Minmaxing Life

Anyone who’s been around me long enough has eventually had to suffer through one of my long winded tangent on the societal impact of technology and the probable advent of the Singularity. So, of course, Ray Kurzweil’s book’s “The Singularity Is Near” takes the place of the bible on my bed stand and it was with great anticipation I headed to South Hall yesterday morning to hear his keynote on “The next 20 years of gaming”.

However, it hasn’t been as exciting as I was hoping for since he basically gave the same speech I heard him give years ago at Siggraph. It’s a quick overview of his central idea - the law of accelerated returns - and its corollary that technological development follows an exponential growth curve. So the keynote went along these lines:

Exponential growth is very surprising and people usually don’t think that way: they make linear projections.

His interest in technology trends came from his desire of becoming an inventor. Timing is essential in building products so he makes mathematical models to project the evolution of trends.

It’s hard to predict the future on a specific project but much easier to do it on trends. He gives all his usual examples Arpanet, computer chess & Kasparov, etc… Then switches on to the democratizing effect of technology on tools of creativity, of production.

Technological trends are predictable, exponential in nature. An exponential trend is very powerful. There will be a billion fold increase in price/performance in the next 25 years. The effects go way beyond technology. It affects everything we care about: health and medicine (RNA interference allows to turn genes off), energy (solar energy efficiency is doubling every year).

He did throw into the mix a few interesting sound bites relevant to games:

- It’s unfortunate we use the name “game” because it makes it seem like it’s all pretend (oh, it’s just a game) when real things happen in game. Just like virtual reality or AI are unfortunate names.

- Play is the principal way in which we learn. We can learn real skills in games.

- Eventually “virtual reality” will be fully competitive with “real reality”.