The rate of paradigm shifts is currently doubling approximately every decade.

Judged as of October 2000, and the claim is hedged ('approximately'). True if independent, accepted analyses support a measurable rate of technological paradigm shifts that roughly doubles every ten years. Mostly true if such analyses support accelerating paradigm shifts at a rate close to doubling per decade. Mostly false if the claim rests only on Kurzweil's own selective compilations of milestones, with no accepted independent measure, so that it is an unproven estimate stated as established; or if accelerating change is real but the specific doubling rate is unsupported. False if independent analyses show that the rate of paradigm shifts is not accelerating in this way.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 The Rate of Technological Improvement before and after the 1830s Technology and Culture (John H. Lienhard; JSTOR stable URL https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103814) · July 1979

   “The equation tells us that, since 1832, the time constant which dictates the acceleration of technological improvement is only thirty-six years.”

2. E2 The Rate of Technological Improvement before and after the 1830s Technology and Culture (John H. Lienhard; JSTOR stable URL https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103814) · July 1979

   “The correlation coefficient for that equation is .92, which is quite high.”

3. E3 The Rate of Technological Improvement before and after the 1830s Technology and Culture (John H. Lienhard; JSTOR stable URL https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103814) · July 1979

   “Thus the time constant did not change until 1832.”

4. E4 The Slow Pace of Rapid Technological Change: Gradualism and Punctuation in Technological Change Industrial and Corporate Change (Oxford Academic) · June 1998

   “Discussions of technological change have offered sharply contrasting perspectives of technological change as gradual or incremental and the image”

Lienhard's 1979 independent analysis [E1, E2, E3] measures accelerating technological improvement after 1832. However, it gives the time constant governing that acceleration as thirty-six years [E1], which does not establish a rate of doubling every ten years. E4 shows that by 1998 scholars still disagreed about whether technological change is gradual or punctuated, which does not support an accepted measure of paradigm shifts doubling each decade. The evidence supports accelerating change in general but not the specific doubling rate, so under the criteria the claim is mostly false.