Evolution is slow and for the sake of argument, assume human intelligence has not changed over the time period you have mapped. If humans haven’t gotten any smarter, and the next incremental step in the technology areas you have mentioned requires increasingly sophisticated solutions and thought, then you would expect progress to slow. Fairly obvious case of diminishing returns.
Second, computers do act to augment human intelligence, and more educated humans alive increase the available brainpower, but this too contrasts with probably exponentially increasing difficulty in certain fields.
For example, in the field I presently work, I see huge teams of people and very sophisticated equipment used to support further improvements in microprocessors. I think in the past the teams needed to be much smaller, and the equipment was simpler, and the gains were easier.
The fields you mention there are specific bottlenecks we can discuss in detail but I feel that would make this post too long. But the TLDR : nuclear turns out to have long tail risks that current human run organizations can’t economically efficiently manage, transportation is gated by energy and human reflexes, medicine is limited by a number of inefficiencies, and manufacturing has seen enormous improvements, just not in the way you think. The rise of China has made manufactured goods of varied quality levels far more abundant than in the past, and has made them accessible to billions more people. Your “typical home, subtract the screens” model is implicitly assuming a nice home in Los Angeles in 1955 or so. But over in China most people did not yet have running water and had minimal access to electricity.
The singularity model is simply, we know that each of the fields mentioned, we can create toy examples of “minimum limit case” where we don’t know the limits of physics, but we do know what we could achieve if we had limitless intelligence to engineer to the limits rapidly.
Below I have listed what are the ‘minimum limit cases’. We don’t know how far the fields can be pushed past the point I mentioned but everything I mention is pretty conclusively supported by evidence as being feasible.
Note that everything listed, including medicine advances, require supporting advances in AI to make them feasible. We don’t have that yet. We have a lot of toy models made at a small scale but not the integrated systems just yet. By AI I mean limited function agents able to choose good (but not perfect) control outputs for a robotic system, not self amplifying superintelligences.
Medicine—we know that aging is governed by processes that accumulate negative changes over time. Stopping/reversing these changes is possible if we knew exactly which genes to rewrite. At the limit case, medicine would be able to produce artificial replacements for any organ, stabilize any dying patient with high speed AI/robotics to identify the correct intervention and apply it, and turn off the root cause of most diseases.
Transportation—a packet switched network of vacuum trains/point to point flying cars/overhead transit pods/autonomous cars
Energy—solar panels over all buildings and deserts, batteries at every electrical panel, a network of demand regulation
Agriculture—robotic farms in a sealed pod
Construction—robotics that assemble a building from pre-fabricated building blocks that come on a truck
Manufacturing—robotics that are sophisticated enough to manufacture themselves and to self-clear nearly all faults
Note that this can be modeled pretty simply.
Evolution is slow and for the sake of argument, assume human intelligence has not changed over the time period you have mapped. If humans haven’t gotten any smarter, and the next incremental step in the technology areas you have mentioned requires increasingly sophisticated solutions and thought, then you would expect progress to slow. Fairly obvious case of diminishing returns.
Second, computers do act to augment human intelligence, and more educated humans alive increase the available brainpower, but this too contrasts with probably exponentially increasing difficulty in certain fields.
For example, in the field I presently work, I see huge teams of people and very sophisticated equipment used to support further improvements in microprocessors. I think in the past the teams needed to be much smaller, and the equipment was simpler, and the gains were easier.
The fields you mention there are specific bottlenecks we can discuss in detail but I feel that would make this post too long. But the TLDR : nuclear turns out to have long tail risks that current human run organizations can’t economically efficiently manage, transportation is gated by energy and human reflexes, medicine is limited by a number of inefficiencies, and manufacturing has seen enormous improvements, just not in the way you think. The rise of China has made manufactured goods of varied quality levels far more abundant than in the past, and has made them accessible to billions more people. Your “typical home, subtract the screens” model is implicitly assuming a nice home in Los Angeles in 1955 or so. But over in China most people did not yet have running water and had minimal access to electricity.
The singularity model is simply, we know that each of the fields mentioned, we can create toy examples of “minimum limit case” where we don’t know the limits of physics, but we do know what we could achieve if we had limitless intelligence to engineer to the limits rapidly.
Below I have listed what are the ‘minimum limit cases’. We don’t know how far the fields can be pushed past the point I mentioned but everything I mention is pretty conclusively supported by evidence as being feasible.
Note that everything listed, including medicine advances, require supporting advances in AI to make them feasible. We don’t have that yet. We have a lot of toy models made at a small scale but not the integrated systems just yet. By AI I mean limited function agents able to choose good (but not perfect) control outputs for a robotic system, not self amplifying superintelligences.
Medicine—we know that aging is governed by processes that accumulate negative changes over time. Stopping/reversing these changes is possible if we knew exactly which genes to rewrite. At the limit case, medicine would be able to produce artificial replacements for any organ, stabilize any dying patient with high speed AI/robotics to identify the correct intervention and apply it, and turn off the root cause of most diseases.
Transportation—a packet switched network of vacuum trains/point to point flying cars/overhead transit pods/autonomous cars
Energy—solar panels over all buildings and deserts, batteries at every electrical panel, a network of demand regulation
Agriculture—robotic farms in a sealed pod
Construction—robotics that assemble a building from pre-fabricated building blocks that come on a truck
Manufacturing—robotics that are sophisticated enough to manufacture themselves and to self-clear nearly all faults