Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7.
...so about 35 years? ;)
...so about 35 years? ;)
Advancement is governed by economics as well as technical capability. There must be demand for new technology, or a field stagnates. Witness aviation as an example... utterly stagnant outside of military niche applications.
People seem to no longer want faster and faster computers, and the market seems to be moving toward lighter-weight lower-power portable devices like netbooks, the iPad, etc. Those have slower CPUs than current-generation desktops. I suppose the extreme gamer and server/datacenter markets are still driving performance, but for how long?
One problem is that programmers are not using the capabilities of current-generation processors, partly because the dominant OS (cough Windows cough) makes it horrifically painful to deploy desktop apps. This drives all development to the web and turns desktops into thin clients. In the end this kills demand for performance outside the datacenter market.
If you could pack the "extreme gamer" capabilities of a Playstation or an Xbox into a format as "usable"[1] as an iPad... Then you would of engineered the next iPad.
The iPad was able to come into existence because we've finally hit the point where we can cram that much computation into a small factor form (along with all the other engineering advances like wireless networking, reducing power consumption, improving display and improving battery life).
Most of those advances are directly descended from the pushing of the bleeding edge. Companies / people are not simply going to go "oh we've got iPads now. So no need to make anything faster / better / bigger".
[1] By usable I'm not talking about some magical Jobsian property of the device. I'm not even talking about the software interface. I'm talking about being able to surf the web / post to your blog / whatever while on the toilet. Try doing THAT in 1995.
If 35 years (according to Henry Makram, linked below it's only a decade) was all it took then we could simulate the brain today at a reduced speed and get meaningful output, after all, all you'd have to do is slow down the inputs accordingly.
We're as far away from having a universally teachable computer (not programmable!) as we were in the early 70's when true AI was only about a decade away.
Some interesting reading about the 'state of the art':
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/bl...
That alone may already be a mistake, it's an observation, not a law after all.
Besides, compared the 35 years ago we can now do things 1,000,000 times faster than back then, but computers are not 1,000,000 times 'smarter' they just give the same answers that you could compute back then but faster and on fewer computers.
The future is parallel anyway, so it isn't Moores law (increase in density of transistors on-chip) per-se that will drive this, more likely there will be a switch to increasing chip packing density with smaller chips (bigger yield) and better communications between the chips (think computing fabric).
We need a huge advance in programming languages before we can really contemplate building an AI by taking advantage of such a structure though, simply simulating the organic soup that forms a brain is going to be a much harder problem computationally and may simulate a dead or an insane brain much more easily than it will simulate a live and thinking one.
Actually, if that last shift took 35 years, the next one of that magnitude will be even faster.
This is Kurtzweil's fundamental insight: exponential growth is faster than people realize. We consistently underestimate it because our brains are pre-disposed to think linearly.
If it takes you 1 year to solve 1% of a problem, your brain feels like you're 99 years away. In reality, you're only 7 doublings from completion.
It may be a physical limit, a supply-side resource limit, or an economic demand limit, but there will be a limit somewhere.
Without limits, a single bacterium could fill the entire universe in a few years.
Sometimes things do grow like that for a while, but Kurzweil's attempt to turn this into a universal law and neglect limits is hand-wavey and silly.
The interesting questions are how much computing power you need to perform equivalent tasks to a human brain, and whether current technology will reach that before it plateau's out.
Exponential growth of tools opens up an exponential number of different avenues of exploration - if computers didn't advance at all for ten years, we'd still come up with many more ways to use them. With them advancing exponentially, we can not only find different ways of using them but new fields where different forms of exponential growth can happen. And so-forth. There's no fixed frontier but a moving process.
This isn't saying it's all wonderful but it's all likely to be a bit beyond our ability to encompass it - to draw a circle around it.
If the solution is 99% easy and 1% hard then you may find out after completing 99% of the problem.
Many problems are like that, simulating the brain is an excellent candidate for being such a problem. If it was just a matter of throwing more computer power at it then we'd have solved it years ago, it's that big a prize. But there is still a large part of our understanding missing and understanding does not yield to Moores law.
ie, if emulating a human brain is only N times as hard as emulating a flatworm, Moore's Law might do the trick.
But if emulating a human brain is more like (flatworm complexity)^(number of cells in human brain - number of cells in flatworm brain) then Moore's Law is unlikely to help for a very long time indeed.