The Singularity is Near

by Ray Kurzweil

Productivity (economic output per worker) has also been growing exponentially. These statistics are in fact greatly understated because they do not fully reflect significant improvements in the quality and features of products and services. It is not the case that “a car is a car”; there have been major upgrades in safety, reliability, and features. Certainly, one thousand dollars of computation today is far more powerful than one thousand dollars of computation ten years ago (by a factor of more than one thousand). There are many other such examples. Pharmaceutical drugs are increasingly effective because they are now being designed to precisely carry out modifications to the exact metabolic pathways underlying disease and aging processes with minimal side effects (note that the vast majority of drugs on the market today still reflect the old paradigm; see chapter 5). Products ordered in five minutes on the Web and delivered to your door are worth more than products that you have to fetch yourself. Clothes custom-manufactured for your unique body are worth more than clothes you happen to find on a store rack. These sorts of improvements are taking place in most product categories, and none of them is reflected in the productivity statistics.