Quotes About Acceleration

Our ability to create models—virtual realities—in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips.

it took ninety years to achieve the first MIPS per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every five hours.

The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes).

Computers doubled in speed every three years at the beginning of the twentieth century, every two years in the 1950s and 1960s, and are now doubling in speed every twelve months.

The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace.

I can understand why many observers do not readily embrace the obvious implications of what I have called the law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution).

We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over. We were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world which seems to be accelerating around them.

Man, that woman was quick when she wanted to be. But put her behind the wheel of a Buick.

They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops, and that's true. What they don't tell you is that when it starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up.

Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.

There's so much more power, so you're short-shifting all the way down into fifth, sixth, seventh before you can get the full throttle. But great fun otherwise.

The present generation doesn't know what a milestone is. They go so fast nowadays that miles mean nothing.

The modern era is the briefest but most turbulent of the three main eras of human history. Whereas the era of foragers lasted more than 200,000 years and the agrarian era about 10,000 years, the modern era has lasted just 250 years. Yet during this brief era change has been more rapid and more fundamental than ever before; indeed, populations have grown so fast that 20 percent of all humans may have lived during just these two and a half centuries.

the number of dirigibles made per year has not increased according to this pattern. The average number of cats per household has not increased exponentially. This made, briefly, for a fun game. It's not too hard to come up with metrics that have not kept pace with the Great Acceleration. Yet, in the end, this exercise in contrarian thinking only reinforces the point: any set of meaningful measures will reveal the same pattern. Venus

I feel the need... the need for speed.

The flowers' beauty drew her closer to them like a magnetic force. She felt compelled to walk a little faster.

He is accelerating all the time. That last lap was run in 64 seconds and the one before in 62.

I love running. I'm not into marathons, but I am into avoiding problems at an accelerated rate.

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It's not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It's more of a diminishment of anything that isn't happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.

Everything is already moving so very fast, but you need a great deal more speed than this to escape the earth's gravitational pull. Seven miles per second. More fuel, please.

Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time.

Every time you accelerate - say by jumping up and down - you're generating gravitational waves.

I don't see it as coincidence that the great acceleration of the Anthropocene influences on Earth came during the same decades as our first exploration of the other planets.