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Comment by tlarkworthy | Hacker News Reader

Thats a very bold claim, that goes against Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis tech is accelerating. Maybe (unlikely) that cloud/mobiles is the end game for silicon. But what about quantum? What about biological? What about Nano? What about AI? Literally there are a ton of potential generational changes in the making that could turn everything on its head again

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Why is Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis particularly important to contrast other hypotheses against? What sets it apart in relevance and/or authority?

Because it's evidence is pretty straightforward: you can take wikipedia's list of important inventions and plot their frequency on a chart.

Of course, there are debates around which inventions count as significant. And there is recency bias.

Never underestimate the power in something easy to communicate.

> "Never underestimate the power in something easy to communicate."

Yes, I suppose that's the biggest thing with these "futurologists": their predictions are both tantalizing and easy to digest. I reserve the right to remain skeptical about any of these Silicon Valley religions though.

This is not limited to Silicon Valley. Every predictor since before Nostradamus has used this to their advantage. Those who haven't lose their audience, because predicting the future in concrete terms is really hard. So hard that nobody can do it regularly. Which causes people to stop listening.

Agreed!

What strikes me as particularly interesting about Silicon Valley and some techie circles -- as opposed to Nostradamus -- is that many of these people self-identify as hiperrational, agnostic, atheist or wary of traditional religions, yet here they are, building their own religions under a more palatable technological guise (I could list ideas like the Singularity, Super AI good or bad, immortality, "we're living in a simulation", "every problem in the world can be fixed with the right app", etc, but if the list of absurdities goes long enough I'm sure to hit some raw nerve, so I'll stop here).

These modern day Nostradamuses also tend to overinflate their own importance in the wider world. Outside of techie circles Kurzweil is a nobody, and the notion that his theories are some bar that other theories must somehow pass is laughable.

Sure, some people are not critical thinkers. I am not a worshipper of Kurzweil and not into Transhumanism, but I liked the historical charts he drew showing exponential acceleration over a wide time interval and tech domains. I feel his evidence of historical exponential progress was compelling, but what u do with that evidence is up to you. If you have something to say about that point I am happy to hear it, but you mostly seem to be lashing out at 'silicon valley' types which is a mischaracterization of who you are talking to. I respect Kurzweil because he is a real engineer, entrepreneur and a helper of those less fortunate (the blind in-particular).

U should look him up, futurology is only a slice of Kurzweil's enormous body of innovative work.

Kurzweil is someone who does not understand where his expertise ends and makes bogus claims based on a poor understanding of non-computer science topics (see his claims about AGI + the human brain as an example). His claims are typically too generic to be wrong or he does mental gymnastics to claim his prediction was correct when it wasn't. Just read his analysis of how his predictions for 2009 did - https://www.kurzweilai.net/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Far...

He claims he's right even when he's obviously wrong. He is not someone whose predictions should be blindly trusted.

I think population growth also factors in. Population is leveling off. In the past century, the global population has quadrupled, so there are four times as many people to invent things in raw numbers alone. But global population will increase no more than 50% in the next century, which means we aren't creating a lot more inventors than we are now.

This is a good point, but also consider the proportion of the global population who have the opportunity to become inventors is hopefully going to grow over the next century. As a result, the absolute number of inventors may grow faster than by just growing the overall population size.

It's very well known and makes a compelling argument that tech progress has been accelerating since the Stone age.

Well known is irrelevant. "Has been accelerating" is also irrelevant. Will continue to accelerate to something very close to infinity is the relevant part. There are plenty of us who do not find Kurzweil's argument on that topic to be at all compelling.

I agree Kurzweil's hypothesis is well known... within techie/Silicon Valley circles, somewhat like the Singularity -- a related concept -- is common in those circles as well. Regardless, there's no particular weight to Kurzweil's hypothesis, tantalizing as it may seem, and it's not reasonable in my opinion to use it as a measuring stick of other hypotheses as if Kurzweil was a proven and acknowledged authority on this topic.

Likewise, if someone said "human aging and death are unavoidable" this wouldn't be bold just because Kurzweil has written a lot about immortality.

I think his hypothesis deserves more credit than that — many of his predictions have come to pass, and many of those that have, at the time they were predicted, seemed somewhat far fetched since they were firmly in the realm of science fiction.

It doesn't matter. Each prediction has to be weighed on its own merit against ever-evolving reality. Even Einstein didn't bat a thousand.

I think this is a crucial point. Based on Ben's premises, his conclusions make sense. But what if you alter the premises, for example, by assuming that compute will happen on another substrate? If you choose a biological substrate, then you can move compute from inside one's pocket, to inside the body. And for many functions, you wouldn't need the cloud. I doubt that the dominant companies in silicon-based tech today have the expertise to make that shift.

A lot of work is being done to make bio-silicon fusion real, with use cases like creating olfactory sensors.

And our increasing control over both brain and genes may be the pathway to more general biological computation.

https://www.ucsf.edu/magazine/control-brains-genes

I think it will, at best, be a semantic argument in retrospect. The companies highlighted are all clearly defined as being bolstered by computing technology. But what about next generation, huge companies that are bolstered by computing and other technologies fused together? For example, if a company manages to create a brain-computer interface that gains global adoption and equivalent valuations to the existing tech giants, but the software layer is a mashup of, by that time, commoditized services from the existing tech giants who fail to enter this industry, does it count?

This myopia really puzzles me.

It seems like the whole analysis is predicated on the idea that technology = software made in Silicon Valley, with unimportant secondary factors. That 3M and ExxonMobil are not "tech" companies because they don't make iPhone apps.

Every company is a tech company, not because we've had computers for a while, but because technology is what we build to get what we want.

These kinds of narrow, myopic, siloed takes miss the forest for the trees.

If you think the epitome of human evolution is going to be people looking at bright rectangles for eternity, you haven't been paying attention to what technologists are doing.

I don't think the claim is technology in general, but non quantum based computing.

It's a substitute computing product though - kind of like electric cars for combustion cars.

I don't think that's accurate. The article goes through pains to discuss that sometimes castles are simply routed around. Quantum computing would potentially be one of those.

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