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by mlyle 2500 days ago
Exponents don't continue forever in the real world.

It's anyone's guess to how far we go, but generally extrapolating a curve far off the current reading is a case of innumeracy.

2 comments

Obviously. However, Moore's Law held for 40+ years. We are at 16 qbits in quantum vs single silicon chips with 1.2Trillion transistors. Clearly some room for growth, especially given the $Billions in annual investment being poured into quantum.
There are some areas where 100x improvement is almost inevitable: self-driving cars, facial recognition, etc. You don’t need to be a genius to see it.
?? Facial recognition is very good already; how would we define a 100x improvement? A 100x reduction in error rate? NIST benchmarked current implementations at a 0.2% error rate with massive databases--1 in 500-- you're saying that you're really confident we'll reach a 1 in 50,000 error rate?

More generally: nothing is inevitable, especially when we're talking about orders of magnitude. Maybe it happens as quickly as we'd hope, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't even happen in the near to intermediate future at all. That goes for self-driving cars, quantum computers, general artificial intelligence, or whatever.

Moore's law was inevitable, until it wasn't.