I’m a former singularitarian, and sadly, we live in a universe that will not be seeing a technological singularity.
Moore’s Law has been dead for over a decade, tech isn’t advancing like it did when we were kids, and we’ve reached the hard physical limits of electronic transistor technology. Even if we manage to get one of the proposed alternatives to work (photonics, spintronics, plasmonics, etc), the most we’ll see is one or two more price-performance doublings before those hit a wall too.
The technological curve isn’t exponential, it’s sigmoid. Those economists know what they’re talking about because they’ve internalized Alvin Toffler’s “Limits to Growth” as a prerequisite for futures studies.
I’m a former singularitarian, and sadly, we live in a universe that will not be seeing a technological singularity.
Moore’s Law has been dead for over a decade, tech isn’t advancing like it did when we were kids, and we’ve reached the hard physical limits of electronic transistor technology. Even if we manage to get one of the proposed alternatives to work (photonics, spintronics, plasmonics, etc), the most we’ll see is one or two more price-performance doublings before those hit a wall too.
The technological curve isn’t exponential, it’s sigmoid. Those economists know what they’re talking about because they’ve internalized Alvin Toffler’s “Limits to Growth” as a prerequisite for futures studies.
Limits to Growth predicts collapse though, so I rather hope it’s not accurate