Connectivity:

The bandwidth available to people is increasing at a rate of 50% per year.  Not quite as fast as Moore's law for silicon, but still extraordinary.

Here is a more up to date estimate that takes into account the number of websites and requests.

Faster and faster it goes.  How long have you been watching videos online?  Two years?  Three?  Not longer surely.

Do you watch any actual TV shows on your internet connection?  You will soon.

Bioengineering:

The human genome is mapped and I have heard some people say, "So what, they haven't done anything with it."  Mapping something and understanding something are two different things.  Give the processor speed increase time to be applied against the genome and there will be plenty that comes from it.

It cost approximately $13 Billion to decode the human genome over the course of 13 years.

...the price of sequencing DNA has fallen rapidly with the advent of these machines. Today, the price tag on a human genome decoded with sequencers of the type used in the Human Genome Project would be $25 million to $50 million. It drops to around $1 million with next-generation machines available today and could be as low as $100,000 by 2008.

Now THAT is an improvement in cost.

"The last year has been the most exciting period in genomics since the days of the Human Genome Project," says Eric Lander, first author on the project's first published draft of the human genome and now head of the Broad Institute for genomic medicine in Cambridge, MA. "Sequencing is becoming cheap enough and powerful enough that it can be applied to about any problem. It's standing the field on its head." Francis Collins,

Remarkable, faster and cheaper by factors of a thousand or more.  And I wouldn't expect it to stop there. 

Someday Kinko's will be able to give you your DNA sequence in 10 minutes for $42.95.

Space Technology:

Lotsa cool stuff going on.  It finally appears that the private sector is getting involved.  We have a variety of Billionaires interested in spending their money here.

• Elon Musk (PayPal): SpaceX
• Paul Allen
• Google guys: XPrize sponsorship for a unmanned moon landing
• Richard Branson: Virgin Galactic

Of these the most interesting to me is Elon Musk's attempt to develop an entire space program on his own.  He is focused on a less expensive, modular rocket system.  He is positioning himself to be the only US based rocket launch provider for the ISS after the space shuttle is decommissioned.

Not a bad place to be.

This is actually the technology that fits the least in the singularity paradigm, but it is finally vibrant and growing after years of stagnation.

Nanotechnology:

One of the holy grails from this technology is fab-labs.  Basically a "replicator" from Star Trek.  Well there's nothing like that on the horizon, but what is being developed is the cross pollination of silicon wafer technologies being leveraged across to make nano-machines.

Still conjecture and wishful thinking.

Virtual Reality:

From online games like World of Warcraft and Elfquest before it we now have the virtual world of Second Life and dotSoul virtual reality is here to stay.  Get you avatar and enter the multiverse.

You can set up your own virtual reality server for free: Worldforge.com

Check out these goggles: [http://www.sensics.com/products/pisight.php]

This video is extraordinary:

This has only just begun and lends itself very well for the tinkerer / inventor.

Computer Power:

We are still increasing at Moore's law.  And Moore's law only applies to the silicon chip, the phenomenon can be traced back further across previous technology and the doubling time holds back to vacuum tubes.

And there is plausibility that as we exhaust the capabilities of silicon that other technologies will enter and the speed increases will continue.

Conclusion:

Now you can see why the singularity is considered the point beyond which we can't predict what will happen.  All of these groups of technologies is increasing in performance and coming down in cost.  Some by extraordinary amounts, some by more modest amounts.

There is feedback loops intertwined amongst some of these technologies.

The only thing we can do is keep our eyes open and watch.  Predicting is likely to be wrong, whatever it happens to be about.

1981 1 GB IBM hard drive model 3380. Starting from $81,000 and weighed in at 34 kg.

versus

2007 1 GB smart card.  Starting at $9 and weighing in at a...well a uh...a few grams maybe?

Eh...if this isn't the most striking example of the law of accelerating returns I don't know what is.

More info:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3380#IBM_3380

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:IBM3380DiskDriveModule.agr.jpg

Hat tip: http://sd4.sd-lj.si/diggit/20yago.jpg

Quantum chip rides on superconducting bus

The connection of two Qubits on a chip for the first time.  This is a crucial first step, a proof of concept, that will lead to true quantum computers.

In effect, says Johannes Majer, a member of the Yale team, the researchers have created "a quantum bus". A bus is used in conventional computers as a conduit for information among the various components – but its quantum chip equivalent has never been made before.

With the predictions for the end of Moore's law I refer you back to Ray Kurzweil's great essay on accelerating change that stipulated the doubling of computing power was not bound to the integrated chip.  The phenomena both preceded the integrated chip and will in all likelihood continue after the silicon chip is no longer viable.

The creation of a working quantum computer might be as momentous an event as the creation of the transistor.  History will of course judge.

Just an example of accelerating change.

There were rooms and devices in history that could be categorized as planetariums dating back to the 13th century, but the first true planetarium was created in Munich in 1920.  [ref. linky] [wikipedia]

That planetarium used a metal dome with holes poked in it to project the lights onto a domed ceiling.  This technology remained largely unchanged for 60 years.

Since then we have seen rapid change.  With computer processing  power increasing continuously it is now possible to provide dynamic content up onto the dome.  I went to a local planetarium last year and the experience was more like a trip through space than a lecture from an instructor.  It was remarkable.

But it doesn't stop there.

We now have sophisticated programs available to everyone for free that exceed the capabilities of ANY planetarium that was built before the year 2000.  Stellarium [linky] is only the most sophisticated example.

The power of a full planetarium placed in your hands for free.

Accelerating Change:

This is only one trivial example of accelerating change in our lives.  We have the capabilities at our fingertips that only large institutions have had in the past.  And even those institutions, whether business or government, have only had THOSE capabilities for a hundred years or so, before that essentially nobody could do these things.

And we take it all for granted.

We shouldn't.

We live in an age of miracles.  It is not an age of once in a blue moon someone gets healed by some mysterious means or someone walks on water or something trivial like that.  It is an age where the miracles are so common and ubiquitous that they have become mundane.

Here is a great article about a person with lifelong hearing loss.  Through his life he has repeatedly purchased and used hearing aids and been uniformly dissapointed.  Each one has been little more than an amplifier of sound, which doesn't really solve the problem.

Recently he got a modern cutting edge model.

And then humming.

And I asked, what’s that?

I turned to the audiologist who said, the humming is the light fixtures overhead. I looked up and it occurred to me that the world was opening up in waves around me within this tiny office. I could hear the secretary a room away on the phone and the printer printing and a phone ringing behind me, and I knew right were it was.

Wow! Right now I hear the refigerator running on the other side of the office. And I can make out the highway sounds in the background...just. This guy has NEVER heard the background sounds of life. Until now.

Go read the whole thing.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)

And by failure I mean unmitigated success.

But I do also mean failure as viewed through our Ray Kurzweil jaded shades. We expect so much out of our technology these days that a device as radical and beautiful and exemplary as the iPhone is still seen as incomplete.

Comparison

Compare it to the most radical phones of the 1990s. I'd argue it wasn't even a phone that was radical back then, but the Palm Pilot, a PDA. The Palm Pilot experimented with the user interface...how would someone work with a handheld effectively.

Compare it to the phones of the mid 1980s. Just having a mobile car phone by itself was the cool thing. Remember the bricks? Remember the mini-briefcase sized phones? 'nuff said.

Why do we not laud it for what it is

What we have here is accelerating returns personified. We are so human that we can't see what has happened. Our perception of the future is constrained by our living in the present.

The iPhone is not perfect.

It does not do absolutely evertyhing in a perfect way. It should be on a fast network. It should have more memory. It should allow us to change to competing phone networks.

What it does do is let us see what can be done, what should be done, and what will be done.

Comparing a current version of the iPod against the earlier versions gives us insight into what changes we might have in store from Apple vis a vis the iPhone. 2-3 years from now we'll be 2-3 versions in and the iPhone will have plugged its remaining product holes.

You will need to be ready for the future because it is on the way here whether you want it or not.

In our modern world we take the fact that anyone can just go click-click-click and see any number of amazing pictures from the Hubble Space Tellescope.

We don't even think about how unimaginably amazing this would be for someone from 1950-60-70 even the 1980s, not to mention earlier than that.  NOBODY saw stuff like this.  And now here it is served to you on your home LCD screen.

Accelerating returns indeed.

I now end your daily Kurzweil minute with this picture.