On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:28:23AM -0800, Heather Madrone wrote: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_of_substitution > > It's a pretty basic concept, actually, straight out of Economics 2. How
Sorry, I don't do pseudosciences. Thanks for the links, still see no relevance to a simple scenario like a positive feedback loop. > easy/useful is it to substitute one input for another in production? It > would take about 2 minutes to explain this concept to another person, > and even less to point them to a site where they could read about it. Yeah, a great way to land in one's killfile. > The technological singularity seems like pure science fiction to me, Well, you're living in science fiction, then. Doesn't feel too remarkable, does it? > with a lot of wishful thinking standing in for evidence. The singularity is nothing but a fancy term for shrinking horizon of predictability. There's obviously progress (though not nearly as much progress as certain notable metric cherry-pickers want to imply), the rate of progress can accelerate in principle, especially if the rate of cognition goes up (physical ceiling is probably 10^6 to 10^9 speedup). According to http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/02/09/science.1200970 we haven't really started yet. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
