Carlos Gershenson wrote:
Dear Bill, Well, software is funny, so this statement isn't exactly true. With the Internet, there can be more than exponential distribution, the spread of Google maps being an example, making the evolution and adopted of algorithms and techniques very quick. With the Internet, that distribution has essentially 0 cost. With the Internet, we're able to scale software development, adding more programmers to a problem. Where we haven't lived up to the hype is programmer productivity - exponential growth of productivity for a program. Again, we're caught relying on the exponential effects of network interaction rather than individual gains. But there are still ways we're using software, such as SOA, that starts to impact software efficiency/utility in a much more productive fashion, even if lines of code/day don't drastically improve. I'm not convinced that software programming productivity itself can't hit some exponential capability, but it's evaded us so far. So yes, no software singularity in sight. On the physical side, Moore's law hasn't applied to bus bandwidth, only to storage amounts and processing speed, giving us a great discrepancy in how much we can store vs. how quickly we can access it. This is a bottleneck for memory-CPU transfers and disk-memory transfers, as well as getting things out to the network. Anyway, I'm not a big fan of future messianic implosion dates. In 100 years we'll still be screaming at kids to brush their teeth before bed and arguing about who has the best beer, regardless of what our computers are doing. |
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