[ExI] Convergence

[Anders Sandberg]

On 23/10/2012 22:14, Michael LaTorra wrote:
> Looking backward at yesterday's predictions for today is always 
> interesting and often quite humbling.
>
> Anders, what is the title of the book by Ayers from 1970 that you 
> referred to?

It is Technological Forecasting and Long-Range Planning by Robert U. 
Ayres, McGraw-Hill 1969 (I got the author's name almost right).

Some fun quotes:

"Several science popularizers of the "Gee Whiz" school have used the 
technique of "envelope curves" extrapolation  in order to justify very 
radical predictions. One author remarks that the rates of increase of a 
number of performance variables apparently will go asymptotically to 
infinity before the year 2000."

He then shows some curves suggesting speed of light vehicles by 1982, 
immortality by 2000 (Ayres correctly points out that there is little 
evidence of maximum lifespan ~115 going up), "by 1981 a single man will 
have available under his control the amount of energy equivalent to that 
generated by the entire sun" (this case is interesting: hydrogen bomb 
development sharply stopped in reality, thanks to better targeting 
systems, breaking the trend), "Using another trend curve (not shown), he 
suggests that by 1970 the number of "circuits" in a computer may be 
equal to the number of neurons in the human brain, i.e. about 4 billion. 
The practical significance of this comparison is not clear, of course, 
though the notion i undeniably provocative."

This is from the chapter on failures of forecasting, the section on 
overcompensation. The short section just before that was about the 
opposite case, lack of imagination and/or nerve.

The chapter on morphological analysis was interesting to me. It is a 
systematic way of going through alternative approaches to solving a 
problem (for example, how to build an electric motor), usually ending up 
with a combinatorial explosion of possibilities of course, but still a 
neat way of seeing what could be done differently. Especially if you use 
it to explore "nearby" different approaches (change one aspect of how 
things are done) it both seems helpful and gives an interesting way of 
quantifying the technological frontier.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University