Strictly speaking, every invention is taking more and more effort to realize. But there is increasing wealth to invest from the reinvestments from previous inventions and energy and information tech and having 8 billion humans many of them educated and so on.
And yes Kurzweil thinks the information tech, which already has led to huge speedups and improvements, with many advanced tools, will itself gain the competence that it will be like instead of 8 billion people available, with some tiny fraction of a percent performing innovation and R&D, most of them not coordinating with each other, it will scale to the equivalent of having all 8 billion people studying problems, coordinating near perfectly. Then 80 billion and 8 trillion and then the computational equivalent of having the biomass of every habitable planet in the galaxy working on R&D or something.
Some absurd explosion. But as the amount of intelligence rises, all the easier problems will be solved almost immediately and you would expect technology to very quickly advance to where the additional compute isn’t helping, everything is gated by physical law. Every computer chip is computronium, every machine optimal nanotechnology, every solar panel near thermodynamic limits and so on.
So that “days” period might only last for, well, days.
Yes and no.
Strictly speaking, every invention is taking more and more effort to realize. But there is increasing wealth to invest from the reinvestments from previous inventions and energy and information tech and having 8 billion humans many of them educated and so on.
And yes Kurzweil thinks the information tech, which already has led to huge speedups and improvements, with many advanced tools, will itself gain the competence that it will be like instead of 8 billion people available, with some tiny fraction of a percent performing innovation and R&D, most of them not coordinating with each other, it will scale to the equivalent of having all 8 billion people studying problems, coordinating near perfectly. Then 80 billion and 8 trillion and then the computational equivalent of having the biomass of every habitable planet in the galaxy working on R&D or something.
Some absurd explosion. But as the amount of intelligence rises, all the easier problems will be solved almost immediately and you would expect technology to very quickly advance to where the additional compute isn’t helping, everything is gated by physical law. Every computer chip is computronium, every machine optimal nanotechnology, every solar panel near thermodynamic limits and so on.
So that “days” period might only last for, well, days.