Yes, I'm not disagreeing that we're making huge progress. My main argument was that it's only going to advance up to a certain point. For one thing, computing p

Yes, I'm not disagreeing that we're making huge progress. My main argument was that it's only going to advance up to a certain point. For one thing, computing power is reaching it's limits. Many consider Moore's law to be dying [0], at that point the advent of the future will rely on the discovery or implementation of a new material like graphene or a quantum computer. Then we have limits in storage and computation, but of course those can be surmounted using smart software (RAID and hadoop come to mind). I'm not saying you're wrong, just that there's a limit to all of it. HN seems to be stuck on some singularity, but personally I just think it's a byproduct of futurology. Just look at the past and how they envisioned the future. Heck, we can study the industrial revolution and the reaction of Luddites, but people still have jobs today. Like I said, we might just have to move an abstraction higher, just like how we went from manual labor, to controlling machines that do manual labor. Also, just a nitpick but all that google maps OCR was done by humans via Captcha. [0]: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319330 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319330