Meeting notice: The 03.Oct.07 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. Suggested topic: Clocking the Singularity A significant fraction of our constituency believes that we are living in a time of accelerating technological change, and that that acceleration will continue until society undergoes a mysterious phase change usually labeled 'the Singularity". The inability to say anything about the nature and consequences of this change is a key element in its definition. The argument is usually advanced with reference to the price/performance curves of IT hardware: processors, magnetic memory, electronic memory, and bandwidth. These are all reliably exponential in character, which argues for the core thesis (accelerating technological change). On any linear graph they naturally and eventually start pointing straight up, which is an indirect though common argument for the Singularity. The problem is that few advances in IT hardware have much meaning absent very ambitious advances in programming, and programming has not demonstrated anything like an exponential improvement in price/performance. (Indeed, it sometimes feels as though significant progress in programming is getting exponentially slower.) If this felt lack of improvement is correct, though of course the metric is hard to define, it would seem to ruin the argument that progress in IT hardware shows us something about technological change in general. However, there are other ways of looking at the thesis. Suppose it is the case that progress in any one sector of technological society translates to progress in all of them. A better grasp of the issues in making movies improves price/performance in construction, textiles, agriculture, health care, and vice versa. The transfer function might not be very high, but it wouldn't need to be to have an effect. Suppose further that it is the nature of such a society to generate new sectors: that construction creates specializations like geotechnical analysis and site security and workplace safety, all of which then become centers of innovation themselves. An exponential rate of change seems inherent in the interaction of these assumptions. OK. The natural next question is where we are on the curve: down in the flatlands to the left? Or on the rising shoulders of the center? One logical source of evidence is the statistics on overall economic productivity increases. The exponential change hypothesis seems to predict that somewhere out there are annual productivity increases of 50%, 100%, 200%, and even more. (It is amusing to imagine the reaction of conventional economists if the government started announcing numbers like these.) While current increases are strong in historical terms (running around 5%) they are nowhere near what you might expect if an event horizon was anywhere in the neighborhood, It is certainly possible that the productivity numbers are unreliable, and it is not hard to find important sectors that seem to be on an exponential price/performance curve (agriculture). But at the same time the price/performance of a long list of key services, led by heath care and education (I wonder whether shelter ought to be classified as a service, since most people buy it like a service) has been going down. Average health care expenditures have risen by an order of magnitude over the last half century; no measure of health care has even kept pace, let alone run faster. Personal services, like the availability of house calls, have deteriorated drastically. The rising tide of every category of debt: personal, corporate, and public, suggests that on net the rising prices of services have overwhelmed the falling prices of goods. On balance people seem to be feeling impoverished. This does not seem like a sign of increased productivity, let alone of the presence of a portal like the Singularity. So the conclusion seems clear enough, regardless of what data sets you use: there may be a Singularity in our future, but it is way out there. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. 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