I’ve been intending writing about Ray Kurzweil and the technological singularity for some time now.  This isn’t that blog—it is a Friday evening after all, at the end of a long week.  But it is connected with some of the ideas behind the singularity.

Instead, I’m going to write about the “Fry Event Horizon”—a phenomenon of equal if not greater importance than the singularity, and due to hit us a good few years earlier—March 8 2010 to be precise (see the image below).  This is the story of British comedian and raconteur Stephen Fry, and how he is destined to change the world in three hundred and sixty seven days.

Click for larger image

The tale starts though with Twitter—a growing web-based vehicle for global social networking. For the uninitiated, Twitter provides an open framework for people across the world to communicate in short messages of 140 characters or less.  As a user, you can sign up to follow other “tweeps,” and they in turn can decide to follow your “tweets”—these are your “followers.”  Each time you post a 140 character pearl of wisdom, it is propagated around the world through this network…

If you want an insight into how people are beginning to use such a deceptively simple (simplistic even) framework, you could do far worse than check out Howard Lovy’s recent blog (although Tim Harper’s account is more entertaining!)

Stephen Fry was an early adopter of Twitter.  Following a meteoric rise in popularity, he currently has the fifth highest following of any user, beaten only by the likes of CNN News and Britney Spears.  According to www.twittercounter.com, Stephen Fry (or @stephenfry, to give him his correct Twitter ID), has more followers than Al Gore or the New York Times.  As of March 6th the figure stood at 267,336.

Think about this for a moment.  Every time @stephenfry sends out a 140 character (or less) message, 267,336 people receive it, absorb it, and are influenced in a small way by it. Then they pass it on to their followers, who in turn pass it down the chain.  The result is a web of influence that is as vast in its reach as it is simple in its conception.

But this isn’t what this story is about.

Playing around with the @stephenfry follower figures for a far more serious lecture I’m giving next week, I began to wonder what would happen if this exponential rise in followers continued.

So I plotted it out.

And, quite naturally, this led to me wondering when the number of people following @stephenfry on Twitter would coincide with the total number of people alive on Earth.

So I plotted that out as well.

It turns out that, following this simple analysis, the date that everyone in the world becomes a @stephenfry follower is not that far away: March 182010 to be precise.  Yes, March 8 2010 is is when the “Fry Event Horizon” will occur, and nothing will be the same again.

What will happen when we hit the “Fry Event Horizon?”  No-one knows – but I think we can expect society as we know it to cease, and be replaced by something even more bizarre.

Of course, there is just a small chance that my thinking is flawed—that I’ve blindly extrapolated an exponential trend without asking what the data actually mean…

The point here (as if you didn’t spot it) is that predicting future events from current data is a tricky business when the underlying causes for those data aren’t understood.  And when apparently exponential trends are used, the errors in the projections get mighty big mighty fast.

(As an aside here, any scientist worth their salt will tell you that the fastest way to make poor data look good is to plot them on logarithmic axes—just as the @stephenfry data are.  It’s the perfect way to hide awkward blips and deviations).

The dangers of exponential extrapolation may be obvious, but they always strike me afresh when examining the exponential trends and predictions associated with the technological singularity.  And even more so when people talk about “Moore’s Law” being predictive—it’s not!

Don’t get me wrong here—many things are changing faster than they have ever changed before, and this change will in turn impact society in significant and unpredictable ways.  And much of what proponents of the technological singularity highlight bears careful consideration.  But when looking at any prediction—especially when it’s based on an exponential trend—it’s worth asking what is driving the trend, what will alter it, and what the trend means in practice?

In the case of @stephenfry, much as I would love the “Fry Event Horizon” to be my ticket to a Nobel, it’s no more than a good example of bad data interpretation.  It’s fun, but it’s wrong.  @stephenfry won’t single-handedly lead society into an unpredictable future.  Because the reasons for people following him on Twitter—or not—are complex, and are influenced by many factors.  Not least, the fact that not everyone wants to follow him!

I’m sure there are many other examples of foolish data extrapolation.  I would have a search around the web and link to some, but it’s Friday evening, and I ought to at least pretend I have a life.  But please do post links in the comments below if you have anything juicy to share.

In the meantime, it was nice to think, even for a fraction of a second, that one man and his Twitter account could change the world.  And of course the irony is that rapidly evolving communication frameworks like Twitter probably will change the world in the long run—just not in the way we might predict!