socialnomicsingularity: Welcome

“Ray Kurzweil,” is associated with the popular interpretation of the Technological Singularity, often referred to as the accelerating change thesis. In his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Kurzweil defined the Technological Singularity as:
“… a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lifes, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.”

Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns In his essay, The Law of Accelerating Returns, Ray Kurzweil proposes a generalization of Moore’s law that forms the basis of many people’s beliefs regarding the Singularity. Moore’s law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Kurzweil extends this to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of computation. He believes that the exponential growth of Moore’s law will continue beyond the use of integrated circuits into technologies that will lead to the Singularity.

The law described by Ray Kurzweil has in many ways altered the public’s perception of Moore’s law. It is a common (but mistaken) belief that Moore’s law makes predictions regarding all forms of technology, when really it only concerns semiconductor circuits. Many futurologists still use the term “Moore’s law” to describe ideas like those put forth by Kurzweil.

However, the term is commonly misunderstood to mean technological progress will rise to infinity, as happens in a mathematical singularity. But, this is not wholly accurate. The term was chosen as a metaphor from physics rather than mathematics: as one approaches the Singularity, models of the future become less reliable, just as conventional models of physics break down as one approaches a gravitational singularity.