Hey, I’m pretty much a regular Joe. I have a job, waste time on the Internet and wonder what the hell anything means. Oh, and I think the world is going to end within 40 years. That said, you won’t see me any time soon on a street corner with a poster board on – I don’t believe the world is headed for a cataclysm, or for utopia, I just believe the progress that we’ve grown accustomed to will continue, nothing more or less than that.

So where’s the revolution? Simple, the progress that we are making in our technology is no longer based on gears and levers and fuel, it is based on information, and growth in information technology is exponential, not linear. When predicting the future, people tend to think in terms of today’s progress and just carry that forward. But information technology doesn’t grow at a fixed rate, just like an investment (or a debt, if you’re pessimistic), it compounds, and not long from now, it is going to pay out some spectacular dividends.

Here is a fact: The cost of computing power has dropped about 50 percent every year since the early 1900’s. If you’re saying to yourself “Wait, they didn’t even have computers back then,” you’re right (give yourself a cookie), but they did have basic electro-mechanical devices used to count the census, among other minor tasks.

The amazing thing is that those devices, with their handmade switches and relays, doubled in price-performance every year. So did vacuum tubes in the 40’s and 50’s, transistors in the 60’s and integrated circuits from the 70’s until today. Bottom line is, after 100 years of this trend we can be pretty sure that it’s going to continue.

No big deal though, right? Computers might get faster but they’ll still be machines. People assume this because the most complicated machines they know, their own computers, still act like machines. This is not due to computers being deficient in some mystical power though, present-day computers just aren’t very smart.

In fact, compared to human beings, computers are fantastically dumb. Your brain is capable of about 10 million billion calculations a second. Your computer? Around 1 billion. So the computer on your desk currently has about 10 million times less ability than you do. This gives it close to the same processing ability as a dragonfly.

Just as you wouldn’t expect a dragonfly to buzz up to you and explain the role of military power in a globalized world, neither should you expect it of your computer. Unlike that dragonfly though, the standard home computer will get about twice as fast every year. If trends continue, trends that have lasted 100 years, the computer on your desk will have more processing ability than you by 2025.

But what does that mean? Again, most people, when presented with this, fall back on the idea of separate domains for computing and human consciousness: “If my computer’s 10 million times faster than today, it will just be 10 million times faster at downloading that breakdancing video off YouTube.”

Uh, no. Ten million billion calculations is what it takes to make you tick; and, if your computer can do that many calculations, then programmed correctly it can do the same things you do.

Life might not seem like a bunch of calculations, but that’s just because we’re calculating so unbelievably fast. When 10 million billion of something happens in one second, it’s hard to see it as a series of simple things, much easier to view as a unified event. When this event is called “falling in love,” or “reacting to a song,” it’s even harder to accept that it can be broken into pieces, but it can if you have enough of them.

Keep in mind there have been lots of things over the years that computers “just couldn’t do.” Computers couldn’t beat a chess grandmaster, now they do it easily. Computers couldn’t look at a photo and tell you if it was a cat or a dog, now they can. One third, one third of all stock market trades last year were executed by a computer, quite often trading stock to another computer working with a different algorithm, algorithms involving things like reading news articles and assessing their content.

All these things can be dismissed now as acts of simple calculations, but that’s always our view after these things have been done, before that people wrapped these tasks in the same aura of mystery we now reserve for laughing at a joke or writing a book.

Real artificial intelligence is coming soon, and the list of possibilities this will provide will be almost endless. And of course, computers won’t stop getting faster once they reach human level intelligence. By 2040 a standard desktop computer will have more than 10,000 times the computational capability of your brain.

What does that even mean – to be 10,000 times smarter than a human being? Hard to say, but one thing is for sure, since computers will be smarter than human beings, computers will be used to design the next generation of computers. This will create a self-reinforcing loop, and soon lead to a rate of technological change so fast that all assumptions break down.

The term futurists use for this moment is the Singularity. In physics, the term describes the center of a black hole, a place where all laws of physics break down. For futurists, this moment is when all predictions of the future break down. And while it’s impossible to guess what will come after, be it good or bad, it’s safe to say it will end our civilization as we know it.

What does this mean for us? Well, tomorrow is not going to be much different than today. And next year things won’t be all that different than this one. But progress will keep going, and that list of things that “we” can do and “machines” cannot, will continue to be chipped away.

So as you think about the future, please be open to the idea of steady, yet dramatic change. It’s happened before. The Industrial Revolution displaced man as the source of power and production.

Though it upended philosophy for 100 years, the Industrial Revolution wasn’t as dramatic as our revolution will be. After all, oxen could pull a plow easier, birds could fly, and horses could run faster. Nothing on this earth can outthink a human being, but that is going to change soon. And that, will change everything.