The Law of ACCELERATING Returns

You have probably heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns, which says, for example, if you exercise for half an hour a day, you get most of the health benefits, if you exercise for an hour a day, you get almost all of the health benefits, and exercising for two, three, or four hours a day will give very little added health benefits.

However, there are situations in progress does not slow down (at least for a long while) and actually speeds up over time. People tend to see progress in technology as proceeding in a linear fashion, so they expect the 21st century (barring something truly unfortunate happening) to progress something like the way the 20th century did. But according to Ray Kurzweil, the technical progress in the 21st century will be more like 1,000 times that of the 20th century.

Here is an example. Cost to read the DNA of one person
in 1990: 3 billion dollars
in 2005: 2 million dollars
in 2006: 200,000 dollars
target for 2010-2015: 1,000 dollars

Being able to read your DNA will allow medical treatments to be tailored specifically for you, vastly improving outcomes.

This BBC Horizon program is granted sensational infotainment, but it is probably the most efficient introduction to this topic and to Ray Kurzweil.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3882715179234602208&q=human+v2.0&hl=en

This article is very long, and there may be parts that are difficult to follow, but look over the entire article because it is a map of the world we are already living in, and it shows what is coming up down the road.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1