I don't see how past increases that have required technological revolutions can be considered more than weak evidence for future technological revolutions.
Technology doesn't really advance through 'revolutions', it evolves. Some aspects of that evolution appear to be rather remarkably predictable.
That aside, the current predictions do posit a slow-down around 2020 for the general lithography process, but there are plenty of labs researching alternatives. As the slow-down approaches, their funding and progress will accelerate.
But there is a much more fundamental and important point to consider, which is that circuit shrinkage is just one dimension of improvement amongst several. As that route of improvement slows down, other routes will become more profitable.
For example, for AGI algorithms, current general purpose CPUs are inefficient by a factor of perhaps around 10^4. That is a decade of exponential gain right there just from architectural optimization. This route - neuromorphic hardware and it's ilk - currently receives a tiny slice of the research budget, but this will accelerate as AGI advances and would accelerate even more if the primary route of improvement slowed.
Another route of improvement is exponentially reducing manufacturing cost. The bulk of the price of high-end processors pays for the vast amortized R&D cost of developing the manufacturing node within the timeframe that the node is economical. Refined silicon is cheap and getting cheaper, research is expensive. The per transistor cost of new high-end circuitry on the latest nodes for a CPU or GPU is 100 times more expensive than the per transistor cost of bulk circuitry produced on slightly older nodes.
So if moore's law stopped today, the cost of circuitry would still decay down to the bulk cost. This is particularly relevant to neurmorphic AGI designs as they can use a mass of cheap repetitive circuitry, just like the brain. So we have many other factors that will kick in even as moore's law slows.
I suspect that we will hit a slow ramping wall around or by 2020, but these other factors will kick in and human-level AGI will ramp up, and then this new population and speed explosion will drive the next S-curve using a largely new and vastly more complex process (such as molecular nano-tech) that is well beyond our capability or understanding.
I don't care. We aren't talking about destroying the future of intelligence by going back in time.
It's more or less equivalent from the perspective of a historical sim. A historical sim is a recreation of some branch of the multiverse near your own incomplete history that you then run forward to meet your present.
It sounds to me like you are insisting that this suffering is worthwhile
My existence is fully contingent on the existence of my ancestors in all of their suffering glory. So from my perspective, yes their suffering was absolutely worthwhile, even if it wasn't from their perspective.
Likewise, I think that it is our noble duty to solve AI, morality, and control a Singularity in order to eliminate suffering and live in paradise.
I also understand that after doing that we will over time evolve into beings quite unlike what we are now and eventually look back at our prior suffering and view it from an unimaginably different perspective, just as my earlier mcdonald's loving child-self evolved into a being with a completely different view of it's prior suffering.
your parents took care of you in the right way in an attempt to make your future life better.
It was right from both their and my current perspective, it was absolutely wrong from my perspective at the time.
They couldn't have chosen before you were born to instead create someone who would be happier, smarter, wiser, and better in every way. If they could have, wouldn't it be upsetting that they chose not to?
Of course! Just as we should create something better than ourselves. But 'better' is relative to a particular subjective utility function.
I understand that my current utility function works well now, that it is poorly tuned to evaluate the well-being of bacteria, just as poorly tuned to evaluate the well-being of future posthuman godlings, and most importantly - my utility function or morality will improve over time.
Given the choice between creating agents that have to endure suffering for generations upon generations, and creating agents that will have much more positive, productive lives, why are you arguing for the side that chooses the former?
Imagine you are the creator. How do you define 'positive' or 'productive'? From your perspective, or theirs?
There are an infinite variety of uninteresting paradises. In some virtual humans do nothing but experience continuous rapturous bliss well outside the range of current drug-induced euphoria. There are complex agents that just set their reward functions to infinity and loop.
There are also a spectrum of very interesting paradises, all having the key differentiator that they evolve. I suspect that future godlings will devote most of their resources to creating these paradises.
I also suspect that evolution may operate again at an intergalactic or higher level, ensuring that paradises and all simulations somehow must pay for themselves.
At some point our descendants will either discover for certain they are in a sim and integrate up a level, or they will approach local closure and perhaps discover an intergalactic community. At that point we may have to compete with other singularity-civilizations, and we may have the opportunity to historically intervene on pre-singularity planets we encounter. We'd probably want to simulate any interventions before preceeding, don't you think?
A historical recreation can develop into a new worldline with it's own set of branching paradises that increase overall variation in a blossoming metaverse.
If you could create a new big bang, an entire new singularity and new universe, would you?
You seem to be arguing that you would not because it would include humans who suffer. I think this ends up being equivalent to arguing the universe should not exist.
At some point our descendants will either discover for certain they are in a sim, or they will approach local closure and perhaps discover an intergalactic community. At that point we may have to compete with other singularity-civilizations, and we may have the opportunity to historically intervene on pre-singularity planets we encounter. We'd probably want to simulate any interventions before preceeding, don't you think?
If we had enough information to create an entire constructed reality of them in simulation, we'd have much more than we needed to just...
Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.
It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.
Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?
Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.
1 Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.
2 I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.
3 Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).