> There are casual reasons to believe that the rate of progress will continue for some time.
What are those reasons? What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago. Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel?
What if AI is just like that? We'll keep improving, and then it'll stall. It may later recover. Or not.
That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not.
The economic incentives for progress are still there, we're using current tools to design better tools in a self-amplifying feedback loop, and limits for this process seem still far away from us. We have tons of space for progress. [0]
> What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago.
Then I would be wrong, for economical, not technological reasons. We can fly at Mach 25 today, but for various (economic) reasons people generally don't want to even go supersonic.
> Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel?
Well, we didn't get space travel, but we got the Internet. To be honest, the progress we made in the last 50 years is more amazing than people dreamed back then, but in a different way.
> That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not.
I agree. In general, the more detailed you try to get in your future predictions, the more likely it is for you to be wrong.
[0] - for instance, even re-reading and cross-correlating (in an automated way) all the medical papers that were published in the last 100 years would bring us tremendous new discoveries; we already have more science than humans can handle, but we also build tools that could handle it for us.
Biotechnology is an infant, like computers at the 50s. Why should we not expect huge progress from it?
Now, I guess he'll have to redo his AI extrapolations. Chip manufacturing is now mature, and while we'll probably be only slightly latter at the computers that put 70% of the population out of a job, the current smaller rate of improvement will make a lot of difference for his 2029 prevision.
Yes, but while we're hitting the limit of our current solutions, AFAIR there's a lot more room to explore with 3D chips and optoelectronics. We might yet squeeze some more progress out of it.
> Biotechnology is an infant, like computers at the 50s. Why should we not expect huge progress from it?
We should, and in this case we have a good reason to believe it - every living thing on this planet, and every little bit of what we discover about them, is an evidence that nanotechnology is possible, works, and can do amazing things. The challenge in front of us is to understand, take control and re-purpose.
What are those reasons? What if you extrapolated the speed of passenger planes in the 60s, or even 80s. Just 30 years ago. Would you be correct about the 21st century? How about space travel?
What if AI is just like that? We'll keep improving, and then it'll stall. It may later recover. Or not.
That's the problem with extrapolation, and extending current trends into the future. It's actually pretty reliable — you're often right. Until you're not.