Long-Term Dynamics of Technological Growth: Would it Lead Us to the Singularity?

In this chapter, the authors set the following tasks: (1) to make forecasts about how technological progress will develop in the twenty-first century, with a slowdown or an acceleration; (2) to show how the change in the pace of technological progress is related to global aging and the development of this process. Grinin et al. solve these problems on the basis of the theory of production revolutions and certain mathematical methods. The authors find that the general dynamics of accelerating technological growth over the past 40,000 years can be described with amazing accuracy (R2 = 0.99) by a simple hyperbolic equation: yt = C/(t0 – t). The authors’ analysis shows that in the coming decades the global technological growth rate will return to a hyperbolic trajectory at the beginning of the final phase of the Cybernetic Revolution (i.e., from the 2030s–2040s). The acceleration will continue up to the late twenty-first century. Then, technological growth will gradually slow down towards the end of the twenty-first century as suggested by the singularity point in the year 2106. As the reader will see, global aging will play a leading role in the changes, first in the acceleration and then the slowdown of the rate of the technological progress.