Living with the Kurzweil's Rule of the Law of Accelerating Returns

Here is an illustration of Kurzweil's Rule:

Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR) is a concept asserting that the rate of change and progress in a wide variety of evolutionary systems, particularly technology, tends to increase exponentially, contrary to the common human intuition of linear growth. 

The Law of Accelerating Returns was primarily introduced and detailed by Ray Kurzweil in his influential works. Here is a list of some of the books by Kurzweil and others.

Kurzweil, Ray, and Diane Jaroch. 1990. The Age of Intelligent Machines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Kurzweil, Ray. 1999. The Age of Spiritual Machines : When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Viking.

Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is near : When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking.

Kurzweil, Ray. 2024. The Singularity Is Nearer : When We Merge with AI. [New York]: Viking.

At the time of this post, the online app with the fastest user adoption rate is Threads.com, which reached 100 million users in less than five days. Before Threads, the record holder was ChatGPT.com, which reached 100 million monthly active users in approximately two months. The adoption of generative AI more than doubled between 2023 and 2024, rising from 33% to 71%. AI is only one aspect of the overall technology. See The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation.

As a historical information based pursuit, genealogy is broadly impacted by technological change. Technology has dramatically transformed genealogy by making research faster, more accessible, and more accurate. Developments such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, massive online databases, and DNA testing have allowed genealogists to discover family histories with a level of detail and efficiency that was previously unimaginable. See Unraveling the Past: AI and the Evolution of Genealogy

I was first involved with computers in 1969/1970 learning to program the main frame computer in the engineering department of the University of Utah. I was majoring in linguistics. I bought my first computer, an Apple II, in about 1978,  I first saw the World Wide Web or internet, at a local community college in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1990 when there were reported to be six "websites." By that time I had been working on my own genealogy for eight years. As I have watched all the developments, I have been impressed by how fast they are coming over time. I now get notice of technological advancements that will directly impact genealogy many times every week such as announcements in metalenses (which is even a new word). See Dielectric metalens for miniaturized imaging systems: progress and challenges Current advances have begun to have commercial applicability. See From performance to structure: a comprehensive survey of advanced metasurface design for next-generation imaging.

Metalenses will indirectly benefit genealogy through future advancements in related technologies like: 

High-resolution imaging for digitizing historical documents and images, enhanced optical character recognition (OCR) for automatically reading difficult-to-access handwritten records and also creating compact, powerful scanning devices that could be used for preserving physical documents. 

Most of the online genealogy companies are implementing AI-based features that will also impact genealogists directly. I expect that applying these new advances may finally help genealogy from being viewed as stogy and only for old people. 

Meanwhile, I will continue to try to translate new developments into understandable concepts.