Singularity and the Law of Accelerating Returns

From the ‘Future for all’ website I clicked on a link that took me to: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0134.html There I read a read a very long article by Ray Kurzweil titled “The Law of Accelerating Returns”

The law of accelerating returns in lay terms states that progress leads to exponentially greater progress. Faster and smarter computers allow us to revolutionize future computers faster and more intensely than current technology. Hence, progress is not linear, as he suggests that most people believe, but exponential. His prediction is that the law of accelerating returns will lead to ‘the Singluarity”. The Singularity is technological change so rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.

My first thought was to dismiss this theory techie gospel, mostly because I tend to reject all theories that paint the present as the turning point in history as self-centered and irrational (people in the year 1000 had the same apocalyptic convictions of people in the year 2000, not to mention the years 500 and 1500 and every other year regardless of whether or not man believed he was the center of the earth).

However, this article is special in that it does not simply state that this time is special inspite of history but relies on history to show how technological progress has always been approaching a crescendo. He provides an analogy about the inventor of chess who asked to the emperor of China to give him one grain of rice on the first square and then double the number of grains in each succeeding square. By the 64th square the man would have accumulated 18 million trillion grains of rice! Very significant is that for the first 32 squares the numbers of rice grains are relatively insignificant. This is an analogy for the law of accelerating returns applied to technology. In which, technology has always been increasing exponentially but it is not until a certain point that this exponential growth becomes noteworthy! Framed in this manner it becomes more feasible for me to imagine technology expanding to a never before calculated frenzy.

At that event horizon, known as Singularity, mankind merges with technology to become smarter thereby remaining the wielders of technology and infinite intelligence. Also of interest was his prediction of how computer intelligence will surpass human intelligence. He says that the human brain is inefficient but its computing capabilities come from three dimensional operation. Hence, Nanotubes, with circuits forming pentagonal arrays of carbon atoms, three-dimensional silicon chips, optical computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing all have the potential intelligence millions of times more powerful than the human brain.