Trends are fun to analyze — just ask Ray Kurzweil. He’s made a career out of basically a single insight, expertly unpacked over the course of several decades: things that have happened in the past will, in absence of any new confounding variables, probably proceed much the same way in the future.
The most famous incarnation of this is Moore’s Law, which says that the speed of computer processors will roughly double every two years — yet even this, the load-bearing pillar of the ideology of exponential growth, is about to smack straight into the limitations of the real world. Unless something drastic happens very soon, Moore’s Law will not describe our coming decade or two of computer development. So, what other historical trends might end in the coming decades of radical social and technological change? The most obvious is population.
Not long ago, we covered an alarming United Nations report that argued global population will explode to hit 11 billion by 2100. That’s a claim that, if true, would mean almost unimaginable changes around the world, even with the prediction that most of the growth will come in Africa alone. This study took the Kurzweilian view, that any impediments to the progression of an easy mathematical model for human development will naturally work themselves out so as to preserve their nice smooth graphs — but this week, a new book from an Austrian demography group argues that those graphs might have to get a lot less pretty. In particular, by taking the effects of education into account, they project a very Moore-like flattening of our global population graph…. see more
source: geek
Tags: Global Population, Science
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