New figures released by the ITU (the UN agency for information and communication technologies) indicates 3.2 billion people online worldwide by the end of 2015 with — 2 billion of them — live in developing countries.
Since the millennium,mobile subscriptions rose from from 738 million to 7 billion worldwide, and Internet penetration from 6.5 percent to 43 percent of the global population. Almost half of the homes across the world now have internet access (46 percent), which is up from 18 percent in 2005.
As for mobile broadband, the number of users surfing on their phones increased by a factor of 12 since 2007, reaching 47 percent this year.
What will the internet of things bring to the party?
ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao commented: “These new figures not only show the rapid technological progress made to date, but also help us identify those being left behind in the fast-evolving digital economy, as well as the areas where ICT investment is needed most”.
Brahima Sanou, Director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau,observed: “ICTs will play an even more significant role in the post-2015 era and in achieving future Sustainable Development Goals as the world moves faster and faster towards a digital society. Our mission is to connect everyone and to create a truly inclusive information society, for which we need comparable and high-quality data and statistics to measure progress
This explosive growth reflects Google Futurist Ray Kurzweil core thesis, called “the Law of Accelerating Returns .(He made headlines with provocative yet often accurate predictions, like that a computer would beat a human in chess (already happened) or that self-driving cars would take us everywhere (starting to happen). Kurzweil’s theory states that “fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories.”
Information technology progresses exponentially. With exponential growth, it’s one, two, four, eight,… and you’re soon at a billion.
The most famous example is “Moore’s Law,” named for Intel cofounder Gordon Moor,who in 1965predicted that “the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months. In 1969 I did metallurgical research on Silicon chip manufacure and 1000 components on a chip was about the limit then and such a chip cost about the same as small car.. Computers have shrunk from filling up a room to filling up your pocket, all while becoming way more powerful.
He cites the analogy of the supposed inventor of chess and his patron, the Emperor of China. In response to the emperor’s offer of a reward for his new beloved game, the inventor asked for a single grain of rice on the first square, two on the second square, four on the third, and so on. The Emperor quickly granted this seemingly benign and humble request. One version of the story has the emperor going bankrupt as the 63 doublings ultimately totaled 18 million trillion grains of rice. At ten grains of rice per square inch, this requires rice fields covering twice the surface area of the Earth, oceans included. Another version of the story has the inventor losing his head. Therein lies the most terrifying, exciting, and mystifying aspect of Kurzweil’s thesis.
From an IT perspective we are somewhere in the middle of that chessboard. When the inventor went through the first half of the chess board, things were fairly uneventful. The inventor was given spoonfuls of rice, then bowls of rice, then barrels. By the end of the first half of the chess board, the inventor had accumulated one large field’s worth (4 billion grains), and the emperor did start to take notice.
When a technology like a a fax, then email, then a smartphone comes in and suddenly shifts our entire culture we start to realize how quickly things are accelerating. Humans are linear by thought process whereas technology is exponential.
“As exponential growth continues to accelerate into the first half of the twenty-first century,” he writes. “It will appear to explode into infinity, at least from the limited and linear perspective of contemporary humans.” The consequences of that moment — which is inevitable if Kurzweil’s theories hold — are widely debated.
Elon Musk has repeatedly said that we should be afraid of these high technologies. He’s said that “with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon,” and that it poses the “biggest existential threat to humans.”But for the rest of us, the issue isn’t whether the Law of Accelerating Returns is good or bad. Simply that it exists. “As humans, we are biased to think linearly,” writes Peter Diamandis, the futurist and XPRIZE CEO. “As entrepreneurs, we need to think exponentially.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ray-kurzweil-law-of-accelerating-returns-2015-5#ixzz3bR4CVLMd
