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Unknowns comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong
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Consider $/MIPS available in the mainstream open market. The doubling time of this can't go down "for some people", it can only go down globally. Will this doubling time decrease leading up to the Singularity? Or during it?
I always felt that's what the Singularity was, an acceleration of Moore's Law type progress. But I wrote the post because I think it's easy to see a linear plot of exponential growth and say "look there, it's shooting through the roof, that will be crazy!". But in fact it won't be any crazier than progress is today.
It will require a new growth term, machine intelligence kicking in for example, to actually feel like things are accelerating.
It could if, for example, it were only available in large chunks. If you have $50 today you can't get the $/MIPS of a $5000 server. You could maybe rent the time, but that requires a high level of knowledge, existing internet access at some level, and an application that is still meaningful on a remote basis.
The first augmentation technology that requires surgery will impose a different kind of 'cost'. and will spread unevenly even among people who have the money.
It's also important to note that an increase in doubling time would show up as a /bend/ in a log scale graph, not a straight line.
Yes Kurzweil does show a bend in the real data in several cases. I did not try to duplicate that in my plots, I just did straight doubling every year.
I think any bending in the log scale plot could be fairly called acceleration.
But just the doubling itself, while it leads to ever-increases step sizes, is not acceleration. In the case of computer performance it seems clear exponential growth of power produces only linear growth in utility.
I feel this point is not made clear in all contexts. In presentations I felt some of the linear scale graphs were used to "hype" the idea that everything was speeding up dramatically. I think only the bend points to a "speeding up".