A blog authored by Frank Whittemore whose life has thus far extended into its 70th year.
I’m definitely a believer that change is accelerating. As a kid I can remember watching a horse drawn plough, a logger using his horse to drag logs out of the woods and riding trolleys in the city of New Haven, Connecticut prior to buses taking over.
In college I was an accounting major. The last paragraph in my last auditing textbook said that in the future some accounting work would be done on computers. That was in May 1961. It was my full exposure to computers. Upon graduating from the University of Connecticut, I had never even seen a computer.
Two weeks later I was assigned to what GE called a business programming unit. My first programming consisted of wiring a board to process 80-column punched cards in an electronic accounting machine. Soon I was programming a multi-million dollar IBM mainframe computer. All programs and data were keypunched into cards. The cards were read by a card reader and copied onto tape. The tapes were then taken over to the mainframe to be processed one job at a time. Disk space was not yet available.
Now my cell phone has more processing power than that mainframe computer plus a camera, audio and video. In addition, everyone collaborates via the Internet - often wirelessly. I have no trouble noticing that change is accelerating at an ever increasing rate.
I have no trouble understanding Ray Kurzweil’s case for exponential rather than linear rates of change. Yes, “The Singularity is Near” and Life Extension is a part of that.
I hope that you enjoy this blog and find it educational in providing Life Extension information and news. Please suggest additions, corrections and improvements by commenting on my blog posts.
Here are more examples supporting the position that change is accelerating at an ever increasing pace -
My wife and I recently watched a Netflix DVD documenting the Lewis and Clark expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. It has been described as the most courageous and important expedition in American history. It took place before the automobile. It took place before the railroads. Their roundtrip took 2 and 1/2 years to complete. A week ago, a grandson made the trip from California to Afghanistan in 3 days.
Did I mention working on the Apollo Program resulting in our Moon landings? Did I mention that our local DVD, movie rental store just closed?