Pretty soon we will hear Matt talking about the knee-of-the-exponential
The point of this, in terms of technological progress, is that we’ve gotten so accustomed to Moore’s Law that we sometimes overlook the implication that the deeper we get into the chessboard, the bigger the changes. We all know that computers advanced a lot between 1991 and 2011, but we should expect the scale of change over the next 20 years to dwarf those changes. This is a straightforward application of a well-known principle and some pretty basic math, but it’s usually not discussed in quite the right way. We think we’re used to the idea of rapid improvements in information technology, but we’re actually standing on the precipice of changes that are much larger in scale than what we’ve seen thus far.
All ribbing aside, I think the – you ain’t seen nothing yet – point is in fact underappreciated.
One of the things that I feel almost everyday is just how slow it seems like the future is coming. When we project out the current trends we can see really revolutionary stuff is possible in the 20 year horizon. But, as an individual human 20 years is actually a really long time to wait.
It also underscores why long term thinking in general shouldn’t be taken too seriously. And, why long term budget projects are junk.
Almost all of this stuff assumes that technological progress will continue to grow at an exponential rate. If you look under-the-hood then almost all of it implicitly assumes that Moore’s law will continue that whole time, since they are expecting the type of changes associated with faster computer processing to continue.
However, if you believe that then you believe that the long term will be radically different from the current world in terms of actual human experience.
Arguing that we ought to get all exercised now about trade-offs that are going to occur then is just silly. Who even knows what the human scale tradeoffs will be.
Plus, by then any budget proposal you set in place will be subject to political whims of parties whose constituents are really interested in cultural issues like whether or not parents should be allowed to have children without genetically modifying them and the War on Virtual Reality Addiction.
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Thursday ~ November 17th, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Nikki Olson
Hi Karl,
Thought it would be useful to point out that the claim is not that Moore’s Law will continue into the far future – in fact, Kurzweil predicts that Moore’s Law will not continue past this decade. Moore’s Law refers to transistors on integrated circuits, which are expected to reach their limits within 8 years. It is via what Kurzweil calls ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’ that the exponential progress continues, as he argues that a similar trend to Moore’s will occur when we move over onto different computing platforms, such as 3D/Molecular computing.
Thursday ~ November 17th, 2011 at 9:42 pm
Karl Smith
Nikki,
That’s certainly right. I used Moore’s law as a general term regarding increasing computing and was actually referring to things like CBO projections of the sources of growth in the economy, which presume the sector they call ICT (Information and Communication Technology) will exhibit the same level of productivity growth that it has for the past 25 years or so.
Thursday ~ November 17th, 2011 at 9:32 pm
Brett
Virtual Reality Addiction poses an interesting issue. What happens if/when we get the ability to create superb simulations, complete with inducted stimuli into our nervous system and brain? That completely changes our concept of “leisure”, particularly if it’s cheap enough so that you could spend all your free time in it.
Then there’s also the possibility of amazing designer drugs. I remember Tyler Cowen actually pointing that out as a risk in one of his speeches about the Great Stagnation (can’t remember the audience). What if we create the equivalent of Soma, a drug that gives us great pleasure with few lasting side-effects? Or go better, and just figure out a way to stimulate the pleasure centers in our brain directly with technology?
Thursday ~ November 17th, 2011 at 9:45 pm
lfvoss
This is obviously what is going to happen. The only question is who keeps everything running as well all doze our lives away.
Friday ~ November 18th, 2011 at 4:02 am
Windchaser
We’ve already seen some pretty revolutionary stuff. Of course, yes, we’ll see more; that’s what exponential growth means. At a 2.5% growth rate, the world becomes 2x as awesome about every 30 years.
Moore’s Law (related to density of transistors, or cost, or whatever) will fail over the next decade. It’ll slow down as we hit the limit on silicon. Of course computers will continue to improve, only a bit slower, doubling every 3-5 years instead of every 2.
But don’t worry! Transistors aren’t the bottleneck in computing anymore anyway, and we also have plenty of other fun projects to work on. You ain’t seen nothing yet!