Better tools make better tools

You do not design a better wrench only with the old wrench. In information-enabled work, yesterday’s machine helps design tomorrow’s. Ray Kurzweil calls that loop the Law of Accelerating Returns. In everyday words: better tools make better tools, so the climb is not one hundred equal-step years.

A yard that writes a five-year freeze as if the dock were walking home will be surprised. The surprise is not a trick. It is the loop. Intel did not wait for a finished microprocessor in order to design one. The tools and the product climb together.

Chen does not need a prophecy of 20,000 years of progress. Chen needs a practice that expects the sheet to age.

The tempting mistake is to hear “accelerating” as “anything goes this winter.” Contracts and safety still bind. The loop is a reason to reopen, not a reason to guess.

That is what lets you see a freeze to “the science we know today” as a design choice.