Adam Becker: prediction

Transcript context

…is something that I think Kurzweil is mistaking for a true exponential trend. Yes. And I think you gave an example in your book that, you know, you could look at maybe this was Kurzweil's example. You can look at lily pads, and then they they grow exponentially, and then they cover the size of the pond, and and then and then that's it. But more broadly, though, there there are limits. But Yeah. Exactly. Me yeah. What what interests me is that, we've spoken to Chomsky about this, and and he said after, Newton exercised the ghost but left the machine intact, you know, the the whole enterprise of science stopped being about trying to understand how the universe actually worked and it was more about making sense of the universe. I mean, David Krakauer said to us that science is like poetry. You know, it allows us to give the the universe meaning and and make it make sense to us. But reality is protein, isn't it? So what Ray Kurzweil did was he selected a bunch of things that were relevant to humans. So he didn't select, know, things that might have been more globally important to our success. And and then he he kind of fitted it on a graph. And and this isn't just this is a very natural thing. Right? The world is complicated. And to make it make sense, we kind of select things that privilege the way we think about the world. Yeah. Absolutely. No. It's a very understandable mistake. In the book, I I will, you know, make the analogy to looking out from the top of a skyscraper. Right? You see the stuff closer to you more clearly and the stuff that's further away and less directly impacting you is is, you know, smaller and and farther away and harder to see. But, yeah, I mean, it's it's a natural mistake. And and also like many other people and and as you were alluding to with the lily pad example that I was talking about in the book that I pulled from Kurzweil, he forgets that the 1 thing that you can always say about any exponential trend, the 1 thing that's always true is that they end. You know? Yeah. He he has the lily pad example to give an idea of of how exponential growth works. He says, you know, the if if the lily pads double every day and on day 29, they cover 0.5 of the pond. Well, then on day 30, the pond is full. I'm like, yeah. And then on day 31, the lily pads don't grow anymore because they filled the pond. There's no more pond. And even Gordon Moore himself said, oh yeah, Moore's law isn't gonna last forever. Moore's law has to stop sometime in the 20 twenties because eventually you get down to the size of individual silicon atoms and you can't really make transistors out of silicon that are significantly smaller than silicon atoms. But I suppose it is a bit of a straw man just just to make the sigmoid case. So what they would say is that the actual exponential curve is the stacking of sigmoids. And in technology, whether it's Betamax or whether it's film processing technology, what tends to happen is you get these disruptions.…

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