RAY KURZWEIL, the brilliantfuturist, author, and inventor of everything from speech-recognition systems to the digital music synthesizer with which | regularly compose really awful songs, has a theory hecalls “the law of accelerating returns.” In brief, Kurzweil’s law states that as a process evolves, its returns—such as its speed, cost-effectiveness, or power—increase exponentially over time.
Imagine a grain of rice on a chess board that doubles with each successive square. At first, the increases come slowly: one grain, then two, then four. By halfway across the board, though, the changes from square to square are staggering (four billion, eight billion, etc.). By the board’s final square, after 63 doublings, you're drowning in 18 million trillion grains of rice.
Early humans, with their dull arrowheads and sputtering campfires, were on the…
