[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/PPTExpon... from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines
- He's always predicted the singularity for 2045 - no post moving there.
- He didn't say Moore's law - that graph you link starts from 1900, long before Moore and microchips
- The graph says 10^10 flops for $1000 for 2020 approx, = 10 gflops. A NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 costs <$1000 and does 29.77 TFLOPS = 29,770 gflops so a good bit ahead of the prediction
Fair enough. I've really only read "The age of spiritual machines" for an English class in college, and we went over it pretty in depth. It was fascinating initially, but after realizing that (IMO) it was mostly BS I have not read any of his stuff talking about the singularity after that book. So if he is sticking with his date good for him, but it seems pretty crazy to believe it's still going to happen if all the technologies that are meant to get us there are suffering setbacks.
I'm kind of right about the other two points though :) I found the book here: https://jimdo-storage.global.ssl.fastly.net/file/afff560e-b5... so it was fun to read back some of the things predicted about 2019.
> - He didn't say Moore's law - that graph you link starts from 1900, long before Moore and microchips
He postulates that there is a generalized law of accelerating returns that's universal. There were computational technologies before that reached their limits, and got overtaken by newer technologies that kept the overall exponential trend going. Moore's law was the latest of these computational technologies, ready to be overtaken once it runs out of steam. That's why that specific image spans times before and after Moore's law.
From page 81, he was pretty sure regular progress in semiconductors was going to get us very close to human processing power (20 Pflops in the book) in a personal computer by 2020:
"So, how will the Law of Accelerating Returns as applied to computation roll out in the decades beyond the demise of Moore's Law on Integrated Circuits by the year 2020? For the immediate future, Moore's Law will continue with ever smaller component geometries packing greater numbers of yet faster transistors on each chip. But as circuit dimensions reach near atomic sizes, undesirable quantum effects such as unwanted electron tunneling will produce unreliable results. Nonetheless, Moore's standard methodology will get very close to human processing power in a personal computer and beyond that in a supercomputer."
> - The graph says 10^10 flops for $1000 for 2020 approx, = 10 gflops. A NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 costs <$1000 and does 29.77 TFLOPS = 29,770 gflops so a good bit ahead of the prediction
From page 146 about 2019: "The computational capacity of a $4,000 computing device (in 1999 dollars) is approximately equal to the computational capability of the human brain (20 million billion calculations per second). [2] Of the total computing capacity of the human species (that is, all human brains) combined with the computing technology the species has created, more than 10 percent is nonhuman. [3]"
I get $4000 in 1999 to be ~$6850 in 2022 for 20 Pflops, so ~2.9 Tflops/$. So that prediction was 100x off (and with 3 extra years it should be >50 Pflops). Not sure if the graphs got adjusted later, but fwiw it looks closer to 10^15 than 10^10.
I think the most interesting one coming up is Turing Test for 2029 which is not so far off now an it's not so obvious how that'll go.