Except you have exactly zero evidence for this, either empirical or theoretical.
With the exception of the world we live in.
Nice non sequitur. The world we live in shows no such thing. It shows boundaries to growth imposed by resource constraints. It shows no examples whatsoever of ever increasing growth rates.
RISC, VLIW, ETC
Things that were thought to be revolutionary increases in computing power live on in niche applications. How is that evidence of what you claim? Niche applications are not revolutionary advances. That’s what makes them niches.
How do you know you can compute with molecules or photons?
By trying both and comparing?
How do you know either can even be tried? How do you know they will work? Molecules are seriously complicated by thermal effects, photons by dispersion, and both by quantum spreading. If you can’t tell us how those problems can be solved, then you are advocating a position based on faith. You have a religious perspective.
There are huge technical and theoretical obstacles in the way.
Yes. That’s why it is called “research”.
As someone who actually does research, I can reliably inform you that quite a lot of the output of research involves specifying what you CANNOT do rather than what you can. Research does not mean “I have an idea; research will tell me how to make it feasible.” Research does not inevitably tell you how to solve a problem. Sometimes it tells you “you can’t solve that problem.”
I think all predictions of eternal exponential growth are bullshit because
they always have been bullshit. And they always have been bullshit
because eventually you will hit a resource constraint.
And hitting the constraint is the opportunity for paradigm change.
Every instance so far shows that it is the opportunity for either plateau or death.
And computing has simply not erased that. It still depends on resources.
True, in principle. But I see the hard stop somewhere at the level of
the Dyson Sphere. Until then it’s a merry ride. And even then, with the
harnessed power of an entire star, who knows if there aren’t spacetime
cheats to make interstellar travel possible.
Now you’re treading into my territory (relativity theorist here). There are no spacetime cheats. All possibilities depend on violating energy conditions that don’t appear to be violated. And if you think Dyson spheres are the limit, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to climate change and the Fermi paradox.
It is touching, and to some extent charming, how you have faith that technological development will conquer all and that all ideas will somehow pan out. But they don’t. Bacteria can’t innovate their way out of the constraints of the petri dish. We can’t innovate our way out of the resource constraints we face either. We’ve essentially run out of oil. If you have to drill more than a mile under the ocean, you’ve approached a limit.
What will you use to replace it? Nuclear? Wind? Solar? Nuclear has waste problems. Wind and solar, as Max Planck Institute has show, will themselves cause climate change if used on a broad enough scale. Since we are nowhere near building a Dyson sphere, how will you bridge the gap?
Fisheries are collapsing. Topsoil is vanishing, as is groundwater. This is evidence that the carrying capacity of the Earth has been exceeded. There are far too many people chasing limited resources and they all want more.
When someone was discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life with Enrico Fermi, he eventually said “Where are they?” That was a cogent point. We have been broadcasting radio for about a century and a half. Anyone within about 150 light years of us therefore knows we are here due to unnatural radio emissions. But despite 50 years of looking, we have never detected an unnatural radio emission from anywhere else in the universe.
Until recently, you could argue that maybe this is because planet, and therefore life, is relatively rare. No more. We know of about 2000 planets around other stars and we’ve only just become able to discover them. Planets seem to be the rule, not the exception. Presumably, where there are planets there can be life so life is probably also the rule, not the exception.
So again Fermi: Where are they? Some civilizations should surely be older than ours. We should detect their emissions, even if radio is only a transient phase in their development. But there’s nothing. Why?
Natural selection by and large produces species that compete for resources and, when resources are available, will exploit them to the maximum extent possible. That’s certainly what mostly happens on Earth. Natural selection is unlikely to be a scientific principle restricted to Earth. Likely, it is universal. So everywhere is much like here.
And here, we are killing ourselves off by trying to exploit our resources before someone else does. I don’t have evidence, but I have a suspicion that we’ve already passed a tipping point on climate change. Change is occurring faster and to a larger extent than even the most pessimistic models. The west Antarctic ice sheet is doomed to melt and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. That’s a big deal.
Once our civilization has collapsed due to massive climate-induced dislocations, there will be no second civilization. The reason is that all the easily available energy resources are gone. Remember resource constraints?
I’ve come to the conclusion that intelligence is not a long term survival trait for a species. It leads you to destroy your own environment. And that accounts for the Fermi paradox. No doubt there were many intelligent species in the universe. They all killed themselves off through environmental destruction. I don’t see any other plausible explanations.
What does this have to do with computing? Well, quite a lot. We’re the ones who are going to build the damn things. It doesn’t look to me like we will do so before we kill ourselves off. Your judgment of that depends on your judgment of how close to AI we actually are, but AI is historically marked by over, not under, estimation. It has been 20 year off for 70 years now. I also know a bit about cognitive science and realize that the problem is not nearly so simple as just throwing more computing power at it.
But suppose we could beat the clock. Suppose we create AI before we kill ourselves off. All that does is reproduce the same problem in a different medium. Natural selection doesn’t give a shit about the substrate of the organism. It only cares about competition for resources. And resources are always limited.
There are, by the way, no Dyson spheres. They’d be pretty easy to detect with infrared cameras. So nobody else solved it either.
I want you to notice that everything I wrote, except certain elements of speculation about the Fermi Paradox (and not all elements) was based in known fact. You rely on faith. You’re confident, for no particular reason, that problems will always be solved. I invite you, then, to create a perpetual motion machine.
Often research tells us “Sorry; Can’t do that.”
