This thread is inspired by a post mentioning Ray Kurzweil and his hypothesis and the whole singularity thing.
I’m not trying to collect arguments against his views, nor really support them.
What I’m curious about is the exponential growth thing in technology. I thought there was quite a bit of tech innovation in the early 2000’s, and medical science seemed to be offering us a bunch of perks.
Now it just seems that tech stories are about some new cell phone (which I guess is improving slowly), or some story about a breakthrough in a lab, which isn’t likely to have any consumer product, let alone even a real prototype associated with it. We may never see results either. Science story fluff, IMO.
Since it is nearly 2010 now, lets compare 2000-2004 breakthroughs with 2005-2009 breakthroughs (beginning of first year to end of the second year of course). Based on your experience, can we get twice the computing power today for the same amount of money this holiday season as we could back in 2005?
ETA: Should we not compare computing power doubled since 5 years ago? Or would it be better to compare only 1 year ago?