Culture. Technology. Archive. Photos. Abandoned. The Origins of Progress. Every chart of technological progress zooms upward.
Ray Kurzwiel has collected an entire gallery of graphs depicting the exponential upward trend in many, if not most, technological fields. All graphs of technological progress start low with small change several hundred years ago, and then begin to bend upwards in the last hundred, and then bolt upright to the sky in the last 50. A fairly typical chart would look like this one: These charts capture a feeling we have that change is accelerating within our own lifetimes. Novelty arrives in a flash (compared to earlier), and there seems to be a shorter and shorter interval between novel changes.