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THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

rate of
change
The future keeps flying at us faster and
faster. How will we cope? B Y C H I P W A L T E R

N
iels Bohr, the great physicist who
hobnobbed with Albert Einstein,
once said: “Prediction is diffi-
cult—especially the future.” But it wasn’t
all that long ago that predicting the future
wasn’t hard, because we didn’t have much
of one. At least not in the sense that we
think of the future today—as a new and
improved version of the present, innovated
to the eyeballs. A mere 200 years ago,
when the industrial revolution hadn’t yet
gathered a full head of steam, life didn’t
change much from one generation to the
next. Tomorrows bore strikingly strong
resemblances to yesterdays, and time didn’t
so much pass people by as repeat itself like
the seasons.
But these days, the future hits us like an
avalanche. Every morning, we march into a
world where novelties and news seem to
tumble down upon us one boulder at a
time. The only certainty is that we have no
idea what we’ll be hit with next.
It’s not that the future wasn’t always out
there, lying in wait—it’s just that, until
recently, we didn’t really notice. Things
were changing, but they simply hadn’t
gathered enough speed for us to perceive it.
The rate of change has a lot to do with
how many forces are at work creating that
change—and with how much and how
powerfully those forces interact with one
illustration by Tim Lee
74 PITTSBURGH AUGUST 2004
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tively short space of the billion years that
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change accelerated. About 250 million years
ago, dinosaurs appeared. About 65 million
years ago came the earliest primates, 20 mil-
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AUGUST 2004 PITTSBURGH 75

 you were to sample national publications
over the past few months, you would have
come across headlines like these:
“Universe Measured: We’re 156 Billion
Light-years Wide!” (Space.com, May 24,
2004). “Scientists Find New Type of Gene
in Junk DNA” (Reuters, June 2, 2004). “In
the Era of Cheap DVD’s, Anyone Can Be
a Producer” (The New York Times, May 20,
2004). “Risk of Radioactive ‘Dirty Bomb’
Growing” (NewScientist.com, June 2,
2004). “The New ‘Molecular Economy’
[Is Here]” (BusinessWeek Online, May
25, 2004). “Study: Self-replicating Nano-
machines Feasible” (Small Times, June 2,
2004).
If you’re feeling as if you have whiplash,
you do. The world has reached a state in
which the rate of change is not simply fast,
but exponential.
T
o comprehend why events seem to
be gathering so much speed, you
have to understand how exponen-
tial acceleration works. There’s an old
apocryphal story that cunningly illustrates
it. The emperor of India (in some tellings,
it’s China) sends out a decree to all the land
that he wants a new game invented.
Whoever comes up with this new game
will be handsomely rewarded. After a
while, all the entries are considered, and
one, created by an old man, clearly stands
out: chess. The emperor is so pleased with
this new and fascinating amusement that
he asks the old man to name his reward.
“One grain of rice,” the old man meekly
requests.
“One grain?!” asks the emperor.
“I mean one grain on the first square of
the chessboard. Two on the second,” the
old man clarifies, “four on the third, eight
on the fourth and so on, please, Your
Majesty.”
The emperor immediately complies, fig-
uring he’s made a great bargain: a few
grains of rice in exchange for the world’s
cleverest game.
Except he hasn’t done the math. There
are 64 squares on a chessboard, which
means that, starting with the second
square, the old man has requested two
grains of rice to the 63rd power—the num-
ber two doubled successively 63 times. As
with changes on planet Earth 3 1/2 billion
years ago, the first doublings of rice don’t
seem to amount to much. Two, four, eight,
16, 32, 64, 128… just a handful of rice,
76 PITTSBURGH AUGUST 2004
hardly any difference at all. But by the time
that you reach the 64th square, a single rice
grain has become 18 million billion ker-
nels. At 10 grains per square inch, all of
the planet, including the oceans, would be
covered with rice, twice over.
Shrewd old man. And a very surprised
emperor. (In some versions of the story, the
emperor resolves his problem by beheading
the old man. So being clever doesn’t always
get you what you want.)
If you mapped life on earth onto this
chessboard, these days you might position
us somewhere around the 45th square. By
that time, the number of rice grains is in
the tens of trillions, with the number still
due for 19 more doublings.
Sitting as we are on square 45, we’re
beginning to see just how much rice is pil-
ing up and how the piling is gaining speed.
More people are joining the party. We’ve
gone from fire and the wheel to the print-
ing press and the steam engine, from the
atom bomb to the archiving of our DNA.
Each breakthrough has enabled the next,
and each has dramatically redefined what
we mean by “the future.”
Soon, our tomorrows will bear very little
resemblance to our todays.
W
e are, of course, brewing up
some of these change agents
right here in Pittsburgh. At
places like the Mellon Institute, where rad-
ically new polymers and chemicals are
being designed down to the molecule. Or
at UPMC’s McGowan Institute, where
chimeric organs, part biology and part
technology, are being hatched. At Rand, the
Heinz School of Public Policy and the
CERT Coordination Center, thinkers are
trying to keep pace with all of the changes.
Computer scientists, engineers and robot-
ics experts at Carnegie Mellon, Seagate and
Intel keep shaping and reshaping the future
by the week. The party favors are out, and
the confetti is flying.
There’s a profound irony in all of this. We
humans are currently the most powerful
creators of change in the mix. Yet we may
be the least able to cope with it.
Each day, tomorrow becomes more diffi-
cult to predict. Yet every day it becomes
increasingly important to get a handle on it.
Debates about cloning and stem-cell
research provide just a glimpse of the ethi-
cal, legal, social and technological issues
we’ll soon be facing. Nanotechnology,
biotechnology, artificial intelligence and
pharmacology will make the questions
raised by the human genome project look
like a riverside stroll.
A few years back, Bill Joy, one of the
founders of Sun Microsystems, wrote a
famous article titled “Why the Future
Doesn’t Need Us” (Wired Magazine, April
2000), in which he suggested we simply
put the brakes on. Stop developing certain
technologies. I can’t say I agree much with
this, for the simple reason that you can’t
stop worldwide technological advance any
more than you could have stopped the evo-
lution of clown fish, stink bugs or
Galapagos finches. Human cloning is going
to happen no matter what our personal
opinions. Computing will become more
pervasive. Nanotechnologies will emerge.
What high-tech company, pharmaceutical
giant or curious researcher is going to stop
developing new and improved versions of
whatever is developed?
On the other hand—we might endeavor
to be less mindless about which technolo-
gies we bring into the world. We might
thoughtfully consider some of the unin-
tended consequences that could result
when we combine nanotechnology and
wireless computing to create self-replicating
machines that have the intelligence of
today’s supercomputers—which should be
possible in fewer than 20 years. We can’t
stop the advance of technology and science
and probably shouldn’t, but we can think
harder about what we are doing rather than
proliferating innovation the way lemmings
proliferate lemmings.
An Institute for the Future might be a
good idea, right here in Pittsburgh. A place
where innovators and inventors, policy
makers and politicians, journalists and
artists can put their heads together, thrash
out the possibilities, consider the assets and
liabilities of what could be and wonder
what it is we really want. Rather than sim-
ply reacting to the powerful technologies
that are emerging, rather than racing to
keep up, we could scout the horizon and
consider today the accelerating avalanches
headed our way before they arrive. Rather
than ignorantly cower beneath the shadow
of what may be, we could put our inventive
minds to work and imagine not simply how
we will survive or adapt to the future, but
how we can shape it so that it becomes one
that we actually want.
That’s an advancement I could live with.