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Anonymous
Are we entering an era of extponential or logarithmic technological advancements? 2017-05-13 02:17:27 Post No. 8906218
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Are we entering an era of extponential or logarithmic technological advancements? 2017-05-13 02:17:27 Post No. 8906218
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Are we entering an era of extponential or logarithmic technological advancements?
Anonymous
2017-05-13 02:17:27
Post No. 8906218
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We are standing at the beginning of a profound era. Science and technology, and most importantly data, have expanded greatly over the past 20 years with the mass production of the PC.
Now, there is talk about entering a "singularity" wherein the exponential growth of computation and genetic engineering will lead us to an explosion of intelligence that will very quickly reach whatever physical limit to computation is possible in this universe. Ray Kurzweil is most famous for talking about this and I know everyone on this board knows about it.
However, there is other talk that the increasing difficulty of discovering new things will not lead to an exponential rate of growth, but a logarithmic one. That the "law of accelerated returns" doesn't actually exist and it's actually the "law of diminishing returns". If this is true, we may be entering an era where, while we do make advancements, the growth rate is logarithmic and slow. Whether or not it diverges as well doesn't really matter to our day to day lives.
Which is it? Are we entering the singularity and exponential growth, or will we be "stuck" at our current level for decades/hundreds/thousands of years?
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>>8906218
>extponential or logarithmic
Neither it is pretty much a given that technology will become stagnant in the next couple of years.
Have you ever seen these books about "how the world will look in 50 years"? None of it happened and we are still not one bit closer to them then we are now.
The only thing underestimated and the only thing that gave us any meaningful progress are computers and the rapid increase in processing speed gave allowed for some rapid development.
But with Moor's law being dead and buried that hope is gone. CPU manufacturers are already very close to the limit at which they can produce transistors and there is no breakthrough in sight.
All we can do now is apply that technology to different problems but no meaningful progress will be achieved.
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>>8906218
What do you think the last 300 years have been?
Exponential growth is ultimately unsustainable, and we are hitting limits with things like computer technology.
Logarithmic is much more realistic.
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>>8906218
:^)?
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>>8906224
Then what happens next? Do we simply regress and all of our current technology becomes a part of a lost age? Or do we find a way over this wall?
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>>8907104
We import people with dark skin into our countries to impregnate our women and collect our taxes until the system becomes 100% unsustainable and then there will be another dark age.
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>>8906242
I know this is a shitpost but this isn't actually that stupid. Growth is slow untill a big thing is discovered or built which causes us to discover and build a shit ton of things in a short time untill we discover a thing again which leads again to an explosion of stuff.
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>>8907256
What do you think the next major technological discovery will be? Will space be involved? Or will it revolve around AI? Maybe what lies underneath the earth or the seas? Or will it be something entirely different?
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>>8907269
Bioengineering.
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>>8906218
I get that time input is on the x axis and technology output is on the y axis, but by what quantifiable metric is technology measured?
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>>8906242
This one's science. Discoveries are made one at a time, not on a continuum, and this illustrates that.
Steps upward in science allow for both further steps upward in science and in technology without directly affecting technology. This makes scientific advancements more indicative of the first derivative of technology with a diminishing return, so the ultimate form of a technology curve would be at least a second-order differential equation with differentiation discontinuities.
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