My point is that the technology is there, and can be used in stupendously great ways. The companies that know this will succeed, while the inept ones will die in the weight of their own wasted effort.

See you in the future.

The fact that for it to occur, some tech advances are required that seem very close, but may in fact be very far away. Advances for which we don’t even (seem to) have the basic ingredients of a convincing implementation – e.g. human level computer consciousness.

Human level computer consciousness is not necessary for a singularity to occur.

Actually, there are clear signs that the rate of computing progress has slowed down, and physics dictates that Moore’s Law will halt its progress in the near future because it predicts transistor sizes smaller than a silicon atom by around 2020.

So what? What does this have to do with computing speed and power? With only crude nanocomputers factored in, any sort of limited predictions of possible computing speeds from our point in time become meaningless (see Drexler’s Nanosystems for the thick physics of nanocomputation). But let’s say that there is some magical barrier to computing speed and power somewhere in the future. What does this have to do with the singularity?

The singularity is a difficult thing to wrap your mind around. It just seems so impossible – like going to the moon seemed in 1920, like any major technological change seems before it occurs. It inspires the deep feelings of “How could something like this ever happen? How could it ever happen in my lifetime? How could change like this occur?” This thread is an exemplar of how most people react to these feelings.

And the singularity is especially unfit for public understanding, because it is not just a major change, it is the major change.

These two seem to be at odds. So I wonder, there are people that will always be dangerous to themselves using a sharp knife to cut vegetables, LOL, yet these same people can use an ATM.

I believe it is the cohesiveness of society that enables growth.
Photon switches, flash memory, who knows next. It is only a matter of time. It seems very arbtrary, and isn’t this the crux of Moore’s Law, that it is an observation, and not a theory? Growth is not smooth.

What happened with walkmans? People isolate?
How about direct brain-computer electro-chemical(what else, LOL) interface wireless connection to my 300 terraflop 4096 core 4gig desktop at home? Daydreaming always?

90 hour work week?

Andrew, the smallest company I’ve worked for that used source code control had 2 developers. The largest company I’ve worked for that refused to use source code control had over 60 developers. I’ve also worked at one where installing a purchased source code product wasn’t possible due to the political power games between the keepers of the computers and the software developing group (it sat in a box on a shelf for over a year). Ineptly run? I agree. Many companies are ineptly run. Which is why I lay the blame for a lot of the foulups (in the lack of improvement of software development among other things) at the feet of mismanagement.

It’s the damned regulations. Government regulation is enormously more detailed and proactive than it formerly was. For instance, the whole complex rule system of medical testing and approval, which stops some tragedies, but creates an ongoing tragedy of greater proportions: Slowed medical progress.

Not a small thing. But at the maximum, the significance of this can be no greater than that of the discovery of blood groups which permitted safe transfusion in the first place. And effective public health measures (restricting high risk people giving blood, self transfusion and so on) could have greatly reduced the risk of infection even without a test.

If Kieran is reading this far down the thread I’m sure he’d have something interesting to say here.

Instead, he [bin Laden] has fallen back on ancient methods of communication, denying the U.S. and its allies the chance to track electronic footprints, satellite signals or even the radiation emissions from cellular phones. A grid of trusted human couriers, foot soldiers melding in with civilians, crisscross Afghanistan and flow into neighboring countries carrying written and whispered messages that are then electronically shot around the world.

Which is the same amount of time it would have taken with a long-distance landline call in 1950 or a telegraph message in 1880. Wooo, progress!

You know how long it takes to get from Charlestown to Lexington today, using these amazing lightning-fast horseless carriages? About an hour.

Do you know how long it would have taken him to inform people of this data with a cell phone network? 10 minutes.

Just last week we hit zrbb one day after zabb, a first for the org.

People keep getting hung up on metrics that are easy to measure, and blind themselves to the massive set of possibilities that all of this new metadata presents for further refinement and acheiving your actual goals. It’s one thing to make widget A go 50% faster, and it’s quite another to discover you can abandon widget A because it’s not important to the big picture. The pessimists get so caught up in widget A that they can’t see the forest of new innovations that is rapidly eclipsing it.

One of my economics lecturers suggested that growth may have been so high in NZ and the US in the 1950s because this was when the internal combustion engine (cars and trucks) took off and governments really started building motorways. So goods could be transferred far faster and cheaper across land than before.

WHAT? You and your friends must work for tiny tiny tiny companies or ones that are so poorly run that they shouldn’t even be considered when arguing whether software development practices have improved. Myself, and everyone I’ve ever worked with has used source control on every multi-developer project since undergraduate.

Hedonic pricing replaces a matching model where quality improvements are valued by looking at the market premium for the newer higher quality item over the older one for the period.

Over-aggressive hedonic pricing will bias the estimated elasticity of demand downwards.

However, you don’t need to worry about this problem for my analysis, since you can just look at the share of IT-driven products in total expenditure. If this is rising the elasticity of demand for the relevant services is greater than one in the sense I want.

Admit I’m a little rusty on this stuff. Isn’t how it works in what way?

Anyway, do you disagree that if over-aggressive use of hedonic pricing exaggerates quality improvements in computers, that will bias the apparent elasticity of demand toward 1?