Consider $/MIPS available in the mainstream open market. The doubling time of this can’t go down “for some people”, it can only go down globally. Will this doubling time decrease leading up to the Singularity? Or during it?
I always felt that’s what the Singularity was, an acceleration of Moore’s Law type progress. But I wrote the post because I think it’s easy to see a linear plot of exponential growth and say “look there, it’s shooting through the roof, that will be crazy!”. But in fact it won’t be any crazier than progress is today.
It will require a new growth term, machine intelligence kicking in for example, to actually feel like things are accelerating.
I would like feedback on my recent blog post:
http://www.kmeme.com/2010/07/singularity-is-always-steep.html
It’s simplistic for this crowd, but something that bothered me for a while. When I first saw Kurzweil speak in person (GDC 2008) he of course showed both linear and log scale plots. But I always thought the log scale plots were just a convenient way to fit more on the screen, that the “real” behavior was more like the linear scale plot, building to a dramatic steep slope in the coming years.
Instead I now believe in many cases the log plot is closer to “the real thing” or at least how we perceive that thing. For example in the post I talk about computational capacity. I believe the exponential increase is capacity translates into a perceived linear increase in utility. A computer twice as fast is only incrementally more useful, in terms of what applications can be run. This holds true today and will hold true in 2040 or any other year.
Therefore computational utility is incrementally increasing today and will be incrementally increasing in 2040 or any future date. It’s not building to some dramatic peak.
None of this says anything against the possibility of a Singularity. If you pass the threshold where machine intelligence is possible, you pass it, whatever the perceived rate of progress at the time.