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singularity or not, the feeling that today's rate of progress is lower than it was between 1880 and 1960 is even more simplistic than the extrapolation of Moore's law. Maybe the rate of "scenic impact" is lower.

An airplane today is totally different than one in the sixties, even if you don't see the difference with your naked eye.

Skype or Youtube do not reshape the urban landscape as a highway does, or as the introduction of cars did, but are not less substantial.

Today's ability of spotting extrasolar planets is in my opinion much more substantial than walking on the moon.

I am in my early forties and can remember, as a child, getting antibiotics injections with reusable syringes. A soccer player of the 1980s could be forced to end his career for a knee meniscus; one of today can be again on the pitch 2 weeks after having the meniscus removed with a local anesthesia.

Progress is accelerating, but in ways that are often very different from our forecasts (and usually far less glaring than the progress happened until now), as can easily be inferred watching some sci-fi movies of the sixties.

You reasonably question claims that progress has accelerated over the last century, and that Moore's law will go on forever or apply to other technologies. But as my article shows, there are reasons to expect a singularity that are not based on these claims.

What if the rate of development of new tech or their improvement hasn't slowed but as of today already addressed the necessities they were meant to satisfy? Meaning there's not a pressing need for a better X vaccine, just it's widespread use. Same applies to mp3 players and such.

i agree with gimmi. your comparative listing is not objective in anyway. it consists of inventions that are important to you, recalled off the top of your head. beyond your personal bias there is also a aspect of hindsight analysis that can not be applied to contemporary changes. that is you can not know now what is a highly significant new invention. when was the automobile definitively considered a revolutionary reality?

i could even interpret your decreasing number of significant new inventions as evidence that we are already on the cusp of the singularity. if that point exists when the rate of technological progress exceeds the rate at which a human can incorporate or comprehend the changes then you would be unable to create a complete set of meaningful invention points after the singularity because you would be unable to appreciate all of the changes occurring. your understanding/perception of the world would not (and may not) be sufficient to even evaluate many new technologies, perhaps ever. isn't that part of the point of the singularity idea?

if it were to happen, we would all individually get left behind.

Science fiction and futurism are children of industrialization. Before that the future was not considered to be greatly shaped by technology, only the philosophy and religion mattered. During the feverish changes of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, many intellectuals convinced themselves that all of humanity's ills were on the verge of being solved, and the whole cosmos and everything in it would shortly be described by elegant mathematical laws. They were quite wrong, but for the first time technology was named the engine of human change. The word 'progress' emerged.

At some point public enchantment with the idea of a technological utopian future faded, perhaps due to the first world war, and then the eruption of fascism, and then the second world war, and then the cold war. Then people quietly contemplated the possibility of a dystopian technological future, as captured so well by George Orwell's 1984. Science fiction became a rather marginal branch of literature, and was no longer taken seriously.

But the cultural pendulum is swinging back. In the thick of it one can't really talk of causes, but certainly technology is hip again. It hasn't been this hip since the top-hatted engineers of 19th century Europe swept aside one institution after another with new-fangled technology. For only the second time in human history, the pace and breadth of technological change has reached such a pitch that global culture is feverishly obsessed with it. Every paper has a daily technology section, whereas none had one even ten years ago. Everyone marvels how there life has been changed by it, and goes out after the latest kit. We praise it as a cure all or predict how it will kill us all. That obsession is sure evidence that we are in the midst of another technology-based revolution. Maybe this one will go even deeper that the Industrial Revoluton.

So, the cultural profile of technology peaked sharply in the Industrial Revolution, then receded, but certainly remained much more important culturally than it ever was before the Industrial Revolution, and now it is peaking sharply again. If it is true that technology's cultural prominence mirrors it's rate of major breakthroughs, then the rate of breakthrough can't be extrapolated as a smooth parabolic curve. But it can be extrapolated as a series of peaks which may or may not curve upwards parabolically. We need another peak to establish that.

The crux of the issue is where the threshold is that divides a world we can recognize as human from one that is clearly post-human. Whether post-humanity will be a singularity or something else is sort of beside the point. The point is a post-human world is clearly implied by technological change, and we can already see several paths to that day. Get ready.

This author is obviously an idiot.

When she talks about the number of inventions being constant or declining, she's talking about the number of inventions WHICH PEOPLE CAN PAY ATTENTION TO.

That's because the raw number of inventions, even great inventions, has risen so fast and so far that no one invention can garner that much attention anymore.

It's the same way there are "no great authors" anymore, even though authorship has increased by orders of magnitude.

As proof, let's consider the fact that the idiot lists vacuum tubes and electronics as two separate technologies.

If the idiot weren't an idiot (heh) he would have listed NAND, CMOS, and FLASH as different technologies. He would also have listed electronic washing machines and electronic dryers. As well as punched cards, computer terminals, computer monitors, LCD monitors and wide-screen LDC monitors.

Similarly, he would have listed satellite phones, cell phones, broadband, wireless ethernet, chat rooms, web sites, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, craigslist, google, skype, video conferencing, napster, eMule, bittorrent, the pirate bay, delicious and reddit as separate inventions. For f---'s sake, video conferencing is a PLUG-IN. That's how frequent and ho-hum new technologies have become.

But the author is an idiot and so instead of truth and honesty we find only lies and idiocy in this article. Instead of marveling at how fast things are changing, this idiot is whining that nobody is noticing. That we've all become inured to change. And rightly so! You can't retain your sanity in an accelerating world without becoming inured to change.

I don't expect this idiot to have the self-honesty to keep my comment up. Which is why I'm reproducing it on reddit. From where I found this article.

The author mentions self-improving intelligence at the beginning yet none of the refutations address the impossibility of such a happening. Sure Moore's Law will hit a physical limit, but what if that limit is more than enough to bring a self-improving intelligence into being? I think I can safely say that a great deal of singularitarians base their arguments on the existence of self-improving intelligence, and a common argument is that it will facilitate the rest of the technological progress. Bashing on the whole idea of singularity based on a partial criticism is overgeneralization at best.

Right on. The singularity folk seem to imagine that this 'event' will occur in a social vacuum. I believe that as it gets closer, more outside folk will realise what is happening and resist it in every way possible. Remember civilisations can fall: Hittite, Egypt, Rome, Mayan, etc. Mostly because the centre became chaotic.
The only way the intelligence born at the singularity can survive is if it occurs within a politically very powerful group, is then nurtured in secret and then seizes political power when suitably mature, possibly even then not overtly. I believe that, as the time gets closer, the associated technology will be buried deeper and 'out-of-sight'.
Also, in Kurzweill's book, he talks of the day artificial intelligence is born. He missed the fact that, such intelligence will first of all devote itself to ensuring its survival. It will take but a millisecond for such an intelligence to realise that the only barrier to its survival is humans -- so it will bend its intelligence to use then removal of humans (whatever that means at the time).
Those that get the rapture seem to be captured by the technology. In fact super-intelligences / tech life forms, despite their seeming wonder, means they think very very differently. I doubt we can survive them, especially if they have some kind of conscious control at the nano-level of manufacturing.

I was appalled at the publication of the report, commented on here, in an IEEE magazine, and very pleased that a rebuttal was also published.

Dr. Nordmann has given us a very sensible viewpoint on "singularitism," which is much like other kinds of unsupported nonsense I heard many times in my years as a faculty member at MIT. I would like to know which Alfred Nordmann he is so I could read some of his other writings.

William F. Schreiber
Prof of Elec Eng, Emeritus, MIT
wfs@mit.edu

You identify capitalism as one of the key factors in the spurt in measured economic productivity (correctly I would say), but surely another critical factor is the availability of useful energy.

The harnessing of fossil fuels allowed us to do so much more work in all areas than was possible before, but we do not appear to have found a comparable energy source to take us on to the 'next level'.

It's worth noting that there exist theories about a 'singularity' in a future and most predate Kurzweil's 'technological singularity'. Terence McKenna, for example, formulated a theory called 'timewave', which is based on the King Wen sequence of the I Ching, in the 70s that he claimed tracked the ebb and flow of novelty (rather than technology) towards a *teleological* attractor at the end of time that drives the increase and conservation of complexity in material forms. Certainly, a stretch, but no more so than the technophilic cornucopia envisioned by many others.

I find it interesting that the above article has provoked so many vehement rejections and insults. Clearly, humans intinctively feel we live in a time of increasing complexity where the rate of change in complexity is increasing as well. The telescopic nature of time down through ever shorter ages seems to confirm this. And these are the short and curlies. It is only natural that we assume these developments must lead to some conclusion as we slide into a 'basin of attraction' where things are more connected than ever before. This theoretical Omega Point serves as a beacon for all those who want to look optimistically to the future in a world where the ideologies of religion, economics and science have left us wanting to say the least. It probably represents the most powerful cultural myth of our time and will clearly not be 'debunked' with a single article.

Many place the point in the very near future (e.g. December 2012), so we won't have to wait too long to find out who's right

I couldn't agree more. I've been contending for a long time that we have not seen any significant advance in at least 60 years. There has been virtually no new invention, simply innovation on existing themes.
Computer chips still rely on lithography, that was invented in the 13th century. They still rely on two bit code.
Airplanes may go faster and higher, but they still have wings and are pushed by a fan.
Cars rely on the internal combustion engine that hasn't changed in over a hundred years.
We are trapped in a market driven innovation nightmare that has suppressed our ability to challenge what is profitable. We aren't even able to return to older technologies that were prematurely abandoned.