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Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

Kurzweil also predicts the Singularity to occur by 2030. My personal thoughts are that even if the AI doesn't emerge, we're already close enough to Singularity that the exponential progress of the next 20 years will still be pretty damn mind boggling. The internet alone is a Singularity of sorts.

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All exponential growth comes to an end eventually.

In the real world there are no "hockey-stick" curves, only S-shaped curves because the real world doesn't deal with infinity.

I wrote a better explanation here: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-neve...

This is a pretty good explanation.

Kurzweil suggested in the "Singularity is Near" that the believed speed limit imposed by the speed of light would be a barrier limiting the available resources to those in the solar system. Thus, limiting the exponential growth of technology and leading to the flattening of the growth curve suggested in your article. He also, gave a date of mid next century when this would occur.

I didn't like Kurzweil's expansionist idea so much. Instead I imagine that the Singularity will hole-up, and become disinterested in the outside universe. There might be lots of real estate - read computing resource - there under all those turtles.

"All exponential growth comes to an end eventually."

Perhaps. But it may be that this limit is very far in the future.

Technological progress relies on matter to store information and to built tools, and energy to apply those tools to accumulate information. There is a lot of matter and energy in the Universe, so much so that even were we to continue at our current rate of progress, we wouldn't hit these known physical limits for a considerable span of time.

There may, of course, be more subtle limits we are currently unaware of, but I'm inclined to believe that technological progress will continue at an accelerating rate for a very long span of time.

A hockey-stick curve can be approximated to any desired degree of accuracy by a sum of many sigmoid curves. The question is, when, if ever, will we run out of new S-shaped curves?

According to the Singularity is Near book, Kurzweil predicts human level artificial intelligence by 2030, and singularity by 2045.

My mistake.

I suspect that the Singularity will be like a speciation event, a recession, or the bottoming of the markets. We won't be able to say exactly when and where it happened until after the fact.

Instead of trying to predict exactly when, the smart money will execute a strategy that doesn't depend on the exact time, like Dollar Cost Averaging into the current depressed markets.

I'm not sure what that means for the Singularity.

Wouldn't all this require a massive investment in strong AI right now ... Well, I can tell you; that isn't happening. Good luck trying to convince your dissertation advisor that you want to build the Singularity. :)

  Who has a massive server farm?
  Computes enough to keep countries warm?
  Goo-gle, goo-gle!

  Who has a massive data store?
  of websites, books and maps and more?
  Goo-gle, goo-gle!

  Who hired Norvig as technical lead?
  Has rooms of genius PhDs?

  Whose statistical translation is leagues ahead?
  Whose voice recognition will leave Dragon dead?

  Who reserves permission to train on your mail?
  Knows who said what in the worldwide news?
  Keeps most of their work hidden under a veil?
  Their every feature gets 'ahhs' and 'oohs'?

  Goo-gle, goo-gle!

  (Ahem - http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/thesimpsons/stonecuttersanthem.htm )

Well, I can tell you; that isn't happening

Sure, says the guy posting under the name of a sentient computer! :)

But doesn't that assume the exponential stays exponential and doesn't slow down like a sigmoid?

Thw assumptions are even stronger. To actually become singular, the development must start to accelerate to eventually become infinitely faster than exponential. Otherwise you will just get growth by a constant factor in a constant time, with no singularity ever. The other way to get a singularity is to have a quantity you divide by go to zero, like when the price society has to pay for the next development step is an increasing function of the inverse of the remaining supplies of a finite resource (like some rare earth element required for faster semiconductors or whatever). If we just continue like we did for the last few decades, this might as well be the most probable type of singularity to expect until 2045. But that is of course nothing to build a milleniarist movement upon.

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