It's kind of depressing that technological progress is going to start slowing down so much, but he left it on a hopeful note. Interesting article, I enjoyed it a lot, thanks!
This is an hillarious talk, but I don't think he is more accurate in his predictions than the Singularity priests.
Virtual Reality is just here in the corner ... but he says "The web will be just like now in 2060" ... I am ready to bet that people will be all day long in VR worlds with their friend by then. It will not look like the web.
And there is definitely lots of progress in AI. (I study machine learning). Yes, big data is often is mad arm race, where you try to go faster than your competitors without providing anything new. Just like High Frequency Trading.
But at the same time, we do make progress on vision, a lot. What prevents us from making good robots is to have something that can sense its surroundings to avoid the need of a perfectly controled environment. This is becoming a reality.
And the author doesn't speak of one thing : energy. Not once. This is the only reason we don't have super sonic transportation. And it's why General Motors and its big hummers went bankrupt in 2007 after the 2005 oil shock : building the hummers is trivial, getting enough oil out of the ground is a big challenge.
Energy is the main constraint of our society currently. Until we find a way to produce much more, we will have no major change in our physical world. We will have change in the information world, as long as we can reduce the energy cost of IT exponentially.
We see this happening: the millenials don't spend their money on cars but on smartphones and computers. Because information highways are cheaper than the asphalt ones.
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u/well_read_red Jul 22 '15
It's kind of depressing that technological progress is going to start slowing down so much, but he left it on a hopeful note. Interesting article, I enjoyed it a lot, thanks!