Ray Kurzweil

Because it's really hard to consider exponential growth.

Right.

People don't think

unless they're pushed in exponential terms necessarily.

I want to call to your attention, particularly if you look at this chart, there's a period between, I don't know, call it 1970 and 1980 or so, when there's flat progress or the appearance, there's a bit of a plateau there.

So plateaus do happen even though over, call it a 70, 80 year time period, there's a linear trend over time.

So my question for you is,

If you could send a message back in time to the 60s or the 1970s for how to avoid all plateaus in progress, we saw in space 50 plus years when humans weren't going to the moon.

It's not that progress automatically happens in all domains for free.

If you could send a message back in time to the 1960s or 1970s for how to avoid plateaus and just speed up progress toward the singularity, what message would you send back in time?

I mean, I think it's just a normal variation.

I don't really think there was constant growth during that period.

It may look like that.

Frame it then as a variance reduction measure.

If you were to send a message back in time for how to reduce variation from that line, that semi-log line, what message would you send back in time to just minimize the variance?

believe in the exponential, as we all are doing here, and you'd make this move a little more exponentially.

But certainly, if you look at this, it looks like there's exponential growth across the entire 75 years here.

And then I guess a related question, maybe pulling on the thread of your answer that believe in the exponential is the solution.

Do you think there is anything that we today prospectively looking forward could or should be doing to smooth out the exponential that we're not otherwise doing as a civilization?

Going forward.