A while ago I wrote briefly on why the Singularity might not be near and my estimates badly off. I saw it linked the other day, and realized that pessimism seemed to be trendy lately, which meant I ought to work on why one might be optimistic instead: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#counter-point
(Summary: long-sought AI goals have been recently achieved, global economic growth & political stability continues, and some resource crunches have turned into surpluses - all contrary to long-standing pessimistic forecasts.)
Why would you expect the opposite? Tight lower bounds have not been proven for most problems, much less algorithms produced which reach such bounds, and even in the rare cases where they have been, then the constant factors could well be substantially improved. And then there are hardware improvements like ASICs, which are no joking matter. I collected just a few possibilities (since it's not a main area of interest for me as it seems so obvious that there are many improvements left) in http://www.gwern.net/Aria%27s%20past,%20present,%20and%20future#fn3
I'm not sure really. The conjectured limits in some cases are strong. Computational complexity is unfortunately an area where we have a vast difference between what we suspect and what we can prove. And the point about improvements in constant factors is very well taken- it is an area that's often underappreciated.
But at the same time, these are reasons to suspect that improvements will exist. Carl's comment was about improvement "surely" occurring which seems like a much stronger claim. Moreover, in this context, while hardware improvements are... (read more)