Living in the knee of the curve

Matt pointed out this fantastic Douglas Adams quote from his blog. It's serindipitous, tying back to a conversation I was having with my co-worker Seth last night as we flew back from LA. We were talking about Kurzweil's idea of life in the "knee of the curve" -- the doubling-curve of technological change.

Doubling curves are nearly flat for a long time, then voom, they take off skywards in a hot second. Seth made the (no doubt mathematically correct) point that there is no point in a doubling curve that we can call the knee, but socially, I believe that the knee of the curve comes when we reach a point where generation gaps start to manifest.

There were multi-hundred-year spans of human history when people knew everything they needed to know to conduct themselves in the world by the time they reached adulthood, and passed that knowledge onto their children.

These days, it seems that there are no multi-hundred day spans of life in industrial society during which the body of knowledge necessary to conduct your daily round remains static.

"We're moving towards a 'Creole' of technological concepts. The idea comes from language theory, specifically Steven Pinker's work where adults come together in an area with lots of different languages and end up coming up with a broken, lumpy language that is put together as a pidgin language. When the next generation comes along, however, it becomes more sophisticated and develops into a real language, then called a Creole. You only have to watch kids today using technology to realise the similarities, and that we adults are very much the pidgins."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)