Kurzweils Singularity

Today its an axiom that life is changing and that technology is affecting the nature of society. But whats not fully understood is that the pace of change is itself accelerating, and the last 20 years are not a good guide to the next 20 years. Were doubling the paradigm shift rate, the rate of progress, every decade. This will actually match the amount of progress we made in the whole 20th century, because weve been accelerating up to this point. The 20th century was like 25 years of change at todays rate of change. In the next 25 years well make four times the progress you saw in the 20th century. And well make 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century, which is almost a thousand times more technical change than we saw in the 20th century.
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge99.html