Great video, Neo !
I also watched another in that series, about restoring sight to the blind using an implanted chip on the retina. Fascinating stuff.

Yes, I fully agree!

Reading about, and seeing the seemingly small advances that are made every single day, I almost take for granted how these advances are actually accelerating. When one steps back and looks at progress, it does seem to adhere to the geometric (or even "compounded geometric") charts that the optimists like Kurzweil have shown.

In fact, I've compiled a "timeline" of possible future events, from the various articles in technology and science magazines, and websites I've come across.

May as well post it here ! (I've not published this elsewhere)

Possible Singularity Timeline

2007 - Medical advances are currently adding 3 months life-expectancy per annum on average *fact*
First quantum computation done on the prime factors of the number 15.
2008 - First living cells with artificial chromosomes.
2009 - Moores Law (doubling) applied to qBits (pending successful mass-production thereof)
2010 - Nano-transistors in consumer use for memory chips. Multicore parallel computing in handheld devices. Speech recognition ubiquitous.
2011 - take one year of biological age for theoretical age. Holographic storage/retrieval becoming consumer reality. Photoelectric paints commercially available, to generate electricity from sunlight falling on walls.
PTC124 to finish clinical trials; pill to dramatically alter protein problems like muscular dystrophy & cystic fibrosis.
Leeds NanoManufacturing Institute (NMi) to complete earthquake-proof building project with German building manufacturer Knauf.
2012 - Nano-solarpower to reach 20% efficiency. Artificial ground meat.
2013 -
2014 - Solar cells to reach parity with conventional electricity cost/efficiency.
2015 - Take total 2 years of bio age. Regular sub-orbital space-tourism.
2016 - Nanoparticle cancer markers and therapy
2017 - Carbon nanotube semiconductors widespread. Artificial meat commercially available.
2018 - Large-scale working quantum processors and memory. Nanophotonics chips to market (IBM/DARPA).
Exascale supercomputing (classical) 1 million trillion calculations per second (or 1000 Petaflops) [ 1 Petaflop = 1 thousand trillion FPoint/sec ]
2019 - take total 3 years off bio age. Practical nanorobotics for medical diagnosis and treatment, at clinical-trial stage.
2020 - Creation of conscious AI entities
2021 -
2022 - AIs comparable to human intelligence predicted to cost £600. Personal AIs
2023 - take total 4 years off bio age.
2024 -
2025 - Largescale AI applications reach fruition. Research and collaboration potentially exponential now.
Space-based "hotels" and recreation facilities to become a reality.
2026 -
2027 - take 5 years off bio age. Technology progresses faster than human perception copes, "future-shock" multiplied !
2028 - Possible full-featured "Virtuality", indistinguishable from the real thing.
2029 - Kurzweil predicts a computer will pass the Turing Test.
2030 - Ray Hammond predicts that (very rich) 90-year olds will be able to become biologically 35 (?based upon?) !!
2031 - take 6 years off bio age.
2032 -
2033 -
2034 -
2035 - Take 7 years off your age for linear medical progress, 17 for exponential.
2036 -
2037 -
2038 -
2039 - Take 8 years off bio-age.
2040 -
2041 -
2042 -
2043 - Take 9 years
2045 - Singularity predicted to occur middle of this year! A person whose chronological age is 70 would now be biologically aged approx 60 if linear medical progress, 35 if exponential; (or reduce to "zero" if singularity reached!)
2046 - AI & AGI should double in capacity each year !! "accelerating exponential technology".
2047 -
2048 -
2049 -
2050 -
2051 - Medical trials of any outcomes from singularity should now be concluded. Barring civil / military problems, should be widely available. "The fuzzy horizon of tech"


Further forward predictions
2192 - current Moores Law increases in processor density reach the Planck resolution (i.e. the smallest physically possible in the current theoretically observable physics.)
Please note that this is based just on today's rate of growth, not counting the Singularity-effect of "super-compounding" of growth.
If humanity (or intelligence) survives this long, it will probably be able to conquer the death of the universe itself and / or prove the simulation argument at last.
=
This is by no means exhaustive, but I've tried to be level-headed and realistic, and probably even conservative. All these
I'm afraid I haven't made notes to credit the authors of the works I've written about, but the list would be very diverse.
Basically, thanks to everyone involved in research and also science and technology journalism.

Feel free to add to it, folks; but please bear in mind that this is not a list of predictions as such, but the timeline for results of current research projects, and is hopefully a more accurate attempt at futurology that mere guesswork.

Thanks, Neo. The only credit I can really take for this timeline, is the hours I spend reading articles on the different subjects involved.



I don't consider myself anything like qualified to make such predictions either, and I thought for a while about whether I should post this timeline. But, all the things featured are taken from current research, and sometimes I've added a year or two to the predicted outcome of the research, just to err on the side of caution.

It's very interesting that the predictions stop round about 2050 - I'm reminded about what Jim said in another posting, about humans not being able to see advances beyond about 50 years.

However, if the singularity - or even anything remotely like it - occurs within this 50-year period, then the future beyond 2050 will truly be an "undiscovered country", where only the only limits will be the imagination of the conscious intellects at the time. And that imagination will surely surpass even our wildest dreams.

Maybe we should have a "Post-2050" timeline, which could be fun, where people could predict all the outlandish stuff. I'd love to hear some of yours, Neo.

Just read this, about the new Roadrunner supercomputer which has broken all records.
http://www.physorg.com/news132497981.html

The most interesting thing about it, for me, is that they are planning to model the entire human visual system. With the amount of the human brain devoted to vision, usually estimated to be somewhere between a quarter and a third of the neocortex, modelling it "in silica" is a feat that I thought would be some years away!

It does seem that the singularity is creeping towards us with giant strides!

Assuming the Moore's law continues for such brain modelling, is it unreasonable to assume that perhaps within as little as five years we might be modelling the entire brain? Or am I being very naive about the numbers of interconnections growing exponentially rather than in a linear way, once we start dealing with whole-brain simulation?

Another thing that caught my eye is the relatively low cost of the Roadrunner - "just" $120 million.

As an aside, I was thinking about the concept of "uploaded minds", and wondered if it would actually be possible to retain your "sense of self" (your "I-ness") even if all your synapses were scanned and modelled in a machine. Would your "You-ness" still be located in the wet-ware of your brain, or in the external model therof?

Hehe I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read the Terminator II quote about Skynet in that article.

It seems that multicore processing is exceeding the sum of its parts, in terms of smashing Moore's Law.

But records are still being made in single core processors:
http://www.physorg.com/news132845817.html

It shouldn't be too long before we see AMD-type multicores and suchlike being used in "supercomputers" too. It is truly breath-taking.

I think the concept of sharing "i-ness" across multiple "machines" (here, using "machine" for both silicon and our bodies, oft referred to as a machine) is an interesting one. Is it possible? I often wonder about the difference in the way non-predatory animals process their visual input. As compared to us "predators," who have eyes on the same side of our head to facilitate focus, animals that are typically prey (e.g. deer, rabbits) have an eye on each side of their head. So their brain processes two completely different fields of vision and there is no concept of focusing. Sharing i-ness might be the same. The "i" has to integrate two sets of sensory stimuli, two sets of independent memories, etc. Frankly, I think it would be enough to drive one mad.

So, it is my best guess that the location of the "i-ness" is chosen by the "i" A Trekian replicator would only result in a single entity with a soul, the other being a cheap facsimile.

Very interesting, I'd never have thought of it that way. a kind of "bicameral consciousness" if you will.

The shared consciousness could perhaps be like two hemispheres of the brain communicating with each other, except that there are really four hemispheres; quad-core computing on a human level. Weird!

Hi stendec, sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this one. The post-Singularity predictions don't seem to interest me as much as the pre-Singularity ones. I was planning to do a timeline like yours but I'd need some time to mull it over (er..think I said that already). Here are three entries for starters:

2018 - Solar power comes of age due mainly to developments in nanotechnology and is adopted worldwide, putting other fuels in the shade.

2022 - human life expectancy begins to increase at over a year per year (Kurzweil)

2025 - molecular manufacturing becomes ubiquitous (too radical?)

p.s. - I attributed a quote ('Singularity as a rupture in the facric of human history') to Vinge at the beginning of this thread. It was actually Kurzweil's quote. Mea culpa.

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There is no spoon.