where we need to be lookin’.
