The same river twice

The organisation where I'm working now regularly refers to Heraclitus. He's the ancient Greek philosopher who is famous for the concept of eternal flux. "A man cannot step into the same river twice for it is a different river". Modern interpretation of this is that "only change is constant". When you look at the modern world much of the technology is very recent - and it will soon be out of date.

Watching the Jeff Bezos clip from Frank's post, I was reminded of a presentation I saw by Raymond Kurzweil, the futurologist. He too saw change as being the constant and described it in the context of Moore's Law - the doubling of available processing power every 18 months to 2 years. He drew the analogy between Moore's Law and the reward for the inventor of the game of chess. The reward was to be a grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, doubling on each successive square. That is a simple rule for constant change but the impact is dramatic - catastrophic or exhilirating depending on your point of view. There is more on Kurzweil's message here: The Future and its Impact