Readit NewsDeleted Comment
It's only after the fact they are transparent about the impact
> "our mission should remain the same: accelerate to the maximum extent possible."
I think you need to justify why hurrying to be AI servants should be our mission :-|
The acceleration we've experienced has allowed us to "outrun" our problems. In earlier generations, that meant famine or disease. Today, it might be climate change. Tomorrow, it'll be something else entirely.
Technological progress has generally been the reason humanity should be optimistic against challenges: it gives us ever improving tools to solve our hardest problems faster than we succumb to them. Without it, that optimism becomes much harder to justify.
Even if there is a plateau we can't cross, if we believe we drive more benefit from technology than the problems it creates, it makes sense to extract as much progress as we can from the physics we have.
But our software could be orders of magnitude more efficient. Am I wrong?
Slowing transistor scaling just gives us one less domain through which to depend on for improvements - the others are all still valid, and will probably be something we come to invest more effort into.
In this case I use "singularity", by which I mean it more abstractly: a hypothetical point where technological progress begins to accelerate recursively, with heavily reduced human intervention.
My point isn't theological or utopian, just that the physical limits of computation, energy, and scale make that kind of runaway acceleration far less likely IMO than many assume.
Asimov's story The Last Question ends with the Multivac machine having collected all the data in the universe and still not answering the question "how can entropy be reversed?", so it spends an immeasurable amount of time processing the data in all possible ways. The article argues that we might not get to "the singularity" because progress will stop, but even if we can't make better transistors, we can make more of them, and we can spend longer processing data with them. If what we're missing in an AGI is architectural it might only need insight and distributed computing, not future computers.
> "We built our optimism during a rare century when progress got cheaper as it got faster. That era may be over."
This effect of progress building on progress goes back a hundred years before that, and a hundred years before that. The first practical steam engine was weak, inefficient, and coal-hungry in the early 1700s and what made it 'practical' is that it pumped water out of coal mines. Coalmine owners could get more coal by buying a steam engine; the engine made its fuel cheaper and easier and more coal to sell. Probably this pattern goes back a lot before that because everything builds on everything, but this was a key industrial revolution turning point a long time before the article's claim. The era may be another two hundred years away from being over.
> "There are still areas of promise for step-function improvements: fusion, quantum computing, high-temperature superconductors. But scientific progress is not guaranteed to continue."
Opening with the recursively improving AGI and then having a section of "areas of promise for step-function improvements" and not mentioning any chance of an AGI breakthrough? Neuralink style cyborg interfaces, biological, genetic, health, anti-ageing, new materials or meta-materials, nanotechnology, distributed computing, vibe coding, no possible areas for step changes in any of those?
> "But the burden of proof lies with those claims. Based on what we know today, a plateau is inevitable. Within that plateau, we can only speculate:"
Based on what we know today there isn't "a" plateau, there are many, and they give way to newer things. Steam power plateaued, propellor aircraft plateaued, sailboat speed and size plateaued, cog and gear computer speed plateaued, then electro-mechanical computer speed, then valve computer speed, then discrete logic speed, then integrated circuit speed, then single core, then what, CPUs, then GPUs, then TPUs...
> "Are therapies for broad set of complex autoimmune diseases ahead of the plateau? Probably."
How many autoimmune diseases have been cured, ever? Where does this "Probably" come from - the burden of proof very much lies with that probably.
> "Will we have Earth-based space elevators before the plateau? Probably not."
We don't have a rope strong enough to hang 36km or a way to make one or a way to lift that much mass into geostationary orbit in one go. But if we could make a cable thicker in space, thinner at the ground, launch it in pieces and join it together, we might not be that far away from plausible space elevator. Like if Musk got a bee in his bonnet and opened his wallet wide, I wouldn't bet against SpaceX having a basic one by 2040. Or 2035. I probably would bet against 2028.
Regulatory and economic barriers are probably the easiest to overcome. But they are an obstacle. All it takes is for public sentiment to turn a bit more hostile towards technology, and progress can stall indefinitely.
> Opening with the recursively improving AGI and then having a section of "areas of promise for step-function improvements" and not mentioning any chance of an AGI breakthrough?
The premise of the article is that the hardware that AGI (or really ASI) would depend on may itself reach diminishing returns. What if progress is severely hampered by the need for one or two more process improvements that we simply can’t eke out?
Even if the algorithms exist, the underlying compute and energy requirements might hit hard ceilings before we reach "recursive improvement."
> How many autoimmune diseases have been cured, ever? Where does this “Probably” come from — the burden of proof very much lies with that probably.
The point isn't that we're there now, or even close. It’s that we likely don’t need a step-function technological breakthrough to get there.
With incremental improvements in CAR-T therapies — particularly those targeting B cells — Lupus is probably a prime candidate for an autoimmune disease that could feasibly be functionally "cured" within the next decade or so (using extensions of existing technology, not new physics).
In fact, one of the strongest counterpoints to the article's thesis is molecular biology, which has a remarkable amount of momentum and a lot of room left to run.
> We might not be that far away from a plausible space elevator.
I haven't seen convincing arguments that current materials can get us there, at least not on Earth. But the moon seems a lot more plausible due to lower gravity and virtually no atmosphere.
But I'd be very happy to be wrong about this.
> Based on what we know today, there isn’t “a” plateau — there are many, and they give way to newer things.
True. But the point is that when a plateau is governed by physical limits (for example, transistor size), further progress depends on a step-function improvement — and there's no guarantee that such an improvement exists.
Steam and coal weren't limited by physics. Which is the same reason why I didn't mention lithium batteries in the article (surely we can move beyond lithium to other chemistries, so the ceiling on what lithium can deliver isn't relevant). But for fields bounded by fundamental constants or quantum effects, there may not necessarily be a successor.
But I don't think the market is saturated just yet.
Even when we stop having unicorns, SWE salaries may go down, but that'll also open new opportunities.
But w may one day have to contend with expecting fewer "new" paradigms and the ultra rapid industry growth that accompanies them (dotcom, SaaS, ML, etc). Will "software eating the world" be enough to counteract this long term? Hard to say
The walled gardens are imo getting worse. And opting out (dumb phone) isn’t the same thing as that dissolving.
That said I’m also cautiously optimistic in some areas. Linux on desktop in particular is on a good streak. Riscv seems promising. More people are understanding lock in risk etc.
But isn't Apple (the most egregious example IMO) losing a slew of cases in many jurisdictions (not just EU)? I think the consensus is very much that they've overplayed their hand and the bill is coming due