Are we reaching a technological singularity?

[Dale Dough]

Found this in soko's share your bookmarks post:

Article

It's a very long read, but well worth it IMO. I will try to summarize:

- Technology progresses at an exponential rate. According to this guy, even the growth rate itself is increasing exponentially, because in the process we improve our methods. Compare what has happened in the last century vs. the last millennium, or the last millennium vs. the last 10000 years
- In the short term, we don't immediately notice this, because it seems as though advances increase at a linear rate.
- Example: computers and communications technology. It seems like the Net has sprouted up and started to expand rapidly only in the last ten or fifteen years, but the underlying technological capabilities have been increasing at an exponential rate for over a century.
- Things that are now unthinkable may well lay much closer ahead than we think. The article mentions stuff like nanobots interacting with our brain, enabling us to expand our own intellectual capacity, and transform that intelligence into a computer, which will be vastly more intelligent and much quicker. The author believes that we will reach this ability well within the next fifty years, based on current (as of 2001) growth rates.
- Humanity as we know it will take on a whole different meaning. Read the article if you're interested. The author calls this a technological singularity.


I have no real background in physics, math, engineering or such, but I'm hard-pressed to find a convincing argument that disputes this. The one thing I notices is that in some cases, the interpretation of growth rates as exponential might have been some wishful thinking on the part of the author, but I'm not sure.

I would be very interested to hear some informed opinions on this.