20,000 years of progression in this century

[Queso]

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0134.html?

 

Ummmm that link has incredible information to be gathered.

This is nuts.

[UncleAl]

The Singularity cometh - that eagerly anticipated magic moment when all trends go exponential. Everything possible will be invented and owned instantly. The real world alternative is obvious: the stupid government bastards will blow it all up.

 

In the early 1990s I needed all night in all the boxes of an undergrad computer lab to minimize the energy of a rather small molecule (about three hundred atoms) - in pieces. In 2006 I can do a much better global optimization in 24 hours in one AMD FX-55 - and the oligomer contains 2556 atoms. The number of calculations rises as the square of the number of atoms. After ten years, for the same cost, I can explore things hundreds of times more complex. As can everybody else. It adds up.

 

The Singularity is all about positive feedback and fragility. Technology feeds upon itself. The best CPUs are running the equipment that fabricates even better CPUs. The best knowledge enables discovery and application of even better knowledge. However...

 

In the bad old days parts-per-hundred purity was adequate for anything. Today, semiconductors are sensitive to parts-per-billion poisoning. Today there are growing families of devices that only work to spec if single elemental isotopes are incorporated. A major social disruption sunders the supply chains and the technology cannot be rebuilt.

 

It made no difference if Rome fell or London was bombed to slag. Iron ore, petroleum, almost all basic resources were always there for the easy taking, thence recovery. Trained minds necessary for re-progress were in abundance. Nothing is easy any more. We have scraped the Earth clean down to two miles depth. Core technologies require the most extreme and extremely talented human mentalities to understand them and make them work.

 

Bomb the First World to slag and it doesn't come back no matter how many naked backs are whipped. Then, 4 billion meat puppets suckling First World charity begin to die.

[C1ay]

This is nuts.

Not at all really. Technology compounds just like interest on a loan....

[Queso]

ok c1ay :)

none of this is fascinating :)

[skuzie]

I dont think extrapolating progression is that simple, there are many variables .. too many variables! :)

Who knows we might not be around soon anyways .. you can speculate here:

 

http://hypography.com/forums/philosophy-humanities/6493-future-our-species.html

 

There are also physical limitation to technologies, new ways of doing things must be invented, or old ways must be rewritten, and this can take time bacause people generally dont like change :)

 

But good link indeed!