Physical Limits of Computation (2009)

lwn.net

31 points·kercker··5 comments

Side note: comments at the bottom on singularity and moore's law are IMHO also highly interesting.

Direct link: https://lwn.net/Articles/286739/

> To be blunt, the singularity phenomenon is the quasi-religious expectation that a brighter tomorrow through technology is "certain" and universal deliverance of mankind is just around the corner.

This sounds like a mis-representative view of the Singularity. Indeed some people think the Singularity will bring some kind of techno-utopia, they get excited about living forever and so on, but this only is an assessment about the Singularity, it is not a definition of the concept.

As of today, the Wikipedia definition is :

> The technological singularity (also, simply, the singularity)[1] is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.

That sounds much more accurate imho. Most notably, the important point is that the Singularity will bring unforeseeable changes. No-one knows if mankind will be better or worse out of it.

Dr. Lloyd is a physicist more than anything (even though his department at MIT is MechE), which may explain why he eschews the manufacturing approach to Moore's Law. The author should have mentioned this; Dr. Lloyd is brilliant but he isn't an EE or CS and can't reasonably be expected to base his theories on those disciplines.

Since the topic is the limits to computation imposed by the fundamental laws of physics, knowledge of the details of modern semiconductor manufacturing seem much less relevant than of quantum mechanics and gravity.

Joe Armstrong gives a very good talk about ideas in the article in "The Mess We're In" (2014):

https://youtu.be/lKXe3HUG2l4?t=26m12s

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