Law Of Acceleration Quotes

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.

Biotechnology isn’t just accelerating at the speed of Moore’s law, it’s accelerating at five times the speed of Moore’s law—doubling in power and halving in price every four months!

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence. So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours.

These moments of intoxication, when we defy everything, when, the anchor raised, we go merrily toward the abyss, with no more thought for the inevitable fall than for the limits given in the beginning, are the only ones when we are completely free of the ground (of laws) … Nothing exists that doesn’t have this senseless sense - common to flames, dreams, uncontrollable laughter - in those moments when consumption accelerates, beyond the desire to endure. Even utter senselessness ultimately is always this sense made of the negation of all the others. (Isn’t this sense basically that of each particular being who, as such, is the senselessness of all the others, but only if he doesn’t care a damn about enduring - and thought (philosophy) is at the limit of this conflagration, like a candle blown out at the limit of a flame.)

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment—that of looking down within the tarn—had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.

You must surrender your attachment to the outcome in order to make your greatest dreams come true. You must release your urgency and your need for control. Then your attitude of Trust will actually accelerate the Universal Laws, helping the process along.

The Magic Formula: Deliberately think and say the magic words, thank you. The more you deliberately think and say the magic words, thank you, the more gratitude you feel. The more gratitude you deliberately think and feel, the more abundance you receive. Gratitude is a feeling. So the ultimate aim in practicing gratitude is to deliberately feel it as much as you can, because it’s the force of your feeling that accelerates the magic in your life. Newton’s law is one for one – what you give you receive, equally. That means that if you increase your feeling of gratitude, the results in your life will expand to be equal to your feeling! The truer the feeling, the more sincerely grateful you are, the faster your life will change.

Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore’s law. These are the numbers: Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents! Intel engineers also estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as Moore’s law, you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline. What

In accordance with the law of accelerating returns, paradigm shift (also called innovation) turns the S-curve of any specific paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm, such as three-dimensional circuits, takes over when the old paradigm approaches its natural limit, which has already happened at least four times in the history of computation. In such nonhuman species as apes, the mastery of a toolmaking or -using skill by each animal is characterized by an S-shaped learning curve that ends abruptly; human-created technology, in contrast, has followed an exponential pattern of growth and acceleration since its inception.

Social media would further accelerate the ascendance of what the Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu described as “the preening self” and the urge to “capture the attention of others with the spectacle of one’s self.

If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.

The Ego is ignorant towards both sigils and symbols, but they both give the Ego a flow of knowledge from themselves. All knowledge of ideas, gained by means of sigils, should be re-clothed in pure symbolism to designate and stimulate its own wisdom. Symbolism is also a means of accelerating and exhausting by living a belief instead of repressing it by choice rather than of necessity, which serves its own time. All begging, self-punishment, sacrifice, etc., is but an attempt to escape the law of reaction or Karma, and by symbolising the reading of these laws, they hope to take that power from nature.

If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began. Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.” Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there. If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.

Pearson’s Law states, “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.

However, as you’ll learn in this book, when you trust that the Universe has your best intentions in mind, you can unravel yourself from that which you do not want.

pain and suffering results from not letting go.

Let us not, however, exaggerate our power. Whatever man does, the great lines of creation persist; the supreme mass does not depend on man. He has power over the detail, not over the whole. And it is right that this should be so. The Whole is providential. Its laws pass over our head. What we do goes no farther than the surface. Man clothes or unclothes the earth; clearing a forest is like taking off a garment. But to slow down the rotation of the globe on its axis, to accelerate the course of the globe on its orbit, to add or subtract a fathom on he earth's daily journey of 718,000 leagues around the sun, to modify the precession of the equinoxes, to eliminate one drop of rain--never! What is on high remains on high. Man can change the climate, but not the seasons Just try and make the moon revolve anywhere but in the ecliptic! Dreamers, some of them illustrious, have dreamed of restoring perpetual spring to the earth. The extreme seasons, summer and winter, are produced by the excess of the inclination of the earth's axis over the place of the ecliptic of which we have just spoken. In order to eliminate the seasons it would be necessary only to straighten this axis. Nothing could be simpler. Just plant a stake on the Pole and drive it in to the center of the globe; attach a chain to it; find a base outside the earth; have 10 billion teams, each of 10 billion horses, and get them to pull. THe axis will straighten up, ad you will have your spring. As you can see, an easy task. We must look elsewhere for Eden. Spring is good; but freedom and justice are beter. Eden is moral, not material. To be free and just depends on ourselves.

However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the

The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs—such as affordable aerial ridesharing—will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time. It

However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the order created by biological evolution.

One afternoon in the fall of 2015, while I was writing this book, I was driving in my car and listening to SiriusXM Radio. On the folk music station the Coffee House, a song came on with a verse that directly spoke to me—so much so that I pulled off the road as soon as I could and wrote down the lyrics and the singer’s name. The song was called “The Eye,” and it’s written by the country-folk singer Brandi Carlile and her bandmate Tim Hanseroth and sung by Carlile. I wish it could play every time you open these pages, like a Hallmark birthday card, because it’s become the theme song of this book. The main refrain is: I wrapped your love around me like a chain But I never was afraid that it would die You can dance in a hurricane But only if you’re standing in the eye. I hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law. Some politicians propose to build a wall against this hurricane. That is a fool’s errand. There is only one way to thrive now, and it’s by finding and creating your own eye. The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.

In the 1954 Internal Revenue Code, a Republican Congress changed forty-year, straight-line depreciation for buildings to permit 'accelerated depreciation' of greenfield income-producing property in seven years. By enabling owners to depreciate or write off the value of a building in such a short time, the law created a gigantic hidden subsidy for the developers of cheap new commercial buildings located on strips. Accelerated depreciation not only encouraged poor construction, it also discouraged maintenance...After time, the result was abandonment.

The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess, the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle.... Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections — nearly six times as many positions as in chess.... [A game of go] can last up to three hundred moves. The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy. Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble: You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate your opponent in small areas and then encircle them... Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponents' stones at an accelerated pace.

all of my bases covered. You assume responsibility for violations of local, regional, global, intrasystem, interstellar, intergalactic and interdimensional law, civil, religious, or military. I’m also not responsible for loss of life and limb, property damage, domestic disputes, engineered biological human dieback, nuclear fallout, violations of causality, cascading sub-quantum misalignment, hastening of cosmic heat death, rampant AI, accelerated climate change, geomagnetic reversal, vacuum metastability events, total existence failure, gray goo scenario, red goo scenario--that’s a nasty one--tectonic inversion--

The strengths of social interaction and the flows of information exchange are greatest between terminal units (that is, between individuals) and systematically decrease up the hierarchy of group structures from families and other groups to increasingly larger clusters, leading to superlinear scaling, increasing returns, and an accelerating pace of life.

because of Marx’s capacity to discover the long-term laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production in its essence, irrespective of thousands of ‘impurities’ and of secondary aspects, that his long-term predictions – the laws of accumulation of capital, stepped-up technological progress, accelerated increase in the productivity and intensity of labour, growing concentration and centralization of capital, transformation of the great majority of economically active people into sellers of labour-power, declining rate of profit, increased rate of surplus value, periodically recurrent recessions, inevitable class struggle between Capital and Labour, increasing revolutionary attempts to overthrow capitalism – have been so strikingly confirmed by history.

The relentless acceleration of computer hardware over decades suggests that we’ve somehow managed to remain on the steep part of the S-curve for far longer than has been possible in other spheres of technology. The reality, however, is that Moore’s Law has involved successfully climbing a staircase of cascading S-curves, each representing a specific semiconductor fabrication technology.

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out. The algorithm was sometimes accompanied by a few corollaries, among them: All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword. Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided. It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong. Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers. When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor — whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" — although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation — sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion — the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

Newton's law of gravity says that the acceleration of any object as it orbits another is proportional to the mass of the body it is orbiting.......Thus if you know the speed of a body in orbit around a star and its distance from the star, you can measure the mass of that star. The same holds for stars in orbit around the center of their galaxy; by measuring the orbital speeds of the stars, you can measure the distribution of mass in that galaxy.

As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate.” In his handbook Leading Teams, Hackman reminds us of “Brook’s Law”: the adage that adding staff to speed up a behind-schedule project “has no better chance of working … than would a scheme to produce a baby quickly by assigning nine women to be pregnant for one month each … adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

As an object approaches the speed of light, its apparent mass also increases. Newton’s law that force equals mass times acceleration still holds, but as the apparent mass increases, more and more force will produce less and less acceleration. There is no way to apply enough force to push even a pebble faster than the speed of light. That’s the ultimate speed limit of the universe, and no particle or piece of information can go faster than that, according to Einstein’s theory.

Mattilon’s law firm in the Paris directory. He wrote it out, brought it to an operator and said he would pay in cash. He was told to go to booth number seven and wait for the ring. He entered it quickly, the soft cloth brim of his hat falling over his forehead above the tortoiseshell glasses. Any enclosure, whether a toilet stall or a glass booth, was preferable to being out in the open. He felt his pulse accelerating; it seemed to explode when the bell rang. “Saint-Pierre, Nelli, et Mattilon,” said the female voice in Paris. “Monsieur Mattilon, please—s’il vous plaît.” “Votre …?” The woman stopped, undoubtedly recognizing an American’s abysmal attempt at French. “Who may I say is calling, please?” “His friend from New York. He’ll know. I’m a client.” René did know. After several clicks his strained voice came on the line. “Joel?” he whispered. “I don’t believe it!” “Don’t,” said Converse. “It’s not true—not what they say about Geneva or Bonn, not even what you said. I had nothing to do with those killings, and Paris was an accident. I had every reason to think—I did think—that man was reaching for a gun.” “Why didn’t you stay where you were, then, my friend?” “Because they wanted to stop me from going on. It’s what I honestly believed, and I couldn’t let them do that. Let me talk.… At the George Cinq you asked me questions and I gave you evasive answers and I think you saw through me. But you were kind and went along. You have nothing to be sorry about, take my word for it—my very sane word. Bertholdier came to me that evening in my room; we talked and he panicked. Six days ago I saw him again here in Bonn—only, this time it was different.

Then there occurred to me the 'glucklichste Gedanke meines Lebens,' the happiest thought of my life, in the following form. The gravitational field has only a relative existence in a way similar to the electric field generated by magnetoelectric induction. Because for an observer falling freely from the roof of a house there exists-at least in his immediate surroundings-no gravitational field [his italics]. Indeed, if the observer drops some bodies then these remain relative to him in a state of rest or of uniform motion, independent of their particular chemical or physical nature (in this consideration the air resistance is, of course, ignored). The observer therefore has the right to interpret his state as 'at rest.' Because of this idea, the uncommonly peculiar experimental law that in the gravitational field all bodies fall with the same acceleration attained at once a deep physical meaning. Namely, if there were to exist just one single object that falls in the gravitational field in a way different from all others, then with its help the observer could realize that he is ina gravitational field and is falling in it. If such an object does not exist, however-as experience has shown with great accuracy-then the observer lacks any objective means of perceiving himself as falling in a gravitational field. Rather he has the right to consider his state as one of rest and his environment as field-free relative to gravitation. The experimentally known matter independence of the acceleration of fall is therefore a powerful argument for the fact that the relativity postulate has to be extended to coordinate systems which, relative to each other, are in non-uniform motion.

It is the core argument of this book that these simultaneous accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law together constitute the “age of accelerations,” in which we now find ourselves. These are the central gears driving the Machine today. These three accelerations are impacting one another—more Moore’s law is driving more globalization and more globalization is driving more climate change, and more Moore’s law is also driving more potential solutions to climate change and a host of other challenges—and at the same time transforming almost every aspect of modern life.

Malls in the late forties and early fifties were risky. Suburban customers still believed in making major purchases in the central business districts of cities and towns, where they expected to find the greatest selection of merchandise and the most competitive prices. After the tax laws of 1954, this changed. Shopping mall developers were among the biggest beneficiaries of accelerated depreciation, and they most often located projects where the older strips met the new interchanges of major projects. With the new tax write-offs, over 98 percent of malls made money for their investors.

A hundred billion years from now, any galaxies not now resident in our neighborhood (a gravitationally bound cluster of about a dozen galaxies called our “local group”) will exit our cosmic horizon and enter a realm permanently beyond our capacity to see unless future astronomers have records handed down to them from an earlier era, their cosmological theories will seek explanations for an island universe, with galaxies numbering no more than students in a backwoods school, floating in a static sea of darkness. We live in a privileged age. Insights the universe giveth, accelerated expansion will taketh away.

The more man inquires into the laws which regulate the material universe, the more he is convinced that all its varied forms arise from the action of a few simple principles. These principles themselves converge, with accelerating force, towards some still more comprehensive law to which all matter seems to be submitted. Simple as that law may possibly be, it must be remembered that it is only one amongst an infinite number of simple laws: that each of these laws has consequences at least as extensive as the existing one, and therefore that the Creator who selected the present law must have foreseen the consequences of all other laws.

This book is my attempt to show you that the absence of the rule of law in the virtual world is devastating. We live in only one reality, and the breakdown of the rule of law globally was ignited by the lack of a democratic vision for the internet in the twenty-first century. Impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances. What I have witnessed and documented over the past decade is technology’s godlike power to infect each of us with a virus of lies, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hatred, and accelerating the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.

What those two young physicists did remains the most important step yet made in the search for quantum gravity. They gave us two general and simple laws, which were the first physical predictions to come from the study of quantum gravity. They are: Unruh's law. Accelerating observers see themselves as embedded in a gas of hot photons at a temperature proportional to their acceleration. Bekenstein's law With every horizon that forms a boundary separating an observer from a region which is hidden from them, there is associated an entropy which measures the amount of information which is hidden behind it. This entropy is always proportional to the area of the horizon.

The soul, all-perfect and ever perfect, is compelled by the law of evolution to incarnate repeatedly in progressively higher lives— retarded by wrong actions and desires and accelerated by spiritual endeavors—until Self-realization and God-union are attained. Having then transcended the Lord’s delusion, the soul is forever freed. “Their thoughts immersed in That (Spirit), their souls one with Spirit, their sole allegiance and devotion given to Spirit, their beings purified from poisonous delusion by the antidote of wisdom— such men reach the state of non-return” (Bhagavad Gita V:17). In the Bible it is similarly written: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out” (Revelation 3:12)

The motorization of law into mere decree was not yet the culmination of simplifications and accelerations. New accelerations were produced by market regulations and state control of the economy —with their numerous and transferable authorizations and subauthorizations to various offices, associations and commissions concerned with economic decisions. Thus in Germany, the concept of “directive” appeared next to the concept of “decree.” This was “the elastic form of legislation,” surpassing the decree in terms of speed and simplicity. Whereas the decree was called a “motorized law,” the directive became a “motorized decree.” Here independent, purely positivist jurisprudence lost its freedom of maneuver. Law became a means of planning, an administrative act, a directive.

Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order - and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.

Einstein’s “physical strategy” began with his mission to generalize the principle of relativity so that it applied to observers who were accelerating or moving in an arbitrary manner. Any gravitational field equation he devised would have to meet the following physical requirements: • It must revert to Newtonian theory in the special case of weak and static gravitational fields. In other words, under certain normal conditions, his theory would describe Newton’s familiar laws of gravitation and motion. • It should preserve the laws of classical physics, most notably the conservation of energy and momentum. • It should satisfy the principle of equivalence, which holds that observations made by an observer who is uniformly accelerating would be equivalent to those made by an observer standing in a comparable gravitational field.

We hear the crack of a bullwhip because its tip is moving faster than the speed of sound, creating a shock wave, a small sonic boom. A thunderclap has a similar origin. It was once thought that airplanes could not travel faster than sound. Today supersonic flight is commonplace. But the light barrier is different from the sound barrier. It is not merely an engineering problem like the one the supersonic airplane solves. It is a fundamental law of Nature, as basic as gravity. And there are no phenomena in our experience—like the crack of the bullwhip or the clap of thunder for sound—to suggest the possibility of traveling in a vacuum faster than light. On the contrary, there is an extremely wide range of experience—with nuclear accelerators and atomic clocks, for example—in precise quantitative agreement with special relativity.

Until the coming of quantum mechanics, nothing happened to modify in any degree what is the essential purport of the first two laws of motion, namely this: that the laws of dynamics are to be stated in terms of accelerations. In this respect, Copernicus and Kepler are still to be classed with the ancients; they sought laws stating the shapes of the orbits of the heavenly bodies. Newton made it clear that laws stated in this form could never be more than approximate. The planets do not move in exact ellipses, because of the perturbations caused by the attractions of other planets. Nor is the orbit of a planet ever exactly repeated, for the same reason. But the law of gravitation, which dealt with accelerations, was very simple, and was thought to be quite exact until two hundred years after Newton's time. When it was amended by Einstein, it still remained a law dealing with accelerations. It is true that the conservation of energy is a law dealing with velocities, not accelerations. But in calculations which use this law it is still accelerations that have to be employed.

The rich have interchangeable heads and their interpretations of law and religion are just as manufactured, false, interchangeable and disposable as the fake moral screen. They have an entire media system to dispense their manipulations of those scrambling for food shelter and some illusion of security. Our borders are opening and closing to refugees of the countries our government pillages, based solely on whether or not those governments toe our party line. The u.s. uses its economic blockades to starve entire populations and accelerate peoples’ deaths from malnutrition or collapsed medical care systems. The bureaucratic distancing technique in washington d.c. creates poverty and mass death in another region of the hemisphere and allows officials here to proclaim that the attacked country’s political system is what has made it fail. Because I am born into a created system of corruption does not mean I have to turn the other way when the fake moral screens are unfurled. I am just as capable of creating my own moral contexts. In fact, using our government’s techniques, I can reinvent and redefine a screen for my own needs.

If the law of gravitation be regarded as universal, the point may be stated as follows. The laws of motion require to be stated by reference to what have been called kinetic axes: these are in reality axes having no absolute acceleration and no absolute rotation. It is asserted, for example, when the third law is combined with the notion of mass, that, if m, m' be the masses of two particles between which there is a force, the component accelerations of the two particles due to this force are in the ratio m2 : m1. But this will only be true if the accelerations are measured relative to axes which themselves have no acceleration. We cannot here introduce the centre of mass, for, according to the principle that dynamical facts must be, or be derived from, observable data, the masses, and therefore the centre of mass, must be obtained from the acceleration, and not vice versâ. Hence any dynamical motion, if it is to obey the laws of motion, must be referred to axes which are not subject to any forces. But, if the law of gravitation be accepted, no material axes will satisfy this condition. Hence we shall have to take spatial axes, and motions relative to these are of course absolute motions. 465. In order to avoid this conclusion, C. Neumann* assumes as an essential part of the laws of motion the existence, somewhere, of an absolutely rigid “Body Alpha”, by reference to which all motions are to be estimated. This suggestion misses the essence of the discussion, which is (or should be) as to the logical meaning of dynamical propositions, not as to the way in which they are discovered. It seems sufficiently evident that, if it is necessary to invent a fixed body, purely hypothetical and serving no purpose except to be fixed, the reason is that what is really relevant is a fixed place, and that the body occupying it is irrelevant. It is true that Neumann does not incur the vicious circle which would be involved in saying that the Body Alpha is fixed, while all motions are relative to it; he asserts that it is rigid, but rightly avoids any statement as to its rest or motion, which, in his theory, would be wholly unmeaning. Nevertheless, it seems evident that the question whether one body is at rest or in motion must have as good a meaning as the same question concerning any other body; and this seems sufficient to condemn Neumann’s suggested escape from absolute motion.

Unfortunately, however, there is another serious catch. Theory dictates that such discoveries must occur at an increasingly accelerating pace; the time between successive innovations must systematically and inextricably get shorter and shorter. For instance, the time between the “Computer Age” and the “Information and Digital Age” was perhaps twenty years, in contrast to the thousands of years between the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. If we therefore insist on continuous open-ended growth, not only does the pace of life inevitably quicken, but we must innovate at a faster and faster rate. We are all too familiar with its short-term manifestation in the increasingly faster pace at which new gadgets and models appear. It’s as if we are on a succession of accelerating treadmills and have to jump from one to another at an ever-increasing rate. This is clearly not sustainable, potentially leading to the collapse of the entire urbanized socioeconomic fabric. Innovation and wealth creation that fuel social systems, if left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds of their inevitable collapse. Can this be avoided or are we locked into a fascinating experiment in natural selection that is doomed to fail?

Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out. The algorithm was sometimes accompanied by a few corollaries, among them: All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword. Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided. It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong. Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers. When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics.

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

Talmy points out how the mindset behind force dynamics is very different from our best understanding of force and momentum from Newtonian physics. The force-dynamic model in language singles out one entity and conceives of another as impinging on it, whereas in physics neither object in an interaction is privileged. Language conceives of the agonist as having an inner impulse toward motion or rest, whereas physics treats an object as simply continuing at its current velocity. Language distinguishes motion and rest as qualitatively distinct tendencies, whereas physics treats rest as a velocity that happens to be zero. Language treats the antagonist as exerting a force that is stronger than the intrinsic tendency of the agonist. In Newtonian physics, an action and its reaction are opposite and equal, so a pair of touching objects that are at rest, or are moving at a constant velocity, must exert equal forces on each other (if one force were stronger, the two would accelerate in that direction). In language, things can just happen, without stated causes-The book toppled off the shelf; The sidewalk cracked-whereas in physics every event has a lawful antecedent. And in physics, the distinction between causing, blocking, permitting, and helping plays no obvious role.

And in 1956, Sir Charles Darwin, grandson of the Charles Darwin, wrote an essay on the forthcoming Age of Leisure in the magazine New Scientist in which he argued: Take it that there are fifty hours a week of possible working time. The technologists, working for fifty hours a week, will be making inventions so the rest of the world need only work twenty-five hours a week. The more leisured members of the community will have to play games for the other twenty-five hours so they may be kept out of mischief. . . . Is the majority of mankind really able to face the choice of leisure enjoyments, or will it not be necessary to provide adults with something like the compulsory games of the schoolboy? They could not have been more wrong. The main challenge they foresaw was how to keep people occupied so that they wouldn’t become bored to death. Instead of giving us more time, “science and compound interest” driven by “technologists working for fifty hours a week” have, in fact, given us less time. The multiplicative compounding of socioeconomic interactivity engendered by urbanization has inevitably led to the contraction of time. Rather than being bored to death, our actual challenge is to avoid anxiety attacks, psychotic breakdowns, heart attacks, and strokes resulting from being accelerated to death.

Continuous growth and the consequent ever-increasing acceleration of the pace of life have profound consequences for the entire planet and, in particular, for cities, socioeconomic life, and the process of global urbanization. Until recent times, the time between major innovations far exceeded the productive life span of a human being. Even in my own lifetime it was unconsciously assumed that one would continue working in the same occupation using the same expertise throughout one’s life. This is no longer true; a typical human being now lives significantly longer than the time between major innovations, especially in developing and developed countries. Nowadays young people entering the workforce can expect to see several major changes during their lifetime that will very likely disrupt the continuity of their careers. This increasingly rapid rate of change induces serious stress on all facets of urban life. This is surely not sustainable, and, if nothing changes, we are heading for a major crash and a potential collapse of the entire socioeconomic fabric. The challenges are clear: Can we return to an analog of a more “ecological” phase from which we evolved and be satisfied with some version of sublinear scaling and its attendant natural limiting, or no-growth, stable configuration? Is this even possible?

A story best told at speed. After finals, more exams, then the call to the bar, pupillage, a lucky invitation to prestigious chambers, some early success defending hopeless cases—how sensible it had seemed, to delay a child until her early thirties. And when those years came, they brought complex worthwhile cases, more success. Jack was also hesitant, arguing for holding back another year or two. Mid-thirties then, when he was teaching in Pittsburgh and she worked a fourteen-hour day, drifting deeper into family law as the idea of her own family receded, despite the visits of nephews and nieces. In the following years, the first rumors that she might be elected precociously to the bench and required to be on circuit. But the call didn’t come, not yet. And in her forties, there sprang up anxieties about elderly gravids and autism. Soon after, more young visitors to Gray’s Inn Square, noisy demanding great-nephews, great-nieces, reminded her how hard it would be to squeeze an infant into her kind of life. Then rueful thoughts of adoption, some tentative inquiries—and throughout the accelerating years that followed, occasional agonies of doubt, firm late-night decisions concerning surrogate mothers undone in the early-morning rush to work. And when at last, at nine thirty one morning at the Royal Courts of Justice, she was sworn in by the Lord Chief Justice and took her oath of allegiance and her Judicial Oath before two hundred of her bewigged colleagues, and she stood proudly before them in her robes, the subject of a witty speech, she knew the game was up; she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ.

It's not that we're dumb. On the contrary, many millions of people have exerted great intelligence and creativity in building the modern world. It's more that we're being swept into unknown and dangerous waters by accelerating economic growth. On just one single day of the days I have spent writing this book, as much world trade was carried out as in the whole of 1949; as much scientific research was published as in the whole of 1960; as many telephone calls were made as in all of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as in 1990.11 Our natural, human, and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt. Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up. A good example is what is inaccurately described as mindless sprawl in our physical environment. We deplore the relentless spread of low-density suburbs over millions of acres of formerly virgin land. We worry about its environmental impact, about the obesity in people that it fosters, and about the other social problems that come in its wake. But nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens-or so it appears. On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand-but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. "Out of control" is an ideology, not a fact.

Newton had bequeathed to Einstein a universe in which time had an absolute existence that tick-tocked along independent of objects and observers, and in which space likewise had an absolute existence. Gravity was thought to be a force that masses exerted on one another rather mysteriously across empty space. Within this framework, objects obeyed mechanical laws that had proved remarkably accurate—almost perfect—in explaining everything from the orbits of the planets, to the diffusion of gases, to the jiggling of molecules, to the propagation of sound (though not light) waves. With his special theory of relativity, Einstein had shown that space and time did not have independent existences, but instead formed a fabric of spacetime. Now, with his general version of the theory, this fabric of spacetime became not merely a container for objects and events. Instead, it had its own dynamics that were determined by, and in turn helped to determine, the motion of objects within it—just as the fabric of a trampoline will curve and ripple as a bowling ball and some billiard balls roll across it, and in turn the dynamic curving and rippling of the trampoline fabric will determine the path of the rolling balls and cause the billiard balls to move toward the bowling ball. The curving and rippling fabric of spacetime explained gravity, its equivalence to acceleration, and, Einstein asserted, the general relativity of all forms of motion.92 In the opinion of Paul Dirac, the Nobel laureate pioneer of quantum mechanics, it was “probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made.” Another of the great giants of twentieth-century physics, Max Born, called it “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition and mathematical skill.

Naval’s Laws The below is Naval’s response to the question “Are there any quotes you live by or think of often?” These are gold. Take the time necessary to digest them. “These aren’t all quotes from others. Many are maxims that I’ve carved for myself.” Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. A Few of Naval’s Tweets that are Too Good to Leave Out “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names. The advance of this anticulture takes two primary forms. Anticulture is the consequence of a regime of standardizing law replacing widely observed informal norms that come to be discarded as forms of oppression; and it is the simultaneous consequence of a universal and homogenous market, resulting in a monoculture that, like its agricultural analogue, colonizes and destroys actual cultures rooted in experience, history, and place. These two visages of the liberal anticulture thus free us from other specific people and embedded relationships, replacing custom with abstract and depersonalized law, liberating us from personal obligations and debts, replacing what have come to be perceived as burdens on our individual autonomous freedom with pervasive legal threat and generalized financial indebtedness. In the effort to secure the radical autonomy of individuals, liberal law and the liberal market replace actual culture with an encompassing anticulture. This anticulture is the arena of our liberty—yet increasingly, it is rightly perceived as the locus of our bondage and even a threat to our continued existence. The simultaneous heady joy and gnawing anxieties of a liberated humanity, shorn of the compass of tradition and inheritance that were the hallmarks of embedded culture, are indicators of liberalism’s waxing success and accumulating failure. The paradox is our growing belief that we are thralls to the very sources of our liberation—pervasive legal surveillance and control of people alongside technological control of nature. As the empire of liberty grows, the reality of liberty recedes. The anticulture of liberalism—supposedly the source of our liberation—accelerates liberalism’s success and demise.

Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out. The algorithm was sometimes accompanied by a few corollaries, among them: All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword. Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided. It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong. Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers. When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence. So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk says. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.” It had five commandments: 1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out. The algorithm was sometimes accompanied by a few corollaries, among them: All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword. Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided. It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong. Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers. When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us. Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral metagenome will contain new and useful gene functionalities for biomedicine: viruses may become essential biomedical tools and phages will continue to optimize may also accelerate the development of antibiotic drug resistance in the post-antibiotic era and emerging viruses may threaten our complacency and challenge our society economically and socially. Simply comparing these pros and cons, however, does not do justice to viruses and acknowledge their rightful place in nature. Life and viruses are inseparable. Viruses are life's complement, sometimes dangerous but always beautiful in design. All autonomous self-sustaining replicating systems that generate their own energy will foster parasites. Viruses are the inescapable by-products of life's success on the planet. We owe our own evolution to them; the fossils of many are recognizable in ERVs and EVEs that were certainly powerful influences in the evolution of our ancestors. Like viruses and prokaryotes, we are also a patchwork of genes, acquired by inheritance and horizontal gene transfer during our evolution from the primitive RNA-based world. It is a common saying that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' It is a natural response to a visual queue: a sunset, the drape of a designer dress, or the pattern of a silk tie, but it can also be found in a line of poetry, a particularly effective kitchen implement, or even the ruthless efficiency of a firearm. The latter are uniquely human acknowledgments of beauty in design. It is humanity that allows us to recognize the beauty in the evolutionary design of viruses. They are unique products of evolution, the inevitable consequence of life, infectious egotistical genetic information that taps into life and the laws of nature to fuel evolutionary invention.

Charlestown’s most characteristic pastime had long been the reckless sport of “looping.” The young “looper” played by a rigid set of rules. First, he stole a car in downtown Boston. Then he roared into Charlestown, accelerating as he reached City Square, where the District 15 police station stood in a welter of bars, nightclubs, and pool halls. Often he had to take a turn around the square before the first policeman dashed for his patrol car or motorcycle. Then the chase was on: down Chelsea Street to Hayes Square, up the long slope of Bunker Hill Street to St. Francis de Sales’ Church at the crest, then down again, picking up speed, often to 70 or 80 miles per hour, until a screeching left into Sullivan Square took him onto Main Street, where, dodging the stanchions of the El, he roared into City Square again, completing the “loop.” All that remained was to ditch the car before the police caught up. Looping was an initiation rite, proof that a Townie had come of age. But it was something else as well: a challenge flung at authority, a middle finger raised to the powers that be. Before long, looping became a kind of civic spectacle, pitting the Town’s young heroes against the forces of law and order. Plans for a loop circulated well in advance. At the appointed hour, hundreds of men, women, and children gathered along Bunker Hill Street, awaiting the gladiators. When the stolen car came in sight, racing up the long hill, a cheer would rise from the spectators, followed by jeers for the pursuing policemen. The first recorded “loop” was performed in 1925 by a sixteen-year-old daredevil named Jimmy “Speed King” Murphy, but most renowned of all was “Shiner” Sheehan, the teenage son of a federal alcohol agent, whose exploits so electrified the Town that he drew round him a group of young acolytes. Membership in their “Speeders Club” was limited to those who could produce newspaper clippings showing they had bested the police.

Through censorship, our opinions and attitudes will become prescribed by the authorities, with dissenting views labeled as heretical and punishable by law. If this happens, we will surely see the dissolution of the rest of our rights accelerate, unhindered by public scrutiny and outrage.

once a technology becomes digital—that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeroes of computer code—it hops on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially.

my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

But the time has one very enduring legacy: the leaps forward in equal rights. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement fundamentally altered American culture, with much of the change taking root in that relatively brief seven-year period from 1963 to 1970, when the Silents were in their 20s and 30s. It began, as usual, with changes in technology. As the technological leaps of the postwar era accelerated, individualism grew: TV allowed people to see others’ perspectives and experiences, jet and space travel made the rest of the world seem closer, and the shift away from manual labor opened up more job opportunities for women. Gradually, an emphasis on individual rights began to replace the old system of social rules organized around race, gender, and sexual orientation. In the early 1960s, Blacks and Whites were segregated in the South, women were actively discriminated against in professions such as law, medicine, and engineering, and people could be arrested for being gay. By 1970, all of

In some respects all this was a sudden acceleration of the drift toward the manorial system, a process which had already gone a long way in Anglo-Saxon England, and certainly in Wessex. But even in Wessex the idea still persisted that the tie of lord and man was primarily personal, so that a free man could go from one lord to another and transfer his land with him. The essence of Norman feudalism, on the other hand, was that the land remained under the lord, whatever the man might do. Thus the landed pyramid rose up tier by tier to the King, until every acre in the country could be registered as held of somebody by some form of service. But besides the services which the man owed to the lord in arms there was the service of attending the courts of the hundred and the county, which were, apart from exemptions, courts of the King, administering old customary law.

U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after Hitler came to power, despite the Depression and Germany’s default on virtually all of its government and commercial loans.

And if families start scattering like stars you can pass laws based on food, rejection and the long drop justified to rock. The Saracens were not impressed. They yelled plunder loud enough for centuries to hear. And here men said to hell with it and left. Barring big rains now, accelerated erosion or a sudden real estate deal, this insufferable figure of Christ will stand over us all God knows how long. The town got smart and moved. You came back to see it. You are the one who failed.

Only three fundamental variables – mass (M), length (L), and time (T) – are needed to derive the units repeatedly encountered in energy studies. Area is obviously L2, and volume L3, mass density M/L3, speed L/T, acceleration (change of speed per unit of time) L/T2, and force, according to Newton’s second law of motion, ML/T2 (mass multiplied by acceleration). Energy is expended (work is done) when a force is exerted over a distance: energy’s dimensional formula is thus ML2/T2.

And the machine felt nothing. As far as it was concerned, the whole world was a math problem. A formula pitting revenue vs. costs. It plugged the numbers in for the variables and went with the cost-effective plan. If it were more profitable to dump toxic sludge into the ground and pay the EPA fines later, so be it. If it were a better deal to spend $3 million to lobby congress so they could bend the law in the company’s favor, the machine paid up. If it cost too much to recall the faulty accelerators, it left them and settled with the families of the dead out of court. The costs to the environment, the human costs, these things did not compute, did not matter. Just the raw dollars, please, the only things that possessed real value in our society. This was business. This was America.

They need to operate at the speed of Moore’s law.

I have probably seen the death of Moore’s law predicted a dozen times,” Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, told me. “When we were working at three microns [one-thousandth of a millimeter: 0.001 millimeters, or about 0.000039 inches], people said, ‘How will we get below that—can we make film thickness thin enough to make such devices and could we reduce the wavelength of light to pattern such small features?’ But each time we found breakthroughs. It is never obvious beforehand and it is not always the answer that is first prescribed that provides the breakthrough. But every time we have broken through the next barrier.

Quantum computing is not only faster than conventional computing, but its workload obeys a different scaling law—rendering Moore’s Law little more than a quaint memory. Formulated by Intel founder Gordon Moore, Moore’s Law observes that the number of transistors in a device’s integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Some early supercomputers ran on around 13,000 transistors; the Xbox One in your living room contains 5 billion. But Intel in recent years has reported that the pace of advancement has slowed, creating tremendous demand for alternative ways to provide faster and faster processing to fuel the growth of AI. The short-term results are innovative accelerators like graphics-processing unit (GPU) farms, tensor-processing unit (TPU) chips, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the cloud. But the dream is a quantum computer. Today we have an urgent need to solve problems that would tie up classical computers for centuries, but that could be solved by a quantum computer in a few minutes or hours. For example, the speed and accuracy with which quantum computing could break today’s highest levels of encryption is mind-boggling. It would take a classical computer 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption, but a quantum computer could crack it in about a hundred seconds, or less than two minutes. Fortunately, quantum computing will also revolutionize classical computing encryption, leading to ever more secure computing. To get there we need three scientific and engineering breakthroughs. The math breakthrough we’re working on is a topological qubit. The superconducting breakthrough we need is a fabrication process to yield thousands of topological qubits that are both highly reliable and stable. The computer science breakthrough we need is new computational methods for programming the quantum computer.

The Israelification of US security services accelerated immediately after 9/11, though US law enforcement didn’t need Israeli training to make it violent or racist. American law enforcement has a long history of harassing, abusing, arresting, and killing African Americans and other minorities without justification

This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.

What the florid imagination of the sadist masks is the fact that the Other is barred, inconsistent, lacking, that it cannot be served for it presents no law to obey, not even the wild law of its accelerating auto-destruction. There is no nature to be followed, rivalled or outdone, and it is this void or lack, the non-existence of the Other, that is incomparably more violent than even the most destructive fantasm of the death drive.

In Disability Servitude, Ruthie-Marie Beckwith shows that one of the major economic causes of accelerated deinstitutionalization was ending the practice of unpaid forced labor in these institutions. This practice, based on lawsuits and enforcing fair labor laws within disability carceral spaces, meant that the cost of maintaining institutions increased after the 1970s.

It is surprising that we as a species have been as successful as we have despite our ignorance of the biological world and our biased perspective on its dimensions. Einstein said that "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility"; in other words, what is incomprehensible is how much we comprehend. But I don't think that's quite right. I think that what is even more incomprehensible is that we have survived despite how little we have comprehended. We are like a driver who somehow gets down the road, despite being too short to see out the window, a little drunk and very fond of acceleration.

Everything worth doing has a learning curve. When it gets hard, remember the goal: reaching the cycle of accelerated returns.

Skin in the game’ is an important psychological tool to harness if you want to accelerate your learning curve in any area of your life. Having skin in the game raises the stakes of your learning by building deeper psychological incentives to perform a behaviour. The ‘skin’ can be anything from money to a personal public commitment.

The force of Church’s Law is that it postulates that all future notions of computation will be equivalent in expressive power (measured by definability of functions on the natural numbers) to the λ-calculus. Church’s Law is therefore a scientific law in the same sense as, say, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, which makes a prediction about all future measurements of the acceleration in a gravitational field.

Are the laws of acceleration and composition of forces nothing but arbitrary conventions? Conventions, yes; arbitrary, no; they would seem arbitrary if we forgot the experiences which guided the founders of science to their adoption and which are, although imperfect, sufficient to justify them. Sometimes it is useful to turn our attention to the experimental origin of these conventions.

Ray Kurzweil talks about the “law of accelerating returns,” feedback loops where advances in technology further increase the pace of development.

Though we’ve taken the environmental idea semi-seriously, passing the laws that cleaned air and water, we’ve never taken it anywhere near as seriously as we’ve taken further growth. On his way to the theoretically groundbreaking Rio environmental summit in 1992, the first President Bush famously declared, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation,”16 and as it turns out, he was correct—and speaking for much of the world. And so far, we’ve gotten away with it: even as we keep accelerating, the game spins

While our purpose was not to predict particular news headlines, we did at one point (see chapter 10, “A Fourth Turning Prophecy”) offer five hypothetical scenarios for how this Crisis era might accelerate toward its climax: a terrorist WMD attack on U.S. cities using airplanes; a “tea party” fiscal rebellion triggering a fiscal meltdown; a Russian invasion of a former Soviet state; a pandemic requiring martial law; and a succession threat triggered by a state’s refusal to follow federal law. Back when we wrote the book, many readers told us these scenarios seemed utterly implausible.

Imagine that you get a car as a birthday present, with the key in the ignition, but you have never heard of cars before and have absolutely no information about how they work. Being an inquisitive person, you get inside and start messing with the various buttons, knobs and levers. Eventually, you figure out how to use it and get quite good at driving. But unbeknownst to you, somebody has removed the letter R by the gearshift and messed with the transmission so that you need to apply a crazy amount of force to shift into Reverse. This means that unless someone tells you, you’ll probably never figure out that the car can drive backwards as well. If asked to describe how the car worked, you’d incorrectly assert that, without exception, as long as the engine is running, the harder you push on the accelerator pedal, the faster the car moves forward. If in a parallel universe, the car had instead required huge force to shift into forward drive mode, you’d have concluded that this strange machine worked differently and only moved backwards. Our Universe is very much like this car. As illustrated in Figure 6.6, it has a bunch of “knobs” that control how it works: the laws according to which things move when you do various things to them and so forth—what we’re told in school are the laws of physics, including so-called constants of nature. Each setting of the knobs corresponds to one of the phases of space, so if there are 500 knobs with 10 possible settings each, there are 10500 different phases. When I was in high school, I was incorrectly taught that these laws and constants were always valid, and never changed either from place to place or from time to time. Why this mistake? Because an enormous amount of energy—much more than we have at our disposal—is required to change the settings of these knobs, just as the gearshift on that car, so we didn’t realize that the settings could be changed. Nor that there even were any settings to change: unlike gearshifts, nature’s knobs are well hidden. They come in the form of so-called high-mass fields and other obscure entities, and huge energy is required not only to alter them, but even to detect that they exist in the first place.

Our senses, our appetites, and our passions, are our lawful and faithful guides, in most things that relate solely to this life; and, therefore, by the hourly necessity of consulting them, we gradually sink into an implicit submission, and habitual confidence. Every act of compliance with their motions facilitates a second compliance, every new step towards depravity is made with less reluctance than the former, and thus the descent to life merely sensual is perpetually accelerated.

In the November 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reported on the special courts established around the country for the express purpose of streamlining and accelerating foreclosure actions. Presided over by retired judges who were unfamiliar with the complexities involved in the mortgage fraud, these courts were not set up “to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.” The whole process was designed to transfer the property of ordinary citizens to the nation’s largest banks regardless of entitlement. As Taibbi wrote: The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville [Florida] judge, the Honorable A. C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes. The following month, the Washington Post reported that similar courts in Virginia were “making it easier for lenders to defend themselves when accused of giving homeowners too little warning of impending foreclosures.” Indeed, “the process moves so quickly in Virginia…that homeowners can receive less than two weeks’ notice that their house is about to be sold on the courthouse steps.” The design of the courts guaranteed that even banks with no legal foreclosure entitlement had an almost insurmountable advantage. In the very short time they were accorded, homeowners seeking to stop foreclosure had to “gather evidence, file a lawsuit and potentially post a bond with the court that could total thousands of dollars.” These arduous requirements, combined with the near-impossible deadlines, meant that many borrowers simply ran out of time when trying to fight invalid foreclosure proceedings. It

The first line of defense for any society is always going to be its guardrails—laws, stoplights, police, courts, surveillance, the FBI, and basic rules of decency for communities like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. All of those are necessary, but they are not sufficient for the age of accelerations. Clearly, what is also needed—and is in the power of every parent, school principal, college president, and spiritual leader—is to think more seriously and urgently about how we can inspire more of what Dov Seidman calls “sustainable values”: honesty, humility, integrity, and mutual respect. These values generate trust, social bonds, and, above all, hope. This is opposed to what Seidman calls “situational values”—“just doing whatever the situation allows”—whether in the terrestrial realm or cyberspace. Sustainable values do “double duty,” adds Seidman, whose company, LRN, advises global companies on how to improve their ethical performance. They animate behaviors that produce trust and healthy interdependencies and “they inspire hope and resilience—they keep us leaning in, in the face of people behaving badly.” When

What all these stories have in common is that the algorithms were in charge—not people, not ethics, and certainly not God. What all of these stories also have in common is the fact that a number of technological forces came together to create an exponential step change in the power of men and machines—much faster than we have reshaped ourselves as human beings, much faster than we have been able to reshape our institutions, our laws, and our modes of leadership.

The third D is deferrable. Tax law allows you to use IRAs and 1031 exchanges to buy and sell investment real estate while deferring the tax hit to a more advantageous time. IRA funds can be invested in real estate, and as long as any profits from rental income or property sales remain in the IRA, those profits are tax-deferred. The 1031 exchanges give you a choice at the moment of sale either to realize the gain and pay taxes on it or to reinvest that gain in another property and defer the taxes. And when you choose to reinvest, the transaction is treated as if you simply exchanged equity in one property for equity in another. The government has established these tax-deferring vehicles as a way for investors to reinvest real estate profits without having to pay the taxes until later. Millionaire Real Estate Investors believe that taxes deferred until tomorrow are always better than taxes paid today. As a result, they make use of these programs to preserve their profits as they go, giving them more to reinvest and accelerating the growth of their real estate portfolios. U.S.

In fact, confusion over units was not confined to electricity and magnetism. When two people spoke of a quantity like 'force' or 'power' you could not be sure that they meant the same thing. James saw a prime opportunity to straighten out the muddle. He went beyond his brief for the paper and proposed a systematic way of defining all physical quantities in terms of mass, length and time, symbolised by the letters M, L and T. For example, velocity was defined L/T, acceleration L/T^2, and force ML/T^2, since, by Newton's second law, force=mass x acceleration. His method is used in exactly this form today. Called dimensional analysis, it seems to us so simple and so natural a part of all physical science that almost nobody wonders who first thought of it.

The murder program accelerated in the spring of 1943. German troops entered the Warsaw ghetto and killed thousands of Jews in street fighting. In the south, the Nazis began deporting Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz. In the north, they deported Dutch Jews to Sobibor, gassing about 34,000 people there as they arrived. The SS also arranged a special transport for 3,000 Jewish mothers and children from the Netherlands; they murdered all of them.11

The ongoing acceleration of technology is the implication and inevitable result of what I call the law of accelerating returns, which describes the acceleration of the pace of and the exponential growth of the products of an evolutionary process. These products include, in particular, information-bearing technologies such as computation, and their acceleration extends substantially beyond the predictions made by what has become known as Moore’s Law. The Singularity is the inexorable result of the law of accelerating returns, so it is important that we examine the nature of this evolutionary process.