The perennial question of whether life is becoming more complex at an ever increasing pace is hard to resolve. Technologists love to engage in hyperbole about how the information society is ramping up. Historians – conservative by training – point out that the concerns of people as reflected in Shakespeare’s dramas, Plato’s dialogs, or even in Homer or passages from the Old Testament are as sophisticated and multi-faceted as the informational burdens of the man on the street as we enter the 21^st century.

Perhaps an even broader net must be cast to settle this question. Based on a number of books about the evolution of knowledge, I graphed a measure of the ability of knowledge to spread around the world at different evolutionary stages. Admittedly, there are serious problems with my graph as a scientific theory. The measure I used was necessarily fuzzy in order to apply to the broad range of "knowledge technologies" I wanted to consider. Moreover, all the dates and times are unacceptably rough – at best orders of magnitude. However, the result I arrived at was incredible (not just in the sense of being scientifically un-credible).

I relied for my data primarily on three books.² Dawkins (1976) traces the origins of life back to chemical replicators existing 3.5 billion years ago on Earth, and shows how they involved into cells housing modern DNA. Maturana & Varela (1987) connect these biological roots to contemporary human understanding. Finally, Donald (1991) defines episodic, mimetic, and cultural forms of human memory as the primary stages leading up to our current development of computer-assisted external memories. I made a chart listing the various forms of memory I could distill from these books. For each form of memory I listed the date that it evolved as well as a measure of its "inertia". By inertia I mean the time it takes for an idea to spread around the world given a particular form of memory. I then graphed the date of appearance of each new memory technology versus its inertia.

The result was that the relationship being graphed turned out to be doubly exponential! The term "doubly exponential" is an uncommon mathematical term because there is virtually no phenomenon in nature that evolves so fast. ³ In graphical terms, this means that when graphed on log-log paper (log of time since historical appearance versus log of knowledge inertia) the relationship is a straight line. This certainly seems to be a strong indication that when observed at an evolutionary scale things are speeding up rather quickly.

A possible interpretation of the doubly exponential nature of the growth is that there are two phenomena interacting, both of which are growing exponentially. That is, significant new memory technologies are emerging at a faster and faster rate. And the effect of these successive technologies is more and more extreme. These two phenomena may, in fact, drive each other.

What are the consequences of this rapid evolution of knowledge? For the historians, I guess it means that they had best start to chronicle these changes faster. For the technologists, I think it means that the impact of memory enhancing technologies will have great repercussions. The World Wide Web, for instance, is becoming an essential global external memory at a speed nobody could have predicted. Software to take advantage of this memory will multiply the power of this memory technology beyond our ability to predict. As with every advance in memory technology, the real impact is only felt when social practices adapt themselves to the new capabilities. But, given the rapidly diminishing inertia of knowledge, this is also happening at break-neck speed.⁴

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