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Because of Processing Power per Dollar is the ultimate measure for computers, that is if energetically possible (it's important to consume less energy but it does only have to be in the range of possible to handl, not going exponential).
Ok, now we're getting somewhere.
But you, like Joseppie, still don't understand why you cannot meaningfully assume that, even granting for the sake of argument an exponential fit on computing power per dollar, it does not follow that you can just make stuff up and say it will happen by 2030 or whenever if the limitations currently preventing the technology from existing are not a matter of simple, raw computation.
But more to the point, computing power per (energy) dollar, by some measures at least, has indeed been approximately flat since 2003, as shown in "The Free Lunch is Over". You have still yet to explain why the more temporally-coarse-grained data you use to support your argument is more relevant to the claims you wish to make about the future, than the data which is sufficient in its temporal resolution to show that there has been a statistically significant flattening of computing power per dollar since 2003.
Until you solve this issue, you have failed to vindicate your argument.
Congrats to you I'm not :-/ but I'm not exactly poor either. Guess I'll let you test the stuff first !
Giving where we are heading I think it will come down "to the masses" quite quickly, in a world of abundance and close to zero marginal costs everyone would have access to about everything.
Still, many people won't be prepared psychologically so they have to wait until it becomes mainstream in usage to dare, or actually not dare being not mainstream any more...
Ha ha, sometimes I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas
ps. you are waiting for the 2020 to go full solar? Is this because of battery tech or grid parity (or others)? I'm tinkering with the costs to check if I can't just buy a solar panel, an inverter and chuck the output in on the 220v line... Seems like it will take some years to get ROI (return on investment) say up to 8. Maybe next year it will drop to 4 years. But I don't have any reliable numbers, still interesting though, both for the economic and environmental approach.
If solar will only cost 4 years of electric bills in one year but currently costs 8 years of electric bills, then you should wait a year, because the depreciation on a system would be 4 years of bills in one year, making your first year of ownership cost 4 times as much as buying power from the electric company for that one year period.
Computing have been around for a thousand years or more, a computer was literally someone sitting at a desk 'computing' at a certain time in history. It is not that the CPU was invented or that Turing made his famous 'bomb' or mechanic calculators, it is about that computing is on an exponential trend.
Biotech is on an exponential trend.
Information technology is on an exponential trend.
The list goes on.
We can debate about what part of what subsystem broke down in the 1990:s (say superheat in projected CPU:s), that is interesting and all but history shows us that when one thing stops working, humanity finds another.
Oh no! we hit a wall, vacuum tubes just can't be smaller!
We hit a wall, litography just can't go below 5000nm!
we hit a wall, 4nm is the end!
You get the idea. Or actually you doesn't seem to.
Maybe it is easier for someone that has actually lived the thing, I don't know.
If someone had told me I'd have a start-trek like hand held computer where I could listen to any music, see any film call any person for almost free I would not have believed them in say 1985.
Then came Napster, then came the smartphone, then came Youtube... and here it is, like it had always been here!
Not like you have to bike downtown to by a friggin expensive plastic disc where the signature of sound waves have been pressed into it so you could put a tiny stick in that valley, turn the disc and listen to music.
Information? Go to the library and try to find something interesting (tough luck), wait until you learn it in school? You needed to do a whole career just to get to the base information in one domain! TV? Yeah that was really filled with useful information. Guess Radio was the best but still, there was like this one show at 23h00 every sunday... missed it? Sorry for you it's gone.
When I got my C64, I got my hands on some opcodes (machine code), but no one did a selective jump, so I spent months writing self modifying code, just because I didn't know there was or how it worked.
That was how it was to live in the eighties.
Today, we truly live in another world.
The thing is that with all those technologies and the expansion of communication (2.3billion people on the internet), the changes are coming faster and faster.
I have felt this a long time (the computer race was actually breaking people in the industry, one console/pc/mobile/GPU or whatever came out, two years later a new came out, then it was every year, then it was every 6 month. Keep up!).
Tomorrow we'll have even more changes, more and more and more. It is even starting to be hard to keep track of all the news about technology, 20 years ago you'd buy a magazine about the latest things every year, today there is several a day, you'd need a magazine like in the old days but every week and soon every day...
So, it doesn't matter if some part breaks down, humanity always find a way around it and this exponential trend will continue. and continue. and continue.
I will add, you are also to some extent making a circular argument here. I asked a very specific question, namely, what is the relevant difference between order-placing machines in 1950 and in 2014. Instead of answering the actual question, you simply make more assertions about technology which are either unfalsifiable or irrelevant to the issue of replacement of human jobs with machines.
Whatever changes in available technology you use to support your claims, must be (1) sufficiently precisely defined to be falsifiable; (2) not excessively ad hoc, (3) Quantifiable in a non-arbitrary manner if you are trying to extrapolate it, (4) relevant to the limiting factor(s) of whichever technology you are trying to argue will exist by some date in the future such as 2030, and (5) show a steady and statistically significant trend which is not only monotonic, but also unambiguously following a specific functional form (such as an exponential) which has remained unbroken for a length of time at the minimum equal to how far in the future you wish to extrapolate, and preferably at least twice or thrice that.
Any technology that does not meet criteria (1) - (5) above cannot be used to justify your futuristic claims.
Ok, it appears the issue under discussion is miniaturization, not performance.
To that end, the issue now is to define what counts as a computer or unit of technology. This is one of the main problems I have with Ray Kurzweil's predictions (which you seem always eager to repeat, almost word for word). Kurzweil's claims about computers being in "X" places or shrinking to "Y" size are so loosely defined as to be virtually unfalsifiable, and to that end, no amount of wearable tech could ever vindicate your argument.
Until you solve this problem, people could be wearing 5000 miniature cell phones embedded in their shorts, even if it happens just three months from now, and there is still not the slightest justification for believing we are any closer to a singularity which involves machine intelligence superior to humans. (unless, of course, you can show that the main limiting factor in the latter amounts to the difficulty of computer miniaturization...)
You seem to think that "impressive", "cool", or "awesome" is somehow equal to compelling, as an argument for a conclusion which is not only specific, but also requires a technological capacity which is different not in quantity but in kind from the examples you use.
What you need to realize is that I am a scientist, and I hold these claims to rigorous standard of falsifiability and quantitative analysis. Informal arguments which cannot be quantified don't cut it, no matter how impressive, awesome, or eyebrow-raising the tech is, because that is simply beside the point.
People said things like that before when they said computers would stop at desk tops then the lap tops then the smart phones now people like you are saying that with wearable tech yet like before computers will continue to advance and we will merge with computers, nanotech, in the 2020's. Sometimes scientists have the hardest time seeing it because you are too focus on the current problem and say we can't solve this let alone have nanotech. Honestly I do not expect to convince you, and thats ok, as I have many friends who do not believe it either but as the 2020's comes everyone will see nanotechnology and then I can say I told you so when everyone else is saying wow this came out of nowhere.
Congrats to you I'm not :-/ but I'm not exactly poor either. Guess I'll let you test the stuff first !
Giving where we are heading I think it will come down "to the masses" quite quickly, in a world of abundance and close to zero marginal costs everyone would have access to about everything.
Still, many people won't be prepared psychologically so they have to wait until it becomes mainstream in usage to dare, or actually not dare being not mainstream any more...
Ha ha, sometimes I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas
This is a good way to put it which is why I am glad I did not know about it in 1984.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Valmond
ps. you are waiting for the 2020 to go full solar? Is this because of battery tech or grid parity (or others)? I'm tinkering with the costs to check if I can't just buy a solar panel, an inverter and chuck the output in on the 220v line... Seems like it will take some years to get ROI (return on investment) say up to 8. Maybe next year it will drop to 4 years. But I don't have any reliable numbers, still interesting though, both for the economic and environmental approach.
I am waiting for better solar technology, its advancing exponentially, and batteries. From what I read it should happen by 2020.
People said things like that before when they said computers would stop at desk tops then the lap tops then the smart phones now people like you are saying that with wearable tech yet like before computers will continue to advance and we will merge with computers, nanotech, in the 2020's. Sometimes scientists have the hardest time seeing it because you are too focus on the current problem and say we can't solve this let alone have nanotech. Honestly I do not expect to convince you, and thats ok, as I have many friends who do not believe it either but as the 2020's comes everyone will see nanotechnology and then I can say I told you so when everyone else is saying wow this came out of nowhere.
Which is not an argument.
Justify your conclusions, or else no one else has any reason to accept it.
Any technology that does not meet criteria (1) - (5) above cannot be used to justify your futuristic claims.
Well first of all, I'm not your professor or something so please stop telling me I have to prove things to you, we are talking about the singularity, the moment you can't know what will happen!
Still, I think that CPU power for the buck fills all your 1-5 arguments. but you cherry picked energy efficiency as a straw man to "prove me wrong". I'm not blind you know ;-)
In science people (scientists!) usually go through three stages when new things come around:
1) It's the most stupid thing I've heard/seen
2) We must stop this, this is just not true/bad (<- for me, you are here)
3) I've always said so/thought so
So all this proving and so is fun and dandy but it doesn't help anyone predict the future, because, as we know, the future isn't perfectly predictable.
What I do is seeing a hundred lines zooming in on a target since decades, getting closer every year and draw conclusions.
Like them or hate them, you can even continue to try to debunk them, please do but you could also contribute what you believe the future will be. I have asked you several times but you don't seems to want to share your thoughts which I think is a shame.
ps. for the solar, yeah of course, that is why I'm tinkering with numbers and so instead of buying. At 2 years (maybe a bit more for the fun) ROI I'd jump on it if there isn't special cases (much better tech to be expected soon for example).
This is a good way to put it which is why I am glad I did not know about it in 1984.
I am waiting for better solar technology, its advancing exponentially, and batteries. From what I read it should happen by 2020.
Yeah solar parity around 2020. It have became very much cheaper lately though so maybe it will go faster. For the batteries, I don't know, there seems to be a new super battery tech every week but we still have LiPoly as the best tech...
For the 1984 stuff, I'm kind of glad I lived that time because things will seem so even more better (than if you are born say today) but I didn't know about any exponential developments back then neither. I think I started to catch up with it around 2001-2003.
Yeah solar parity around 2020. It have became very much cheaper lately though so maybe it will go faster. For the batteries, I don't know, there seems to be a new super battery tech every week but we still have LiPoly as the best tech...
I agree, however, I am trying to be conservative on this one. However if it happens faster then I will switch sooner. Every year I check to see if its worth it or not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Valmond
For the 1984 stuff, I'm kind of glad I lived that time because things will seem so even more better (than if you are born say today) but I didn't know about any exponential developments back then neither. I think I started to catch up with it around 2001-2003.
I was born in 1973 and graduated from high school in 1991 then went to college. I actually like the time I was born in as I will get to really view what life was like before and after the singularity. I actually did not read about it till 2009 and since then it has become my hobby to study it. I do believe that 99.9% of the people living today have no idea what is coming in the next 20 years. That is quickly changing and you can tell from the pop culture as more tv shows and movies are talking about either directly or indirectly. The next movie to watch about it will be out next month and is called Automata.
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I'm not :-/ but I'm not exactly poor either. Guess I'll let you test the stuff first 
!
