Notes on the Singularity.

[swestrup]

I was fooling around with Mathematica today, and after an large amount of frustration, I managed to get it to spit out this chart:



Its a simple thing, but I'm quite proud of it. It doesn't have the axes labelled or anything, because I was too lazy to figure out how, but it has the shape I was looking for.

This curve represents cumulative technological progress in the next century, correcting for 'inflation' in the rate of progress. So, the X-axis represents actual years from 2000 and the Y-Axis represents cumulative years of technological progress, measured in multiples of the amount of progress we made during the year 2000.

Now, the first thing you may notice about this chart, is that its not linear. Nope. The rate of technological change is increasing and this chart reflects that. The second thing you may notice is that the number at the top of the Y-Axis is 20,000. As in, years. So, this chart predicts that, assuming that the rate at which technological change was increasing during 2000 is constant, during the next 100 years we will see 20,000 years-equivalent of progress.

You should keep this in mind whenever almost any scientist says that some technology or other is 'three to four hundred years in the future'. When they say that, they are assuming the rate of technological change is constant, when it isn't. This is to help translate such estimates into real-world numbers. So, pulling out some points from that chart and sticking them in a table we see:

They Say  It Takes
--------  --------
   50 yr  21.07 yr
  100 yr  29.03 yr
  500 yr  49.72 yr
 1000 yr  59.05 yr
 5000 yr  81.00 yr
10000 yr  90.49 yr

So, that estimate of 300-400 years can be expected to happen before 2050.

This would all be hard enough to swallow, but the rate of change of technological progress during the year 2000 wasn't constant. It was increasing. What this means is that this chart is a conservative estimate. We don't really have a very good handle on the rate at which progress is accellerating, nor do we know that the increase is merely hyper-exponential. It may be MUCH faster. When people talk about the 'Singularity', they are usually postulating that sometime during the next hundred years that line above goes to infinity, not just 20,000.

What would that mean? No one is exactly sure, but it certainly is fun to speculate...  Of course, its coming fast enough that the majority of folks on LJ will live to see it, for good or bad.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

I think that's what Bush is all about. He's sidelined the US from the global community because he (whether by lack of vision or simply for the short term interests of his family) prefers the economics of 60-100 years ago.

We'll see if his strategy works.

But in Europe, children use their cellphones to go, see what I'm doing?

But in Korea, cellphones have the bandwidth that US televisions do.