On June 14th of this year 2016 I wrote a piece about 2043. It was pure whimsy and futuristic fantasy. Last night I watched a show about artificial intelligence and that got me thinking about how realistic my fantasy might be, so I looked up some information this morning. Here is a graph on the growth of human knowledge I found on Wikipedia.
Note how much knowledge we have attained since 1901. It is fantastic! I found on a site called Industry_Tap that knowledge has been recently been doubling every 12 months, but in the near future it will double every 12 hours. I found this to be amazing!
The size of the internet is estimated at 5 million terabytes.
Of that 5 million terabytes, Google has indexed 200 terabytes or roughly 0.004% of the information there. This seems an astounding series of facts. I wonder if mathematicians will have to come up with new numbers to express the ramping up of numbers.
When the ancient Chinese spoke of the biggest number in the known world they spoke of the “ten thousand things.” When I was a child, “one million” was a bigger number than I could imagine. And now look at the numbers above on the graph.
Harvard University neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman has estimated it will take several billion petabytes of data storage to index the human brain. These kinds of things were beyond human comprehension just scant years ago. Is it any wonder that the age of artificial intelligence is upon us?
Factory automation has ramped up beyond my wildest dreams in just the last two decades and is projected to grow on a nearly exponential scale in the coming years as shown in the graph below. 
All of this leads me to believe my fantasy piece about the future is not fantasy at all, but just a look into the near future.
Now I have to wonder if when the human race begins to look like the picture above if our sex drive will drop to zero and the humankind will vanish from the earth, leaving only artificially intelligent robots and of course insects.
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