In 2004 and 2005 I helped John Smart organize the Accelerating Change Conferences. At both of them Ray Kurzweil gave the keynote. (In 2004 Ray tried to be present via hologram from New York, but the technology wasn't there yet and we ended up with a conference call.)
His prediction is, that within the next 20 years, technology will accelerate to a point, where the computational power of computers will surpass human intelligence: The Singularity. Check his presentation at Google from 2 months ago, if you want to get his latest insights.
The cool thing is, he will be the keynote speaker together with Vishal Sikka from SAP at SAP TechEd in Phoenix later this year.
Vishal is one of the smartest people at SAP and instead of accelerating change and hockey sticks he looked at our lessons learned from 30 years of enterprise software development and derived the concept of timeless software from it.
In a couple of hours (Wednesday 9th 2pm PST) Vishal and Ray will do a live video conversation that you shouldn't miss.
According to some calculations, about 50% of the worlds GDP touches at least one SAP system, that gives us a unique perspective on what is going on at enterprises worldwide.
Yes, technology is accelerating, but the complexity of our systems that are running our companies is accelerating as well. Not sure which one has the upper hand.
I also can't shake the feeling that Mitch Kapor may be right, who called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me.
Rumor has it, that the live twitter stream will be integrated into the video conversation. Tweet with you there soon.
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