Evolution accelerates. History shows that next steps in life development take less and less time to happen.
It took about 3B years to evolve from simple life-forms to multicellular organisms. Craniates appeared few hundred million years ago, mammals ten million years ago and so on.
We, as species, emerged some hundred thousand years ago. Civilization started a few thousand years ago.
The reason for this shortening of the evolution time spans is probably the fact that each sequential step is based and uses the development of all previous steps. It is easy to evolve, once you have done the hard part - start the life and sustain it for a long period of time.
This pattern of shortening the time of development is most likely to continue, unless something disruptive happens, like nuclear war, global warming (already happening), or the Moon decides to leave us (which, in fact, is also happening). Each new development requires a fraction of the time required for the previous one. ...
Fast forward to the current time. It takes less and less time to adapt new technologies. The thing is that to adapt something new, it needs to be created. This means that we are not only adapting technologies quicker, but we also create new technologies much, much faster. In fact, creating new technologies is much faster than adopting them, because companies with their agenda to make money, step into the picture and slow down this process, to derive bigger profits for longer periods of time. So, companies are effectively slowing down this process of adoption (and one may say - the evolution), which I think, is good. Let me explain why.
Based on the Moore’s law, some time close to 2020 we will have machines, with calculating power that equals the performance of the human brain. The moment this happens, we are going to loose control to the machines. Why? Their ‘brains’ are going to be electron-based (not like ours - ion based), which means they are going to be much faster. This will inevitable lead to the creation of machines, created by the machines, that will excel the power of the human brain. So, we will become the creator that needs to move to the side and let its creation develop and evolve on its own. I only hope these creations will petty us.
In each process there is an event or critical mass that will make it saturate or stall, but it still will develop, regardless some small delays.
I think we will face problems before we actually face the moment we create the super computer. Because the rate of creating and adopting new technologies constantly increases, it will become easy and affordable to implement any new idea that someone has. And because this process will be very short and cheap, it will generate enormous surplus and abundance of stuff. It will be short, because it will use more and more existing and developed technologies. It will be cheap, because there will be a lot of machines and businesses that will be able to realize your idea in months, then in days, then in hours, until we reach the moment everything we think of is going to be realized almost immediately. In fact everything we think of will most likely already being done and created by somebody else. There will be very little or no room for innovations that will become blockbusters. Marketing will become obsolete; there will be not possible to control the society, because new ways and things to go around the law and police will be almost instantly crated. The civilization as we know it will crash…
Of course, time travel will not be invented and space travel or other industries that require playing with mega-giga-tera-peta-joules will require more time to get to the saturation point, but the pattern will be the same.
This process will lead to deflation of ideas. It will be impossible for ‘old’ people to keep up with this blast of novelty, which will bring down the age people (or should I say – kids) become millionaires (if they would ever). If you look around, you will see that it in fact is already happening – if your kid is past 16-18 years old and hasn’t created his one time wonder - he is already late.
This might not look like a pretty picture, but once we are buried under the abundance we create, we might recognize that we need to develop in different ways and actually increase our wisdom. When I say wisdom, I mean we will learn how to manage and what to do with the knowledge we have gathered last few thousand years. Hopefully, the machines will get busy creating abundance of their own and will take over managing the abundance we have created. That might finally give us the chance to start searching for our souls.