| > Overall growth in knowledge isn't at least directly proportional to population growth, if the proportion of knowledge already known and shared grows with population growth. I don't see why. > But even if it did, we don't have another doubling of human population ahead of us, so you better hope we're already there Right, but we have plenty of doublings of intelligent non-human agents ahead of us. Until then, we increase our effective intelligence using semi-intelligent machines, like we've been augmenting our physical strength with mechanical devices for millennia. > As you point out, Moore's Law doesn't have a ton more power available to it either. I disagree. Frequency scaling won't yield too much more improvement. There are other scaling modes available though, as I described. Moore's law is about information density, not performance. > Lots of problems don't parallelize well Often repeated, but frequently overstated. Our knowledge of parallelism is still in its infancy. > quantum computing has never demonstrated more power than classical computing, Any other option would require rewriting a lot of physics. > hardware growth doesn't in fact guarantee an intelligence explosion. Increased information density beyond that available in the human brain means simulating said brain is feasible. That's as close to a guarantee as you can get. > Look, every futurist in the world in 1975 thought that by 2017, we'd all be routinely traveling faster than sound, that we'd have colonies on the moon if not mars, and that probably we'd have AGI or something pretty close to it by 2017 Except I'm not giving a timeline, I'm saying it's inevitable. Low exponent exponential growth is still exponential. The intelligence explosion is about a trend, not a fixed milestone. |