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(automated mechanical machines). Ultimately, with sophisticated computational and communication devices, technology was itself capable of sensing, storing, and evaluating elaborate patterns of information. To compare the rate of progress of the biological evolution of intelligence to that of technological evolution, consider that the most advanced mammals have added about one cubic inch of brain matter every hundred thousand years, whereas we are roughly doubling the computational capacity of computers every year (see the next chapter). Of course, neither brain size nor computer capacity is the sole determinant of intelligence, but they do represent enabling factors.
    If we place key milestones of both biological evolution and human technological development on a single graph plotting both the
x
-axis (number ofyears ago) and the
y
-axis (the paradigm-shift time) on logarithmic scales, we find a reasonably straight line (continual acceleration), with biological evolution leading directly to human-directed development. 11

     
    Countdown to Singularity:
Biological evolution and human technology both show continual acceleration, indicated by the shorter time to the next event (two billion years from the origin of life to cells; fourteen years from the PC to the World Wide Web) .

     
    Linear view of evolution:
This version of the preceding figure uses the same data but with a linear scale for time before present instead of a logarithmic one. This shows the acceleration more dramatically, but details are not visible. From a linear perspective, most key events have just happened “recently.”
    The above figures reflect my view of key developments in biological and technological history. Note, however, that the straight line, demonstrating the continual acceleration of evolution, does not depend on my particular selection of events. Many observers and reference books have compiled lists of important events in biological and technological evolution, each of which has its own idiosyncrasies. Despite the diversity of approaches, however, if we combine lists from a variety of sources (for example, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, the American Museum of Natural History, Carl Sagan’s “cosmic calendar,” and others), we observe the same obvious smooth acceleration. The following plot combines fifteen different lists of key events. 12 Since different thinkers assign different dates to the same event, and different lists include similar or overlapping events selected according to different criteria, we see an expected “thickening” of the trend line due to the “noisiness” (statistical variance) of this data. The overall trend, however, is very clear.

     
    Fifteen views of evolution:
Major paradigm shifts in the history of the world, as seen by fifteen different lists of key events. There is a clear trend of smooth acceleration through biological and then technological evolution .
    Physicist and complexity theorist Theodore Modis analyzed these lists and determined twenty-eight clusters of events (which he called canonical milestones) by combining identical, similar, and/or related events from the different lists. 13 This process essentially removes the “noise” (for example, the variability of dates between lists) from the lists, revealing again the same progression:

     
    Canonical milestones based on clusters of events from thirteen lists .
    The attributes that are growing exponentially in these charts are order and complexity, concepts we will explore in the next chapter. This acceleration matches our commonsense observations. A billion years ago, not much happened over the course of even one million years. But a quarter-million years ago epochal events such as the evolution of our species occurred in time frames of just one hundred thousand years. In technology, if we go back fifty thousand years, not much happened over a one-thousand-year period. But in the recent past, we see new paradigms, such as the World Wide Web,