Accelerating Returns Redux

This morning, I asked Grok the following question:

I wrote this speech in 2009.
Analyze it for accuracy and voracity of my predictions.
Think deeply about it and compare it with the state of accelerating returns today.

Here is the speech:

"Good afternoon and thanks for having me here back. 
Last August, I presented a speech to the faculty and staff of Parkland College as is expected of the president every year, and I thought I would share some of the things I was thinking about.
Last August, I was thinking about a couple issues in particular….the concept of what is being called “Accelerating Returns” and I’ll define what that means in a couple minutes…but, I talked about this notion of accelerating returns and what it means to be an educated person these days.

Actually, this notion goes way beyond Parkland College. 
Directly and indirectly, everyone in this room is impacted in some way, large or small, by what happens in our High School, at Parkland College and the University of Illinois, and how each one of you chooses to interact with your environment, your families, and your places of employment.

I’ll begin with an observation about what it means to be “educated”.

I’m sure we can all agree that the educated person should have an understanding of history and social issues, an appreciation of literature and poetry, be able to deal with matters of economics, understand scientific principles and the basics of mathematics…oh, and it is really good if you can speak more than one language.

Actually, between 60 and 75% of the rest of the world already speaks more than one language…and we seem to be the exception.

But actually, those descriptors were used to develop the high school curriculum in the United States…in 1892.
Those objectives were mandated for anyone that wanted to attend a university. 

And today, with a few exceptions…
our ideas about what it means to be an educated person…are virtually the same…as they were in 1892. 

And my question to you this afternoon, “what has changed in the last 117 years that has impacted those objectives?” 

Let me say differently, “what actually is the future for which we prepare our students?“

And when I say “our students”, I should clarify what I mean. They are you. They are your children and your family members, and your neighbors…some 250,000 graduates of Parkland College, of which 96% still live and work in our community.

In fact last year, 36% of the graduating class from the 25 high schools that are within our district, came to Parkland College.
And today, the topic of education seems to be at the tip of every politician’s tongue…as an issue of critical importance, but rarely, if ever, does the question come up, about what it means to be educated, especially in the context of the future.

What does it mean to be an educated person today…or in 5 years?

We experience massive transformations, politically, socially, and scientifically, almost on a daily basis, but those transformations are rarely discussed in the context…of what it means to be an educated person. 

 Certainly, we at Parkland College are not educating our students to work or to live in the nineteenth century, yet, we continue to idealize this notion of an “optimal path” with respect to high school students. 

Today, everyone is considered “college-bound”, until proven otherwise. And College bound is code for university prep curriculum shades of 1892.

My premise today is that it is going to change, and in fact, it already has. 

Now, you may or may not agree with my premise, so for those of you that are skeptical, please allow me to provide some context.
What’s going to change and when? 

What’s likely to be out-sourced or made redundant?  
What will happen to these United States, the American dream, our Democracy, and our lives in this largely…insulated part of the country?

Let’s start with accelerating returns.
 
Do you sometimes feel like the pace of change is accelerating?
That our world, our society, and our technology, is advancing at nothing less than a breakneck pace?

That is because it is. And there is a name for it. It’s called the Law of Accelerating Returns.
Although you may never have heard of it, there is some measurable evidence that it is indeed true.  Its basic premise goes something like this:

"an increase in the rate of technological progress throughout history, suggests even faster and more profound change in the future".

Ok, that’s interesting, but what does it mean?
Well, when people think of a future period, say just 5 or 10 years out, we intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue into future periods. 

But if you take a look the data in different ways and on different time scales, and for a wide variety of technologies ranging from the electronic to the biological…. the notion of accelerating returns appears to apply.  

Change, progress, advancement…is happening at a faster pace…an accelerating rate.

Ok examples:
Let’s start with the most profound…Human life expectancy. 
In the eighteenth century, technology, in general terms, added a few days…every year to human longevity; 

During the nineteenth century it was couple of weeks…each year; 
And today, we're adding almost a half a year…every year to our life expectancy. 
Look at the number of human genomes mapped per year, number of internet hosts created every 12 months, and decreases in size of mechanical devices (nanotechnology)…the growth curves are exponential.

 
Economics too, total gross domestic product in constant dollars, output per hour of US manufacturers, the percentage of US GDP derived from e-commerce, and the number of US patents granted. 
…a higher degree of change over shorter periods of time.

Oh, and how about education? 
Over the past 120 years, our investment in K-12 education per student and in constant dollars has grown by a factor of ten. 
And we’ve experienced a one hundred fold increase in the number of college students. 
Why? 
Because for the past two centuries, at least in this country, automation has been eliminating jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder while creating new and better paying jobs at the top. 

And it’s caused us to exponentially increase investments in education at all levels.  

Another example. This one deals with computing power, and I’ll describe it in terms of the number of calculations per second an off-the shelf computer can do for one thousand dollars. 

Today, a thousand bucks will buy you a couple of gigaflops (a gigaflop is 1 billion calculations per second)
…this is the equivalent computing capacity of a mouse brain.

For a thousand dollars.

It took us roughly 108 years…1900 to 2008 to go from the very first concept of a  computer….to a mouse brain. 

For a thousand dollars.

In 1961 , to purchase a gigflop of computing power cost in the neighborhood of 1.1 trillion dollars. 

In 2006, a gigflop could be had for a dollar. Today, it’s about 13 cents.
And if everything stays the same, this concept of accelerating returns tells us it will take just 17 years to go from a mouse brain to a human brain. 

That’s 20 million billion calculations per second…for a thousand dollars.

Another 20 years after that, it’s predicted that we will have a device with capacity to compute at a rate equivalent to the entire human collective. 

For about a thousand dollars.

Well, now that seems a little far-fetched, doesn’t it?   

Ok, let’s talk reality.
Today, if you have $65 million dollars lying around you can build a computer that does 10 petaflops or one thousand trillion calculations per second, just like they are building about 15 miles from here at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
So, the trick will be in getting from 65 million dollars to one thousand dollars in the span of about 14 years.

Possible? No, probable. 

The law of accelerating returns tells us that $65 million dollars, halved 14 times comes to just under $4000, assuming no amazing scientific advances or economic forces, positive or negative…in 14 years.

That’s pretty close. So great. What’s the big deal?

We’ll have a big honking computer that can do a lot of calculations really fast. What do we do with it besides make Happy Feet 2 and Shrek, what is it now…4? 

How does it affect us…what does it mean? Good question, thanks for asking.

Example: Human Genome Project

The first Human Genome Project Centers were created in 1990. 
When work began, it was thought that it would take about a hundred years to get the first human genome sequenced, based on the computational power available to the consortium at that time.

Fast forward to April of 2003…13 years later, it was done. And, it cost more than $500 million dollars to sequence that one genome.

Using the same process, but with more advanced computers, a human genome could be decoded for mere $10 million in 2006.

Two years later…February of 2008, a company called Illumina did it in four weeks for $100,000.

Five weeks later, Applied Biosystems, did it in a couple weeks for $60,000.  This is a fantastic illustration of accelerating returns.

But wait…I’m not done.

On February 10th, 2008, yet another company, Pacific Biosciences, claimed that within 5-years, they could complete a high-quality sequence in 15 minutes – all for under $1,000. 

Estimated availability date…2013.

Imagine your baby arriving at home with its complete genetic operating instructions on a DVD. 
Do you think your health insurance provider will pay the $1000 for it…?  You betcha. 

The implications are staggering…what in the world changes when this is possible? 

The short answer…Everything. 

Predictive medicine, gene therapies, and no doubt, a major impact of human longevity. More technology, more change, more information, more choices. Airplanes can take off and land on their own, the stock markets are monitored with predictive and recursive software systems and doctors routinely use computer-aided diagnostics to care for their patients.

Ok, a short quiz…nod you head this way if you agree with the following statement:

Here it is: “I would do just about anything avoid having an endoscopy.”
For those of you that don’t know what Endoscopy is or have not yet experienced it, you just go along with the folks that are doing this.

Enter the smart pill.
The FDA-approved sensor from Buffalo NY -based SmartPill Corporation, transmits data about pressure, acidity and temperature to a 5 x 4-in. receiver about the same size and shape as beeper. 
Patients carry it around with them for about 24 hours while the pill journeys through their gastrointestinal tract. 

Yes…. swallow a pill and wear a beeper…I can do that. And yes, they are available right now.
I assume that they are disposable.

So what’s my point?

The increasing the complexity of our lives without equal gains in human workers’ competency is a major and growing concern. 

We human beings are not keeping pace well enough to avoid causing disasters due to human error. 
I have an uncle that traveled 400 miles to have the precision of a human-guided robot perform his prostate surgery.

Think about telecommunications traffic, air traffic control, subway management, no more missed pre-cancerous polyps. And what is the impact of all this technology on our jobs, our lives? 

And two years from now?

Well, in terms of jobs, we all assume that “globalization” and “technology” is what is killing the job market in the United States, and it’s true. It has been for some time. But today, it seems to happen…faster and affect a whole lot more people…nearly everyone in fact. Vesuvious, AC Humko, Motorola, Yahoo, Meadowboork, Collin and Aikmen, and Baltimore Air Coil to name a few…our neighbors, our kids.
 
Us.

According to MIT Economist Frank Levy, there is a simple rule for deciding if a job is going to last in the U.S. or not.

 “if you can describe the job precisely, it’s gone.”

”If you have a job for which can write rule that says “if this happens, then do that,” and so forth, it can probably be programmed into a computer slash robot or we’ll get someone overseas to do it.”
And he goes on to say that this concept will (and is) disproportionately affecting what he calls the “middle area jobs”.

Low skill jobs that involve a lot of interpersonal contact… those are probably safe for the time being.

High skill jobs that require specialized knowledge, creativity and or proximity to others…safe for now also.

But it’s those that are in between, that that operate under set of rules or decision points…goodbye. And that’s the reality of it. We can all figure out who is going to do the high skill part, but what about the low?
Here’s an eye opening statistic for you: 75% of recent high school graduates in the Parkland College district need on or more remedial courses before they get to College-level curriculum. 
3 out of every four graduates…
 

What’s going to happen to people that can’t read, write, or compute well? They will be left behind at an accelerating pace also. 
One of our jobs at Parkland is to provide pathways to work and to a decent living – our transfer mission included. 
Because, really, what it boils down to, no matter how lofty and academic goals and our rhetoric, a College education must provide the skills needed to get a job.
So what happens to those jobs that don’t get off-loaded to machines, where do they go?
Yeah, China and India? 
You’ve heard it before...the top 25% of the population in China in terms of IQ is greater than the entire population of North America. 
What’s the quote? China has more honors kids that we have kids.
Yes it is true. China is:

Largest global producer of toys, clothing, and consumer electronics.  Cars, computers, biotech, aerospace, telecom are next.
They have a billion-and-a-half… hard working people…I was there in October. I saw it. China is on the move.
But today,  factory wages start at 40 cents/hour in China. 

October 24th, 1945. That’s when the minimum wage in the US was set at 40 cents an hour.
Today, there are 45,000 Taiwanese Contract Factories. There are 20,000 in Europe, and 15,000 in the U.S.
Between 1995 and 2002, the world’s 20 largest economies lost 22 million industrial jobs.
America lost @ 2 million, mostly to China.

China lost 15 million, mostly to machines. 

But despite America’s shrinking workforce, our overall industrial output increased 50% since 1992. 

Accelerating returns…

Our academic world has become far more competitive, too.

If we aren’t building partnerships and anticipating change we will be irrelavent.  

Through a series of 22 town hall meetings last spring, we have a pretty good idea what our community expects from us. The number one concern is economic and workforce development.
We have heard a desire for help with job creation and retention strategies, diversification of the tax base and help attracting the right kind of industry in every single one of the twenty communities we visited. 
We have a role in that. Our community expects us to have a role.
How we conceive of that role, how rapidly it changes, and what form it might take are for us collectively to figure out.  

Parkland College is the single largest workforce development entity in over 3000 sq miles.
99% of our graduates stay in Illinois and 70% live and work in one of the 66 communities within our district. 
 
Let me leave you with some final thoughts.

The technologies I spoke of and the companies that research and develop them are already in our community, and more are coming every day. 

I went to speak to the companies in the University Research Park recently, and I met the president of a company that deals with something called self-healing polymers. In plain terms, his company is designing automotive paint that fixes itself. If it gets scratched, you just wait a few hours, maybe buff it a little bit and, presto. The scratch disappears. 

Nanotechnology.

In the Research Park today, there are 3 biotech, 8 engineering, 12 software, 1 ag tech, and 2 nanotech-based companies. More are on the way.

It is up to us to develop relationship, partnerships, and to prepare a workforce that these companies need to grow and expand their businesses in our district. We know what our mission is.
We train and re-train the workforce these companies need to thrive and expand.

In the last 10 years, we’ve gone from 14,000 to over 17,000 credit students. 
There are an additional 4000 students in community education and the Business Development Center, and another 2500 students accessing bachelor’s degrees from a dozen or so universities on our campus…they’re all growing too. And from the look of the economy, we are likely to see even more natural growth.

Our community needs and priorities are evolving.  
For forty-one years, Parkland College has served hundreds of thousands of students for a very reasonable rate. But during the last decade, we have realized less and less support from the State of Illinois and have been completely shut out of capital dollars that were once available to keep our campus safe, current, relevant, and welcoming. It is clear to me that this situation will not change in the foreseeable future. We have two choices. Do nothing or create our own future.

And unfortunately, it’s human nature to judge the leaking roofs and stained carpeting in otherwise well-equipped labs and classrooms as a proxy for academic quality. There is so much to be done.

We are poised to begin construction of a New Engineering Sciences and Technology facility, a diesel addition, a student services center, and build additions for fine arts. Along the way, we are updating, remodeling, and renovating. Elevators, roofs, carpeting, lights, paint will all be refreshed and repaired.
We have recently completed renovation of a new Health Professions Annex on Mattis Avenue to help address the shortage of skilled nurses and technologists.

Our intentions and our mission revolve around responding to our community needs, to our students needs, and to do our part in keeping the 66 communities we serve, competitive. 
And to an increasing degree, we are on our own. 

Help us, partner with us, and support us…so that we prepare our students…you…in a time of accelerating returns.   Thanks."

Here is what Grok said:

Your 2009 speech is a thoughtful, forward-looking address that draws heavily on Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (a concept from his work, including The Singularity Is Near). You framed accelerating technological change as a transformative force reshaping education, jobs, longevity, and society—urging adaptation at Parkland College and beyond.

Overall, your core thesis holds up remarkably well in 2026: technological progress has indeed accelerated exponentially in many domains, often beyond linear expectations, driving profound shifts in computing, genomics, automation, and the economy. The "accelerating returns" framework remains influential and largely validated by trends, though some specific timelines and magnitudes you cited (based on 2008-era projections) proved optimistic or partially offset by factors like physical limits, energy constraints, pandemics, and paradigm shifts (e.g., from classical to AI-specialized/quantum computing).
Key Predictions and Their Accuracy

The Law of Accelerating Returns and Exponential Progress
You described this accurately as per Kurzweil: progress isn't linear but exponential, with rates increasing over time across technologies (computing, biotech, etc.).

Today: This concept is still widely discussed and supported. Kurzweil's predictions (e.g., human-level AI by 2029, singularity around 2045) have an often-cited ~86% historical accuracy rate on past forecasts. Exponential trends persist in AI capabilities, though Moore's Law (transistor doubling) has slowed due to physical limits (e.g., ~2-3nm nodes in 2025-2026), shifting toward specialized architectures, efficiency gains, and massive scaling in AI training clusters. Progress feels "double exponential" in areas like AI model performance.

Computing Power for $1,000
2008: ~2 gigaflops (~mouse brain equivalent).
Prediction: Human brain equivalent (~20 million billion calculations/sec, or ~20 exaflops) for ~$1,000 by ~2025 (17 years from 2008).

Further: Human collective scale in another ~20 years.
Today (2026): Consumer hardware is close but not quite there on dense, general-purpose FLOPS. High-end GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA's 2025-2026 models) deliver massive AI-optimized performance (e.g., ~10^15 operations/sec range per ~$1,000 card in sparse/8-bit modes), roughly 15-20% short of Kurzweil's 2023-2025 target for full human-brain equivalence. With used markets or multi-card setups, it's arguably crossed in effective AI compute. Supercomputers reached exaflop scales years ago (far beyond 2008's petaflop systems), but consumer democratization lags slightly. The trend aligns directionally—compute is vastly cheaper and more powerful—but timelines were a bit aggressive.

Human Genome Sequencing
You highlighted dramatic cost drops: $500M (2003) → $100K (2008) → predictions of <$1,000 in ~15 minutes by ~2013. Implications: routine, predictive medicine, longevity boosts.
Today: Costs have plummeted further—whole-genome sequencing is routinely <$1,000 (often $200-600 in 2024-2025 announcements), with some platforms claiming $100-200 or even sub-$100 in high-throughput setups. It's not yet a standard "DVD at birth" for everyone (insurance/equity barriers persist), but clinical use is widespread for diagnostics, gene therapies, and personalized medicine. Your "everything changes" call was prescient—genomics drives biotech advances, though full gene therapies for longevity remain emerging, not routine.

Life Expectancy Gains
You cited acceleration: days/year (1700s) → weeks (1800s) → ~half-year/year today.

Today: U.S. life expectancy rebounded post-COVID, reaching ~79 years in 2024 (up ~0.6 years from 2023), driven by declines in key mortality causes. Annual gains aren't consistently half a year globally/U.S. (recent averages closer to 0.1-0.3 years/year in developed nations, with setbacks from opioids/COVID), but biotech/AI-driven health tools (e.g., early detection, targeted therapies) support ongoing upward trends. Longevity escape velocity (adding >1 year/year) isn't here yet, but research momentum is strong.

Job Market and Automation
"If you can describe the job precisely, it's gone" (routine/middle-skill jobs automated or offshored).
Middle-skill squeeze; low/high-skill safer (interpersonal/creativity).
Globalization (e.g., China) + tech killing jobs faster.

Today: Highly accurate. AI has accelerated this dramatically since ~2022-2023 (generative AI tools). Routine office, data entry, basic analysis, coding support, and entry-level white-collar roles face heavy disruption—entry-level hiring drops in AI-exposed fields. Middle-skill jobs (e.g., clerical, some manufacturing) continue polarizing: low-skill interpersonal and high-skill creative/specialized roles more resilient. AI creates new jobs (e.g., prompt engineering, AI oversight) but displaces others faster than before. Global shifts persist (China's manufacturing wages rose sharply—far beyond 2008's ~40 cents/hour to hundreds/month average, though tariffs/economics cause fluctuations). U.S. industrial output grew via automation, not headcount—echoing your point.

Education and Preparedness
You critiqued 1892-era ideals persisting amid rapid change; need for workforce adaptation, partnerships.
Today: Still relevant—debates rage over curricula vs. AI-era skills (e.g., AI literacy, critical thinking over rote). Community colleges play key roles in retraining, especially as AI reshapes jobs. Your call for partnerships with tech/biotech firms (e.g., University Research Park) aligns with ongoing needs.

Comparison to Accelerating Returns Today
The "pace of change" you felt in 2009 has intensified: AI's rise (e.g., models surpassing human performance in many tasks) embodies accelerating returns, often outpacing even Kurzweil's curves in narrow domains. However, bottlenecks (energy for data centers, chip fabrication limits, regulatory/ethical hurdles) temper the pace in others. Progress is uneven but undeniable—your speech's urgency about adaptation feels even more pressing in 2026.

In summary, your predictions were directionally spot-on and prescient for a 2009 perspective. Specific dates/magnitudes (e.g., exact $1,000 brain-equivalent) were optimistic but close enough to validate the framework. The speech remains a strong call to action—education and society must evolve faster than ever amid accelerating change. Well done capturing the zeitgeist early.