Nandan Nilekani invokes 'second half of the chessboard' at IIT-Madras

A couple of months ago, while addressing the graduating class at IIT Madras, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani mentioned that we are currently in the “second half of the chessboard”.

For those unfamiliar with the term, here’s what it means:

1. It was coined by Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil, a US-based author and computer scientist.

Kurzweil is famous for his views on futurist subjects like artificial intelligence and robotics. His book, 'The Age of Spiritual Machines', written almost two decades ago, spoke about humans eventually creating machines smarter than them.

2. He also introduced the law of accelerating returns which states that the rate of change in a variety of evolutionary systems tends to increase exponentially.

Particularly about technology, he felt that whenever it will approach some kind of a barrier, a new one will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He predicted that such paradigm shifts will continue to become increasingly common, leading to technological change so rapid that it will represent a rupture in the fabric of human history.

3. This theory can be understood better as a mathematical problem expressed in textual form:

Take a chessboard. Place a grain of wheat on the first square, two on the second square, four on the third and so on. Place double the amount of grains on each new square than the preceding one. You will notice that the quantity is increasing faster with each new box being filled.

4. That’s exactly how the term second half of chessboard can be understood. The quantum of changes in technology are increasing at a pace faster than has ever been known to mankind and it only gets faster from here on.