[sp332]

I don't see any SAS SSD's going for much less than $1,000/TB. Some of them are twice that! And I'm sure the density will let it command a premium by targeting users who really need more storage in tight spaces. My guess is $50,000.

[userbinator]

On the other hand, I still remember when hard drives (the spinning platter ones) reached the $1/GB mark ~10 years ago. Now high-end SSDs are there. A billion bits of storage costing $1 is pretty amazing, I think.

[robbiemitchell]

Hell, I remember reading PC Mag and being SHOCKED about a 4GB HD that cost a few hundred bucks. (Also shocked that I subscribed to PC Mag.)

[ryao]

I was shocked when 200GB drives were called drivezilla and cost $400.

[cm2187]

And I was shocked when Seagate announced a 8TB HDD for $200..

[MichaelBurge]

I'm shocked every time I open Newegg. Having hardware with at least 256MB of RAM, 100 Mhz clock speed CPUs, 10Gb hard drives that works with such high reliability is amazing. You have to think, even a single screwed up instruction or corrupted bit could bring down the OS.

How many millions of pixels are on my two LCD screens, and they are each individually controllable and none have failed in 8 years?

[dorfsmay]

Our brain thinks linear, technology grows exponentially.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

[dahart]

Kurzweil also claims, as the capstone final paragraph in this piece, that human life expectancy is on an exponential curve, which is false. Not just a little wrong, it's all the way wrong, and intentionally misleading, there's no possible way he doesn't know it's false. It's very easy to check the basic facts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy. Lifespan for people who live past 20 (discounting infant mortality) has been around 70 for at least a thousand years. It's gone up a little in developed countries recently, but he intentionally uses only a small window of time, and includes infant mortality in his stats. If we eliminate all infant mortality, still nobody will live forever, and average lifespan will not be on an exponential curve. This intentionally misleading falsehood alone makes me doubt all the rest of his claims about exponential and double exponential trends. (And I don't doubt Moore, only the additional unsupported implications and loose associations that Kurzweil adds to Moore's law.)

[adrianN]

I agree that the claim that lifespan is on an exponential curve is bogus. Modern medicine basically extended extremal lifespan up to the maximum attainable without fixing the underlying causes of aging and then stopped. There is for example some research that shows that the oldest woman's blood was derived from just two stem cells.[1] We currently don't have the technology to fix problems like that

I disagree however that nobody alive today will live "forever". The technology that might allow us to fix aging is on an exponential curve, look for example at the cost of genome sequencing. So the time is ripe for some breakthrough results in aging research that actually address some causes of aging.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25458-blood-of-worlds...

[dahart]

The tech you're talking about can't do anything for the living, it only has potential for the unborn. Either way, there is exactly zero evidence that it's already happening. Kurzweil's claim is pure fantasy.

[adrianN]

This discussion is becoming way to off-topic here. But I was convinced by Aubrey de Grey's arguments, perhaps you will be too. He is easy enough to Google.

[maxerickson]

I think you are understating the improvements in adult life expectancy. 1000 years ago, the very wealthy (the aristocrats) were getting to their 60s. The population wasn't.

The improvements have mostly come from violence reduction and public health and dealing with disease though, I agree that those things aren't really part of a life extension technology trajectory.

[dahart]

I think you misunderstand my point. If you take away all early mortality factors, lifespan is long, and always has been. Separating the burgeoisie is actually an important piece of this argument, and it reinforces what I'm saying. Healthy adults that don't die of diseases or violence often lived as long as healthy adults today. Aristocrats a thousand years ago, on average lived to 65, but bunches of them made it to 80 and beyond. The same factors you cited lowered the lifespan a little for the entire population, even the adults. If I had data on people that only died of old age, I would use that instead, and that would (and probably still does) favor the rich.

If you solve all of these things, then lifespan is asymptotically something like 80 years. That is plain as day. We might come up with ways to increase lifespan, but we haven't yet, and none of the data Kurzweil shows are a result of increases in lifespan for people who die of old age.

[maxerickson]

I just didn't read carefully enough (missed that you were mostly speaking of potential life span).

[ashmud]

About 20 years ago, I worked on a project replacing/rewriting servers and their management software for a manufacturer. They had an already aging *nix system (circa 1990). Story went that not long before we came in for the project they had to replace a HDD that was out of production to the tune of about $50k.