{"id":978,"date":"2008-06-17T07:32:19","date_gmt":"2008-06-17T06:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=978"},"modified":"2008-06-17T07:32:19","modified_gmt":"2008-06-17T06:32:19","slug":"can-science-secure-our-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=978","title":{"rendered":"Can science secure our future?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>American futurist <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ray_Kurzweil\">Raymond Kurzweil<\/a> certainly thinks so &#8211; as explained in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/06\/03\/science\/03tier.html\">this article<\/a> from the &#8220;New York Times&#8221;.<br \/>\nKey to understanding his optimism is appreciating that science grows not linearly but exponentially and acknowledging what Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cScientists imagine they\u2019ll keep working at the present pace. They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they\u2019d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you\u2019ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>American futurist Raymond Kurzweil certainly thinks so &#8211; as explained in this article from the &#8220;New York Times&#8221;. Key to understanding his optimism is appreciating that science grows not linearly but exponentially and acknowledging what Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns: \u201cScientists imagine they\u2019ll keep working at the present pace. They make linear extrapolations [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}