Georges Anderla
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Georges Anderla is a French economist. While working for the OECD in 1973, he created a statistical model of the accumulation of human knowledge. He began by defining the known technology in 1 A.D. as a unit and showed that it had doubled in 1500, doubled again in 1750 and again in 1900. According to Anderla the next doubling only took fifty years, then ten, seven and finally six leading up to the year 1973. If Anderla is correct, the amount of human knowledge in 1973 was 128 times greater than in the year 1 A.D.
According to science philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, who extrapolated the accelerating accumulation of knowledge in Anderla's model, knowledge is now doubling every eighteen months. The exponential growth is similar to Moore's law that says that the complexity an integrated circuit will double in about 24 months. These kinds of exponential growths has lead some to speculate about a future technological singularity in which the increase will approach infinity.
