Ray Kurzweil: "The recession has made no dent in the exponential advancement of technology"

[Odin2005]

Very interesting talk Kurzweil gave here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_announces_singularity_university.html

Most interesting was his comments on solar energy technology, which implicitly claim that the complaints about photovoltaic technology not developing fast enough were ignorant of the principles of the exponential growth.

[JDPriestly]

1. Thanks. That was great!

I also thought the statement on solar energy was the most encouraging part of the discussion. I'm not sure I like the part about increasing our intelligence. I think we need to increase our humanity. Lack of humanity is more of a problem than lack of intelligence. I would like to think that increasing intelligence would increase our humanity, our compassion for each other, but based on my experience, I do not think that is necessarily so.

[Odin2005]

2. IMO the vast majority of people do bad things out of stupidity and ignorance more than...

...anything else. People often think they are doing a good thing based on what they know and what they believe when they are really not, that is why its so hard to reason with, say, cultural conservatives, and, say, many non-Randoid Libertarians, THEY think they are doing The Right Thing even though they are not. No, greater intelligence will not directly change that, but it may have a positive indirect effect by making it much harder to sustain willful ignorance and blatant fallacious reasoning.

[ret5hd]

3. IMO the vast majority of people do bad things out of greed.

[joshcryer]

4. Doubling every two years, 16 years for world photovoltaic utilization.

That's sick if the trend continues. Sick.

The thing about exponential trends is that they don't look exponential until well after they jump. If the trend continues then in 10 years we'll start to really see photovoltaics kick butt (solar shingles come to mind, large decentralized community grids, paved solar roads, etc).

[Odin2005]

5. Yep, that same thought left me grinning ear to ear.

"Paved solar roads" :wow:

[Occulus]

6. AAAAAAANNNNND Singularity University's webpage is live

http://singularityu.org/

[Posteritatis]

7. I tend to think Kurzweil's a bit *too* optimistic...

... But if he's off by, oh, let's say half or two-thirds? Things are still looking pretty good.

[joshcryer]

8. The thing is, by using S curves, he can claim exponential growth on dissimliar technologies.

For instance, say photovoltaics slowed down next year (unlikely, but bare with me), he'd just use some other technological innovation to say "this is solar power." Say windmills take the place.

Regardless of how the data is set up, there is always going to be an exponential trend, though.

I think he's off by about 20-30 years, but I'd be happy to be wrong.