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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Journal of Consciousness Studies issue on the Singularity - Less Wrong
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There's another such curve, incidentally - I've been reading up on scientific careers, and there's solid-looking evidence that a modern scientist makes his better discoveries about a decade later than in the early 1900s. This is a problem because productivity drops off in the 40s and is pretty small in the 50s and later, and this has remained constant (despite the small improvements in longevity over the 20th century).
So if your discoveries only really begin in your late 20s and you face a deadline of your 40s, and each century we lose a decade, this suggests within 2 centuries, most of a scientist's career will be spent being trained, learning, helping out on other experiments, and in general just catching up!
We might call this the PhDalarity - the rate at which graduate and post-graduate experience is needed before one can make a major discovery.
I think we can plausibly fight this by improving education to compress the time necessary to teach concepts. Hardly any modern education uses the Socratic method to teach, which in my experience is much faster than conventional methods, and could in theory be executed by semi-intelligent computer programs (the Stanford machine learning class embedding questions part way through their videos is just the first step).
Also, SENS.
Even better would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem incidentally, and my own idée fixe, spaced repetition.
Like Moore's Law, at any point proponents have a stable of solutions for tackling the growth; they (or enough of them) have been successful for Moore's Law, and it has indeed continued pretty smoothly, so if they were to propose some SENS-style intervention, I'd give them decent credit for it. But in this case, the overall stylized evidence says that nothing has reversed the changes up until I guess the '80s at which point one could begin arguing that there's underestimation involved (especially for the Nobel prizes). SENS and online education are great, but reversing this trend any time soon? It doesn't seem terribly likely.
(I also wonder how big a gap between the standard courses and the 'cutting edge' there will be - if we make substantial gains in teaching the core courses, but there's a 'no mans land' of long-tail topics too niche to program and maintain a course on which extends all the way out to the actual cutting edge, then the results might be more like a one-time improvement.)
Thanks for the two sigma problem link.