For example, transportation technologies are generally in this category. This might change soon with the advent of self-driving cars, but it's still hard to reconcile any "law of accelerating returns" with four decades of no meaningful progress.
Fatal car accidents per million miles driven, and per capita, are down precipitously. Although consumer automotive technology is not becoming faster and faster, using it is becoming safer and safer. In human terms — in terms of its ability to implement our values, which certainly include using it without dying or killing — the technology is advancing steadily.
(Of course, this construes "consumer automotive technology" broadly — including airbags, highway design, and Breathalyzers! — not just things like engine design.)
Fair enough. "No meaningful progress" is an overstatement. But so is "advancing steadily": under any meaningful metric, 2011 cars represent much less progress over 1950s cars than the latter represented relative to the 1890s horse carriages or the early motor cars circa 1900.
And in any case, even steady advances would still be a counterexample to the supposed trend of exponential progress and accelerating returns.
Ray Kurzweil's writings are the best-known expression of Singularity memes, so I figured it's about time I read his 2005 best-seller The Singularity is Near.
Though earlier users of the term "technological Singularity" used it to refer to the arrival of machine superintelligence (an event beyond which our ability to predict the future breaks down), Kurzweil's Singularity is more vaguely defined:
Kurzweil says that people don't expect the Singularity because they don't realize that technological progress is largely exponential, not linear:
Kurzweil has many examples:
He emphasizes that people often fail to account for how progress in one field will feed on accelerating progress in another:
Kurzweil's second chapter aims to convince us that Moore's law of exponential growth in computing power is not an anomaly: the "law of accelerating returns" holds for a wide variety of technologies, evolutionary developments, and paradigm shifts. The chapter is full of logarithmic plots for bits of DRAM per dollar, microprocessor clock speed, processor performance in MIPS, growth in Genbank, hard drive bits per dollar, internet hosts, nanotech science citations, and more.
The chapter is a wake-up call to those not used to thinking about exponential change, but one gets the sense that Kurzweil has cherry-picked his examples. Plenty of technologies have violated his law of accelerating returns, and Kurzweil doesn't mention them.
This cherry-picking is one of the two persistent problems with The Singularity is Near. The second persistent problem is detailed storytelling. Kurzweil would make fewer false predictions if he made statements about the kinds of changes we can expect and then gave examples as illustrations, instead of giving detailed stories about the future as his actual predictions.
My third major issue with the book is not a "problem" so much as it is a decision about the scope of the book. Human factors (sociology, psychology, politics) are largely ignored in the book , but would have been illuminating to include if done well — and certainly, they are important for technological forecasting.
It's a big book with many specific claims, so there are hundreds of detailed criticisms I could make (e.g. about his handling of AI risks), but I prefer to keep this short. Kurzweil's vision of the future is more similar to what I expect is correct than most people's pictures of the future are, and he should be applauded for finding a way to bring transhumanist ideas to the mainstream culture.