John Smart

In our best current understanding, the history of universal evolutionary development has always seen an increasingly faster development of computational complexity (modeling intelligence) within special subsets of locally emergent forms. Carl Sagan first popularized this in his famous metaphor of the "Cosmic Calendar." Place all universal history on a calendar year, and the closer you get to the end of the calendar, the faster change goes, with the pace of change continually accelerating.

Eric Chaisson (Cosmic Evolution, 2002) has recently given the calendar a helpful thermodynamic explanation. He notes that as universal development moved from galaxies to solar systems to life-friendly planets to microbes to plants to animals to human brains to computing technology, each new computational system in this hierarchy has operated with significantly greater free energy rate density (energy available for computation per volume per unit time). This increased energy density has allowed each of these complex systems, whether living or nonliving, to model and react to its environment far more rapidly and extensively than its predecessors. There is also independent data that later-developed systems in this hierarchy are significantly more resource efficient (per physical or computational output), denser, and more miniaturized. This impressive resource efficiency and energy density of the most newly emergent systems apparently allows the leading edge of universal intelligence to continually avoid resource limits to accelerating growth.

In human history anthropologists have long noted that significant cultural advances (neolithic tool kits, architectures, language, civil society, law, science) have emerged at an accelerating rate in human history. Many scholars (Jared Diamond, James Burke, Robert Wright) consider such factors as increasing population density, technological diffusion, and communication rates to be key drivers of these sociotechnological accelerations.

Over the last millennium, rates of planetary technological innovation and diffusion have broadly accelerated as a whole, with ever-briefer pauses between each new phase of acceleration. The increasingly rapid development of what may be called the "average distributed complexity" of our sociotechnological systems has been apparent even as catastrophes, declines, wars and revolutions have caused local discontinuities within specific civilizations.

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