About 1260 AD, Ibn Khallikan, a Kurdish historian living in the Abbasid Empire (modern Iraq), wrote an encyclopedia with biographies of many famous men (though no women). One of the biographies includes a story about chess and the meaning of “exponential growth.” The story takes place in India, because Ibn Khallikan knew that chess was a game that came from India.

According to this story, King Shihram was a tyrant who oppressed his subjects. One of his subjects, a wise man named Sissa ibn Dahir, invented the game of chess for the king to play, to show him that a king needed all his subjects and should take good care of them. King Shihram was so pleased that he ordered that the game of chess should be preserved in the temples, and said that it was the best thing he knew of to train generals in the art of war, a glory to religion and the world, and the foundation of all justice.

Then King Shihram asked Sissa ben Dahir what reward he wanted. Sissa answered that he didn’t want any reward, but the king insisted. Finally Sissa said that he would take this reward: the king should put one grain of wheat on the first square of a chessboard, two grains of wheat on the second square, four grains on the third square, eight grains on the fourth square, and so on, doubling the number of grains of wheat with each square (an exponential rate of growth).

to bring out the chessboard and they started putting on the wheat. Everything went well for a while, but the king was surprised to see that by the time they got halfway through the chessboard the 32nd square required more than four billion grains of wheat, or about 100,000 kilos of wheat. Now Sissa didn’t seem so stupid anymore. Even so, King Shihram was willing to pay up.

But as the slaves began on the second half of the chessboard, King Shihram gradually realized that he couldn’t pay that much wheat – in fact, to finish the chessboard you would need as much wheat as six times the weight of all the living things on Earth.

(London, 1843-1871, Biographical dictionary of Ibn Khallikan, vol. III, p. 71). – Kidipedea

One big risk for humans is that we may not always precieve the world correctly. We live in a world that can change exponentially with brains that like to plot things out linearly.

In other words, we do a bad job at perceiving reality in some cases. (It is no secret to those of us interested in cognitive science know that humans minds are flawed. Here is a list of cognitive biases if you want to peruse a few. We have a habit of perceiving things that are not true.)

The theory I propose that can cause us problems in the future: Humans seem to think (and plan) in a linear growth fashion while reality can be exponential.

So, we seem to have problems getting our minds around exponential behaviors. They can sneak up on us, like in the old story above. For example, energy usage, population growth, and consumption of resources are all growing at an exponential rate.  Exponential depletion of resources combined with exponential consumption layered on top of exponential population growth appears to be the reality we are moving into at this point.

Let’s take a look at a population graph of the world since 10,000 BC. This is an exponential graph. Once you get on the right side of one of these things, it can start going almost straight up at this scale.

From Wikipedia

Combine a population that is growing exponentially, combined successful populations of people moving out of poverty to become ever more consumption oriented – and you could perhaps have a problem at some point.

Our history plotted on this population chart has been one where growth and consumption has been the goal throughout history – and man has not had an issue because the finite amount of total resources was so much larger than the population’s demands. But, I think there has to be a point where exponentially depleted resources meet exponentially growing demand, and we have an issue. We would at that point meet a new paradigm that we have never encountered before. So, the future over the next 20 years could be much different than the last 20.

On the positive side, we can make progress at an exponential rate. Ray Kurzweil, futurist, technologist, and all around genius predicts exponential growth in certain information technologies, which can allow us to survive and thrive. For example, he believes that solar energy is improving at an exponential rate and will be capable of providing all of our energy needs in 20 years.

The reason why solar energy technologies will advance exponentially, Kurzweil said, is because it is an “information technology” (one for which we can measure the information content), and thereby subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns.

“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” he said. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”

Solar Power to Rule in 20 Years, Futurists Say

So, what what topics should be paid attention to in order to understand the future? I recommend 4 words that start with “E”: Energy, Environment, Economics, and last but not least… Exponential growth.