This reminds me of Peter Thiel's idea of "indefinite optimism": we've been spoiled by a recent history of frequent cutting-edge innovation, so we assume that it will continue despite having no idea of the shape it will take. The key here is recent history -- humanity has only been advancing at its current breakneck pace for a few generations. Technological stagnation is more the normal mode.

I think we should consider the possibility that growth in processing power will level out at least for a while. There are some interesting research avenues which may yet bear fruit, but there's no guarantee that some miraculous scientific breakthrough will appear just in time to salvage exponential growth. "Moore's Law" is not some fundamental law of the universe.

Yes, some people take the approach that because one guy called Malthus was wrong before, things can't turn really bad ever. Never understood that kind of reasoning.

Seems like plenty of people even if they don't believe in Father God, they still have some kind of faith in Mother Nature, or Brother Progress that have our backs covered whatever we do.

> eg biological neurons are far superior to our best silicon.

By what metric?

Biological neurons misfire and make errors all the time. Biological neurons don't like -40C or 100C very much. Biological neurons get rather upset when you subject them to a couple of G's of acceleration.

We'd need artificial neurons without those limitations.

For example, just a few days ago a team from UCSD announced something like that called 'memprocessors'.

Unless it's an actual product, those announcements are a dime a dozen. We're still waiting for "memsistors" and "cold fusion".

It's research, but they claim to have built some.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/6/e1500031.full

Their conclusion:

"The actual machine we built clearly suffers from technological limitations, that impair its scalability due to unavoidable noise. These limitations derive from the fact that we encode the information directly into frequencies, and so ultimately into energy. This issue could, however, be overcome either using error correcting codes or with other UMMs that use other ways to encode such information and are digital at least in their input and output."

So, it remains to be seen how feasible this machine is.

>So we'll switch to an entirely different basis - as we did from vaccuum tubes, relays, gears - I like Kurzweil's historical argument on this.

The historical argument boils down to: "we've managed to do this a few times in the past, THUS we'll be able to do it indefinitely".

Hardly a logical or coherent argument.

Yeah, I misspoke "argument". It's odd that he doesn't actually articulate the "increasing returns" argument. It's that better technology enables you to see and do better (smaller, larger, faster, purer; whatever your trajectory). Knowing more gives you awareness of more avenues; more people (population) working on it (not needed for the basics of food, shelter etc) enables exploration of those avenues. But most of all, better technology, tools, methods give faster iteration. Because trial-and-error is how we explore unknowns.

Of course, all of that is about discovery - and pre-conditioned on there being something useful to discover. Whether there is or not is necessarily a matter of faith... since, by definition, we don't know. Historicaly it's turned out that way, but rephrasing you, past performance is no guarantee of future performance.

Personally, I see Chaitin's work as showing that there is infinite pattern; and with infinity, some of it is bound to be useful. It's a matter of finding it.

Of course, in the present case we already have a proof by existence that better technology is there to be discovered: you.