 Is anybody here old enough to remember when computer screens only came in black and white? Is anybody here old enough to remember rotary dial phones? Is anyone old enough to remember what mimeograph machine fluids smell like? Is anyone here old enough to remember polio? Well, the reason so many of these things sound so archaic, and that they almost laugh at the archaic, is that we've been going through a period of exponential change. This is a change that involves not going up in a straight line, but on a curve, in which change is coming at us ever faster. A lot of people are familiar with one example of this, which is called Moore's Law. There was a guy back in the mid-60s named Gordon E. Moore, who was a physical chemist out in California, and he was noticing in 1964, this was five years after the first commercial computer chip, that the number of transistors that you could get on a piece of silicon for a dollar had been regularly doubling every few months, and he boldly projected that this increase would continue for another 10 years. Well, little did he know. Gordon Moore ended up becoming one of the three founders of Intel, and he's now a bazillionaire many times over. But he's probably going to be most remembered for what is now known as Moore's Law, which is now the core faith of the entire global information technology industry. And the way it's usually now stated is that the amount of computer firepower that you can buy for a dollar will double every 18 months for as far as the eye can see. Now, that's an amazing prediction because it has major consequences. And everybody has experienced this. I mean, who hasn't looked at a whiz bang computer at Christmas time, you know, that costs $2,000, and it's got 512s of this and 60 gigs of something else, and it's got, you know, just a multi-core, and it's a real fire breather. And the very next Christmas, that exact same machine is available for $1,300. And the reason that is is because another way that Moore's Law can be stated is that the price of any given amount of computer technology will drop in half every 18 months on a curve. So this means that that fire-breathing $2,000 Christmas machine in 10 years will be available for $31.25. And you'll be able to get it free with a subscription to Newsweek. And it will no longer be on your desktop, it'll be your cell phone. You know, cell phone's now, an iPhone today has more computer fire power than did the entire North American Air Defense Command in 1965 when Gordon Moore first prophesied. Now, this business about this change occurring on a curve, this has a lot of practical implications to people's everyday lives. For one thing, it means that the last 20 years is not a guide to the next 20 years. It means that the last 20 years is at best a guide to the next eight. You know, if you want to look forward eight years, then think about where you were 20 years ago, and that's about right. And the last 50 years is not a guide to the next 50 years. It's at best a guide to the next 14. And so, you know, when you're starting to think about what the future holds, you know, if you think that the future is going to be something like the past, well, that's about the one thing you can confidently say is not going to happen. Now, this curve is nothing new. It's been going on for a long time throughout all of evolution. I mean, if you look at the first organisms to the first mammals, that took about 400 million years to get from the first organisms to the first mammals. To get from the first mammals to the first monkeys took 150 million years. From monkeys to chimps took 30 million years. See how this is shortening? From chimps to walking erect took 16 million years. From walking erect to painting on cave walls in France took about 4 million years. From painting on cave walls to first settlement, fixed settlement, took about 10,000 years. See how the pace is picking up? And then to writing took about 4,000 years. Now, that's all biological evolution. That's what Darwin was interested in. And even that was the pace was picking up. But when we started to be able to write and have fixed settlement, then evolution kicked into an entirely different phase. It's cultural evolution because we had a brand new way of storing and sharing and collecting our ideas beyond our little tribes and to the rest of the species. Well, as soon as you kick into cultural evolution, the pace really begins to pick up. From writing to the Roman Empire takes about 4,000 years. To the industrial revolution takes about 1,800 years. From the start of the industrial revolution to the first flight, the Wright brothers took 100 years and 66 years later we're on the moon. And 20 years after that, we're in the information age, wondering what the hell we've done here and whether this is a good idea after all. And of course, what's interesting is that as you enter this information age, this is where you start getting engineered evolution, this third phase, first biological and then cultural and now engineered evolution or what I call radical evolution. And this is the point at which we start taking control of our own evolution through our own technologies. And this engineered evolution is really what I'm interested in.