heh, the flawed assumptions are yours, I assure you. Dr. Vinge is considering technological sophistication from the stone age to present in his theory, not computational power or any other specific.
Consider that for perhaps millions of years we had fire and spears as our main tools. Then agriculture, then metallurgy, then language, communication etc. Each epoch is marked by revolutions in technological sophistication, and also, each epoch shift occurs more and more rapidly, in a logarithmic fashion. consider the advances of the last 100 years to see my point.
In fact, the last great technological revolution has been the global information network that we are currently using to discuss the topic. Born less than 30 years ago, it has already saturated the planet, becoming nearly ubiquitous to the segment of the population at the front of the wave.
think 'distribution of resources' mr/mrs smart-alecky attourney person. Right now, that process occurs in analogue at the hands of people that 'aren't clever'. Supersmart machines will change that into an increasinglyh higher and higher digital-like resolution, making small refinements to the global resource network that will multiply any given individuals share of resources by an unguessably large amount.
It is a simple thing to posit that there are abundant resources for everyone on the planet. There is enough of each element (hydrogen, neon, lead, etc) for each person to accomplish each desire. The difficulty each of us deals with every day is acquiring, refining, processing and building with these elements. Super smart machines would be so smart that they could easilly restructure the flow of materials and information to the utmost degree of optimisation.
But all of this marvellous utopian refinement would take place in a matter of hours at the singularity. A little while later, those same machines would have upgraded and optimised themselves to an unkowable level of sophistication and cognitive capability. This timeline is what is being referred to in the article. Note that Dr Vinge suggests complete revolution of human society would occur in perhaps 36 hours! The singularity is much like a logarithmic scale, flat for much of its length and shooting sky high, perhpaps perpendicularly directly UP towards the end. The row axis represents time and the collumn axis represents technological sophistication.
These machines have been prophesied by one of the most suitable men on the planet to consider such things. You, on the otherhand, have merely been trained in sophistry. Please keep your sharp tongue inside your mouth next time!
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heh, the flawed assumptions are yours, I assure you. Dr. Vinge is considering technological sophistication from the stone age to present in his theory, not computational power or any other specific.
Consider that for perhaps millions of years we had fire and spears as our main tools. Then agriculture, then metallurgy, then language, communication etc. Each epoch is marked by revolutions in technological sophistication, and also, each epoch shift occurs more and more rapidly, in a logarithmic fashion. consider the advances of the last 100 years to see my point.
In fact, the last great technological revolution has been the global information network that we are currently using to discuss the topic. Born less than 30 years ago, it has already saturated the planet, becoming nearly ubiquitous to the segment of the population at the front of the wave.
think 'distribution of resources' mr/mrs smart-alecky attourney person. Right now, that process occurs in analogue at the hands of people that 'aren't clever'. Supersmart machines will change that into an increasinglyh higher and higher digital-like resolution, making small refinements to the global resource network that will multiply any given individuals share of resources by an unguessably large amount.
It is a simple thing to posit that there are abundant resources for everyone on the planet. There is enough of each element (hydrogen, neon, lead, etc) for each person to accomplish each desire. The difficulty each of us deals with every day is acquiring, refining, processing and building with these elements. Super smart machines would be so smart that they could easilly restructure the flow of materials and information to the utmost degree of optimisation.
But all of this marvellous utopian refinement would take place in a matter of hours at the singularity. A little while later, those same machines would have upgraded and optimised themselves to an unkowable level of sophistication and cognitive capability. This timeline is what is being referred to in the article. Note that Dr Vinge suggests complete revolution of human society would occur in perhaps 36 hours! The singularity is much like a logarithmic scale, flat for much of its length and shooting sky high, perhpaps perpendicularly directly UP towards the end. The row axis represents time and the collumn axis represents technological sophistication.
These machines have been prophesied by one of the most suitable men on the planet to consider such things. You, on the otherhand, have merely been trained in sophistry. Please keep your sharp tongue inside your mouth next time!