Transcript Technology - MWMS HW Wiki

2045: The Year Man
Becomes Immortal
By: Lev Grossman
February 10, 2011
TIME Magazine
Technology:
Exponential Growth and Decay
1) The accelerating pace of
change…
• Agricultural Revolution…
– 8000 years later
• Industrial Revolution…
– 120 years later
• Light bulb…
– 90 years later
• Moon landing…
– 22 years later
• World Wide Web…
– 9 years later
• Human genome sequenced
2) …and exponential growth
in computing power…
Computer technology, shown
here climbing dramatically
by powers of 10, is now
progressing more each hour
than it did in its entire first
90 years.
Analytical Engine – Charles Babbage 1837; designed to solve computational and
logical problems
Colossus – 1943; electronic computer, with 1500 vacuum tubes, helped the
British crack German codes during WW II
ENIAC – 1946; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer; first generalpurpose electronic computer; called “Giant Brain”
UNIVAC I – 1951; UNIVersal Automatic Computer I; first commercially marketed
computer, used to tabulate the U.S. Census, occupied 943 cubic feet
Apple II – 1977; at a price of $1,298, the compact machine was one of the first
massively popular personal computers
IBM PC – 1981; IBM Personal Computer
Power Mac G4 – 1999; the first personal computer to deliver more than 1 billion
floating-point operations per second
Mac Pro – 2006
Macbook Air 2008
Ipad 2010
Remember this from 1837?
Exponential Growth
• Rising clock speed of microprocessors
• Rising number of Internet hosts
• Rising number of nanotechnology
Exponential Decay (fall)
• Falling cost of manufacturing
transistors
• Plummeting price of dynamic RAM
• Falling cost of sequencing DNA
• Falling cost of wireless data service
From the article…
“He kept finding the same thing:
exponentially accelerating progress…
Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating
returns: technological progress
happens exponentially, not linearly.”
From the article…
“Then he extended the curves into the
future, and the growth they predicted
was so phenomenal, it created
cognitive resistance in his mind.
Exponential curves start slowly, then
rocket skyward toward infinity.”
From the article…
“Here’s what the exponential curves told him.
We will successfully reverse-engineer the
human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end
of that decade, computers will be capable of
human-level intelligence…
In 2045,…the quantity of artificial intelligence
created will be about a billion times the sum
of all the human intelligence that exists
today.”
Raymond Kurzweil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X
4Neivqp2K4
I’ve Got a Secret
February 15, 1965
46 years later…
Watson on Jeopardy
Computer beats humans
February 15, 2011
1.http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/video/jeopardy-pits-manversus-watson-computer-12841538
2.http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/jeopardy-ibm-computerwatson-wins-million-man-machine/story?id=12940205
3.http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2011/01/14/pepitone.i
bm.jeopardy.cnn?iref=videosearch
4.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12464447
5.http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/02/15/carroll.
jeopardy.ibm.cnn?iref=videosearch
What’s the difference between
exponential and linear?
Let’s graph these!
1. Cost of computers
2. Speed of computers (calculations per
second)
3. Page load speed
4. Number of Internet hosts
Cost of computers –
Exponential decay
http://www.freeby50.com/2009/04/cost-of-computers-over-time.html
Calculations per second –
Exponential growth
http://www.singularity.com/charts/page70.html
Page load speed –
Exponential decay
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-speed-are-you-fast-does-it-matter
Number of Internet hosts –
Exponential growth
http://www.singularity.com/charts/page79.html