[kobeya]

> baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts

I'm not a fan of Kurzweil, but isn't this really one of his claims with the most data behind it? His presentations on exponential trends is always accompanied with endless citations of data points that went into it. He has (or had prior to Google?) a research team whose job was to find this data.

[Iv]

Just go at page 17

http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/SingularityisNear_Chapter1....

and see the kind of bogus things he puts together to fit his narrative of accelerating shifts. He puts no paradigm shift between the apparition of city states the invention of the printing press but he separates the inventions of computers and the invention of personal computers as two paradigm shifts.

I did not check all the sources he uses in the graph page 19 but I suspect the same bias: we ascribe more importance to events closer to us than to events further in the past.

[kobeya]

In the context of information technology that's perhaps somewhat accurate though, right? City states centralized information into religious and political power structures. That pretty much stayed the same until the invention of the printing press. Maybe you could add the invention of double entry accounting and the banking industry it created, which allowed cooperation between disparate city states. But I'm not sure what else might be an epoch in between.

[Iv]

Gee, I don't know... Paper? Books? Libraries? Big empires with a uniform language? Roads networks? Trade routes? Accurate copying of books? Schools? University? Logic?