3 ms·
This is, as usual for Kurzweil, full of Andy Grove Fallacies [0]: roughly, the premise that everything is a lot like a semiconductor so we can just apply Moore’
by hprotagonist 8y ago
This is, as usual for Kurzweil, full of Andy Grove Fallacies [0]: roughly, the premise that everything is a lot like a semiconductor so we can just apply Moore’s Law to biology.
Many/most things are not nearly as simple as transistors and computation are. Nature prefers sigmoids over exponentials anyway, so it’s basically always unrealistic to predict things getting exponentially different unless you have really good priors to let you predict when that sigmoid necks over.
[0] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/andy_grove_rich_famous_smart_and_wrong https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/an...
- seppel 8y ago> Nature prefers sigmoids over exponentials anyway, so it’s basically always unrealistic to predict things getting exponentially different unless you have really good priors to let you predict when that sigmoid necks over. I'm pretty sure that Kurzweil is aware of this, given that he sees ICs already as the fifth paradigm in computation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#/media/File:PPTMooresLawai.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#/media... The problem (it seems to me) is that there basically was no further paradigm shift after ICs so far, which would have been necessary for many of Kurzweil's predictions to come true this year.
- ianai 8y agoI think mobile processors may be paving a way forward for us. They’ve been engineered all along to increase performance through increased core counts and decreased thermal footprints. I wonder how far they can be expanded in core counts for general computing and not graphical/vectorized computations. Could we eventually see 100s or even 1000s of cores in a U?