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To me a singularity does not seem to be approaching. In particular it doesn’t seem like technology is “accelerating faster and faster”. The broadest metric for
by lacker 7y ago
To me a singularity does not seem to be approaching. In particular it doesn’t seem like technology is “accelerating faster and faster”. The broadest metric for human progress is GDP growth, and in the U.S. GDP growth hasn’t really been accelerating, it’s been around 2.5% a year for the past decade or so.
AI in particular has made some advances but most basic activities remain undoable. AI cannot fold my laundry or generate a believable sentence well enough for those features to make their way into a consumer product. Voice recognition like Alexa is the only big impact of AI so far, which places it below advances like “touch screen glass” in terms of its impact on society.
It could certainly change. The biggest question right now is whether self driving cars will work, or whether it will fizzle. In the 50’s many car companies thought the next step was inevitably personal airplanes, and that fizzled. So it’s possible it just won’t happen.
- taneq 7y agoReally? How much progress was made on thinking machines in the 19th century? How much between 1900 and 1950? 1950 and 2000? 2000 and 2010? 2010 and now? I think each of those timespans is very roughly equivalent. In the past 10 years voice recognition has gone from useless to ubiquitous. Neural image labeling and segmentation likewise. Physical robots have gone from taking a few faltering steps to doing parkour. None of that counts as "AI" any more because it works and we know how, but the rate at which new capabilities are moving from the realm of "AI" to the realm of "normal engineering" is increasing exponentially.
- nwah1 7y agoI agree that technology isn't progressing "faster and faster," but GDP doesn't measure technological progress. That is absurd. It doesn't even measure economic growth very well, and even if it did that wouldn't mean technological progress would track it. Technological progress can happen even during a recession, and often has. GDP measures the value of monetized final goods in an economy. Linux and Wikipedia have thus reduced the GDP, because they displaced a huge chunk of existing markets that used to be monetized. GDP is useful for monetary policy conducted at central banks, primarily.
- samnwa 7y agoGreat episode of Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein discussing this slowing of technological progress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s