On 10/27/2011 10:10 AM, Steve Dekorte wrote:
BGB<cr88...@gmail.com> wrote:
Leitl wrote:
John Zabroski wrote:
Kurzweil addresses that.
As far as I know Kurzweil hasn't presented anything technical or even detailed.
Armwaving is cheap enough.
yep, one can follow a polynomial curve to pretty much anything...
actually getting there is another matter.
I wonder what the curve from the early Roman civilization looked liked and how
that compared to the actual data from the Dark Ages.
probably:
sharp rise...
plateau...
collapse...
dark ages then begin.
a lot was forgotten for a while, but then in the following centuries
much of what was lost was recovered, and then the original roman empire
was surpassed.
now, things are rising at the moment, and may either:
continue indefinitely;
hit a plateau and stabilize;
hit a plateau and then follow a downward trend.
most likely, processing power will stop increasing (WRT density and/or
watts) once the respective physical limits are met (basically, it would
no longer be possible to get more processing power in the same space or
using less power within the confines of the laws of physics).
granted, I suspect there may still be a ways to go (it is possible that
such a computer might not even necessarily be "matter" as currently
understood).
then again, the limits of what is "practical" could come a bit sooner.
a fairly conservative estimate would be if people hit the limits of what
could be practically done with silicon, and then called it "good enough".
otherwise, people may migrate to other possibilities, such as graphene
or photonics, or maybe build anyonic systems, or similar.
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