I'll be writing a lot more about the Singularity later. Let's go back to the basic building blocks that will educate my later writing.
We return to the numbers of people in higher education. If this number is growing exponentially, there might be reason to think human knowledge will too, in future. Specifically, in India, we find "India's provision for higher education rose from a meagre 200,000 at the time of Independence to an astronomical 5,000,000 college and university places by 1998." Those words come from Gajaraj Dhanarajan, President and CEO, The Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada. He was speaking in August of 2000 at the 11th General Conference--Universities as the Gateway to the Future.
Let's see--India achieved independence in 1947 (right? Might be off a year--Nope. Google says August 15, 1947). If Indian university students had doubled in number every five years since then, starting from a base of 200,000, they should now have 516 million university students. So, if they have started growing exponentially, it is recently. (How many university students should India have? Using figures from Dhanarajan's speech, to have the same rate of university enrollment as Canada {5%}, for example, India should have had 50 million university students in 2000. Room for improvement here).
This is actually fairly important. The Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for the Indian university population is 5.51%. The CAGR needed to double in five years is 14.87%. A CAGR of 5.51% means the population doubles every 13 years, instead of five. We won't get where we need to be at this rate.
If you've been reading from the bottom up, you'll be able to join in the refrain--"Great growth. Not doubling."
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