[danieltillett]

Of course we are far from reaching human level yet, but generalised Moore’s Law means the number of years until we reach human level is not that far away.

There is of course the issue that since brains evolved rather than being designed that they can be inefficient in their processing. Look at how poor humans are at arithmetic - we need to divert a huge fraction of our processing power to do what a computer designed for arithmetic can do very efficiently.

[api]

Is Moore's Law still a thing?

I don't doubt we can go far beyond present compute power since I am far beyond present compute power and I am reading this. But is the economic driver there?

At the endpoint most people use PCs, tablets, and phones to browse the web, write e-mails, play games that are already pretty good, etc. In the cloud we can always just make data centers larger.

There's obviously always a push for speed and density, but is that push still powerful enough to pump the billions upon billions that will be required to make leaps into areas like 3d circuits, photonics, quantum computing, etc.? At what point does the economic driver drop below the threshold needed to overcome the next hurdle?

First we flew in balloons. Then we flew in fixed wing airplanes. Then we motorized them even more and fought wars with them. Then we built jets. Then we broke the sound barrier. Then we went to orbit. Then we built the SR-71 blackbird and pioneered stealth. Then we landed on the moon.

Then nothing happened in aerospace until Elon Musk, and he's just getting back to where NASA should have been in the 80s. Meanwhile the Concorde is still cancelled and commercial flights are no faster than they were in the 70s.

I'm a bit concerned the computing is about to do what aerospace did. I take some of the breathless hype you hear today as a contrarian indicator for this, since before aerospace went comatose we saw this:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/...

I hope not but history does rhyme and economies are more powerful than wishes (or even governments).

[ufmace]

I'm not sure how seriously we should take Moore's Law when it comes to these things. It applies pretty well so far to the development of silicon-based microprocessors, but at some point, we're going to come up against some hard physical limits on those. Once that happens, we may be stuck until we can come up with something fundamentally new.

We already seem to be up against some limits in a way as far as single-threaded processing power - it doesn't seem to be going up all that fast in the last few major cycles of processor development.

[danieltillett]

This is why I said generalised Moore's law, not Moore's law. We are pretty much at the limit of current designs, but there is still plenty of room for parallelising computation.

I do agree we are going to need something new to get to human level.