The heart of this book is discussing exponential growth and its consequences. Much of this first chapter is filled with graphs demonstrating the exponential growth happening on earth in various ways.
The heart of this chapter is that life can be thought of as an information processing system -- earth's information processing system -- and if it is looked at that way, it is a processing system that is undergoing exponential growth. And it has been for four billion years!
This chapter also defines a singularity. It is the time when something that is growing exponentially finally gets so big that its absolute growth gets really fast when viewed by an outside observer. If the growth is happening within a finite system (not a mathematical model such as a graph) it can be the moment before what is growing consumes all the remaining resource its growing on in an eyeblink. Kurzweil is predicting that a singularity will happen for earth -- in the sense that earth is an information processing machine and all the material and energy on earth is going to get gobbled up and reorganized so that it is dedicated to information processing.
The chapter is an impressive start. It got my brain juices flowing.
My additional observation to add to Kurzweil's in this chapter is that the moment when a singularity happens -- Kurzweil's Knee of the Curve -- cannot be determined by the observer inside the system. The inside observer does not experience a singularity. To the observer inside the system, no matter where they are on the curve, it always looks as if growth has been slower in the past and will be faster in the future.
What the inside observer will experience as a change is when the inflection point comes -- when the easy resources have all been tapped and now growth must slow due to diminishing returns: The time when the Good Times end.
The Six Epochs of the chapter title are different eras in the growth of life on earth. Kurzweil created these based on their complexity and information processing capability. Each represents quite a shift from the previous epoch, and information processing advances happen thousands of times faster in each new epoch.
Epoch One is pure chemistry. It is the information processing ability of inanimate matter plus energy. This is the thinking power of first plasma, then rocks and gases. (Hint: It ain't much. But as your mother might say to you when you were a child, "It's a start.")
Epoch Two adds animation -- biology -- to this mix. In earth's Epoch Two information is now contained in DNA as well as lumps of rock and masses of gas. And compared to rocks and gasses DNA-based systems' information processing ability grows astoundingly quickly over time.
Epoch Three adds learning to this mix -- brain power on top of DNA power. Brain power in this case is referring to animal brain power -- things such as the brains and learning ability of insects, amphibians, fish and dinosaurs.
Epoch Four adds human technical ingenuity to the mix -- teaching new generations old tricks and astounding tool making abilities. This is the present.
Epoch Five will be when human and computer intelligence seamlessly merge and being human becomes much more than just inhabiting a biological body.
Epoch Six will be when this hyper mix of information processing ability spreads across first the solar system, then the galaxy, then the universe. The universe exists to become a high performance computing system. It's a big concept, and just as with its predecessor epochs, this last epoch will happen astoundingly quickly when compared to the timeframes of the previous epochs.