[extropy-chat] "The Spike" - Raymond Kurzweil

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Damien Broderick wrote:

> But I considered his
> own special contribution, the `Law of Accelerating Returns',
>
> http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?m=1
>
> to be at the verge of bogosity (sorry, Ray) when regarded as a sort of
> cosmic Truth.

Well there are little truths and big truths and some in between.
Ray is pretty good compared with others (Ron Klatz of the A4M
comes to mind) when it comes to pushing trends (e.g. the doubling
rate for medical knowledge) way beyond what is reasonable.

Now, the "Law of Accelerating Returns" is an interesting concept.
For example, clearly the Google Search of Books will accelerate
progress if it survives the assault by the authors guild.  And
perhaps 8 years ago, I made up a spreadsheet that documented the
increasing amount of "intelligence" that could be applied to the
problem of aging research as a result of Moore's Law increasing
computational capacity (view it as a pre- at HOME project of where
people would choose to dedicate their "spare" intellectual capacity
should they have the option of doing so).  It made it clear (to me)
that "aging" was doomed.  And just today there was a release of
BSD Unix that can take advantage of processor features that have
been in Intel processors >= Pentium Pros for years to address 64
Gigabytes of memory.  Hell -- a year ago we didn't even have hard
drives that big!

Worth noting -- this means a single PC (with a hell of a lot
of memory) is within 2 orders of magnitude of being able to
store (and address) the entire contents of the Library of
Congress (~8 Terabytes).  Presumably the AMD 64-bit Athlon
goes way beyond this.

Today I'll play with the LoC.  Tomorrow I'll play with copies
of Damien's mind...  After all -- a copy of Damien isn't
really Damien right?

Robert