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Sci-fi author Vernor Vinge, creator of the tech singularity concept, has died at age 79.
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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It amazes me that as famous as the concept of the tech singularity has become, how little its implications enter most people's thoughts. When most people talk about the future, they do it without any regard for its implications. Even more amazingly, when it comes to academics and intellectuals paid to think about the future, almost none of them ever do. I've yet to see an Economist who seems to know about the concept. When Economists make predictions about the effect of technology on our economic future, they are far more likely to reference trends from the early 20th, or even 19th century.
I suspect all the problems and opportunities the tech singularity will create won't be dealt with in advance in a planned orderly fashion. Rather it will be like March 2020 with Covid, and suddenly we'll be scrambling for emergency responses to a brand new reality.
I'm a former singularitarian, and sadly, we live in a universe that will not be seeing a technological singularity.
Moore's Law has been dead for over a decade, tech isn't advancing like it did when we were kids, and we've reached the hard physical limits of electronic transistor technology. Even if we manage to get one of the proposed alternatives to work (photonics, spintronics, plasmonics, etc), the most we'll see is one or two more price-performance doublings before those hit a wall too.
The technological curve isn't exponential, it's sigmoid. Those economists know what they're talking about because they've internalized Alvin Toffler's "Limits to Growth" as a prerequisite for futures studies.
Limits to Growth predicts collapse though, so I rather hope it's not accurate