9:36 AM
Amit Khajuria
A few years ago, my buddy, Robert Sawyer postulated that because we now use computers as a critical tool for research, Moore’s Law applies to scientific accomplishment as well.
He started with a simple postulate—assume that in the first decade of the 21st century we have already accomplished as much scientific advancement as we accomplished in the entire 20th century—amazing discoveries in astronomy, paleontology, materials, medicine, robotics, etc.
Now, let’s try a thought experiment. If we apply Moore’s law and assume that the rate of scientific advancement doubles at the same rate as the computer power that we apply to research, then we can project that we will likely accomplish a whole 20th century’s worth of scientific advancement in 5 years—by 2015. As the rate continues to double, we’ll accomplish a century’s work in 2.5 years, then 1.25 years, 7.5 months, 3 months and 3 weeks, then a smidge less than two months, one month, two weeks, one week, then 3.5 days, 1.75 days, and if you ignore Zeno’s paradox, by the end of 2020 we will be accomplishing a century’s worth of research every day, and two weeks later, every second. And after that…?
Will that be when The Singularity occurs?
In math, a singularity is a point where a function demonstrates extreme behavior. The Singularity, as defined by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, will occur with the technological creation of superintelligence. Such a world may be impossible to predict because us poor present-day humans are unable to comprehend what superintelligent entities will want or how they’ll behave to achieve their goals. (Well, yeah, okay—but life has one fundamental rule: survive. Start with that and everything else follows.)
It may be that The Singularity is nothing more than a technological ‘rapture’ — an event of some interest to those who believe in it, but not necessarily one that the rest of us are expecting. In October of 1951, The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction published a story by Richard Deming called “The Shape Of Things That Came.” In that story, a young reporter uses his uncle’s time-nightshirt (what a silly idea, he should have used a time-belt) to travel from 1900 to 1950. When he returns, he writes about what he has seen — highways and cities full of cars, huge airplanes traveling coast-to-coast, skyscrapers sixty and eighty and a hundred stories tall, telephones everywhere, radio broadcasting, moving pictures with color and sound, television beaming into every home—but his editor rejects the tale because of its essential implausibility. Paraphrasing: “Yes, all of those things are certainly possible at some point in the distant future—but not in fifty years. What is impossible to believe is the timespan. Many of the people in your tale are already born. The human mind simply cannot deal with so much change in a single lifetime.”
In the fifty years since that story was first published, we’ve seen even more astonishing changes in our science and technology: nuclear power, organ transplants, multiple trips to the moon, solar panels, communication satellites, space probes, an international space station, supersonic jets, genetically modified crops, digital information technology, the widespread use of lasers for transmitting and storing information (as well as for teasing cats), globally-connected cell phones, personal computers of all sizes and vast libraries of applications, the incredible reach and versatility of the internet, video games (of course), Viagra, and so much more.
So maybe, just maybe, when and if The Singularity occurs, it will be just one more thing that human beings take in stride—and then complain about because that’s one of the things that machines still can’t do. For most of us, technological advances are a way to address the fundamental laziness of the species—we’re looking for an easier way to get the job done. Good, fast, cheap, we’re happy with any two out of three.
We might take a clue from what happened last century. The two inventions that had the most impact on the 21st century came in the second half—the microchip and the laser. To a great degree they were unexpected and mostly unpredicted. The laser was a lab curiosity for decades. And even after the first microchips were fabricated, industry still didn’t recognize the true potential—not until a couple guys in a garage showed them what a microchip could really do.
It’s very likely that today’s lab curiosities represent possibilities that will redesign our world. Here are a few things to watch out for. (We’ll check back in a few years and see if my crystal ball needs recalibrating.)
First there were bucky-balls, then bucky-tubes, now unrolled bucky-tubes in flat sheets, only an atom thick. Already being touted as the miracle material of the future, graphene is still just a lab curiosity because nobody knows how to manufacture it in industrial quantities, but if graphene could be manufactured efficiently, it would be the plastic of the 21st century. A lot of people believe the problem is solvable.
Researchers at IBM have already demonstrated high-speed circuits on a graphene substrate. What happens when we move from gigaherz processors to teraherz processors? Yes, everything we do now will be faster, effectively instantaneous, but just as the gigaherz CPU made speech recognition and photo-editing and video processing practical what other labor-intensive tasks will the teraherz CPU be able to handle without breaking into a sweat? Add parallel processing to that and we’re talking hellaflops.
But more than that, graphene has incredible physical strength. Researchers at Columbia University have proven that graphene is the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel. Quote: “It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of saran wrap.” Other scientists have layered multiple graphene sheets into a paper-like form that is six times lighter than steel, two times harder, has 10 times higher tensile strength and 13 times higher bending rigidity.
Perhaps someday, layered graphene will be used in cars, planes, trains, buses, spacecraft, robots, perhaps even buildings. The weight savings alone will provide significant fuel economy and the increased strength will give greater structural integrity and safety. It could also show up in military armor. We might see it used in lightweight patio furniture or rugged laptop shells or even as rollbars in some future generation of hybrids.
The predictions for graphene have not yet been tested by reality—but if graphene really is a miracle material, it will have enormous impact on the global infrastructure.
He started with a simple postulate—assume that in the first decade of the 21st century we have already accomplished as much scientific advancement as we accomplished in the entire 20th century—amazing discoveries in astronomy, paleontology, materials, medicine, robotics, etc.
Now, let’s try a thought experiment. If we apply Moore’s law and assume that the rate of scientific advancement doubles at the same rate as the computer power that we apply to research, then we can project that we will likely accomplish a whole 20th century’s worth of scientific advancement in 5 years—by 2015. As the rate continues to double, we’ll accomplish a century’s work in 2.5 years, then 1.25 years, 7.5 months, 3 months and 3 weeks, then a smidge less than two months, one month, two weeks, one week, then 3.5 days, 1.75 days, and if you ignore Zeno’s paradox, by the end of 2020 we will be accomplishing a century’s worth of research every day, and two weeks later, every second. And after that…?
Will that be when The Singularity occurs?
It may be that The Singularity is nothing more than a technological ‘rapture’ — an event of some interest to those who believe in it, but not necessarily one that the rest of us are expecting. In October of 1951, The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction published a story by Richard Deming called “The Shape Of Things That Came.” In that story, a young reporter uses his uncle’s time-nightshirt (what a silly idea, he should have used a time-belt) to travel from 1900 to 1950. When he returns, he writes about what he has seen — highways and cities full of cars, huge airplanes traveling coast-to-coast, skyscrapers sixty and eighty and a hundred stories tall, telephones everywhere, radio broadcasting, moving pictures with color and sound, television beaming into every home—but his editor rejects the tale because of its essential implausibility. Paraphrasing: “Yes, all of those things are certainly possible at some point in the distant future—but not in fifty years. What is impossible to believe is the timespan. Many of the people in your tale are already born. The human mind simply cannot deal with so much change in a single lifetime.”
In the fifty years since that story was first published, we’ve seen even more astonishing changes in our science and technology: nuclear power, organ transplants, multiple trips to the moon, solar panels, communication satellites, space probes, an international space station, supersonic jets, genetically modified crops, digital information technology, the widespread use of lasers for transmitting and storing information (as well as for teasing cats), globally-connected cell phones, personal computers of all sizes and vast libraries of applications, the incredible reach and versatility of the internet, video games (of course), Viagra, and so much more.
So maybe, just maybe, when and if The Singularity occurs, it will be just one more thing that human beings take in stride—and then complain about because that’s one of the things that machines still can’t do. For most of us, technological advances are a way to address the fundamental laziness of the species—we’re looking for an easier way to get the job done. Good, fast, cheap, we’re happy with any two out of three.
We might take a clue from what happened last century. The two inventions that had the most impact on the 21st century came in the second half—the microchip and the laser. To a great degree they were unexpected and mostly unpredicted. The laser was a lab curiosity for decades. And even after the first microchips were fabricated, industry still didn’t recognize the true potential—not until a couple guys in a garage showed them what a microchip could really do.
It’s very likely that today’s lab curiosities represent possibilities that will redesign our world. Here are a few things to watch out for. (We’ll check back in a few years and see if my crystal ball needs recalibrating.)
Graphene
Researchers at IBM have already demonstrated high-speed circuits on a graphene substrate. What happens when we move from gigaherz processors to teraherz processors? Yes, everything we do now will be faster, effectively instantaneous, but just as the gigaherz CPU made speech recognition and photo-editing and video processing practical what other labor-intensive tasks will the teraherz CPU be able to handle without breaking into a sweat? Add parallel processing to that and we’re talking hellaflops.
But more than that, graphene has incredible physical strength. Researchers at Columbia University have proven that graphene is the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel. Quote: “It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of saran wrap.” Other scientists have layered multiple graphene sheets into a paper-like form that is six times lighter than steel, two times harder, has 10 times higher tensile strength and 13 times higher bending rigidity.
Perhaps someday, layered graphene will be used in cars, planes, trains, buses, spacecraft, robots, perhaps even buildings. The weight savings alone will provide significant fuel economy and the increased strength will give greater structural integrity and safety. It could also show up in military armor. We might see it used in lightweight patio furniture or rugged laptop shells or even as rollbars in some future generation of hybrids.
The predictions for graphene have not yet been tested by reality—but if graphene really is a miracle material, it will have enormous impact on the global infrastructure.
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