Devil's Advocate

Here's me debating with myself again:

The accelerating pace of improvement in computation, also known as Moore's Law, can not continue forever. There are fundamental limitations to how small we can make the circuits and still be able to disperse away heat.

The exponential curves that Kurzweil is so fond of are nothing more than the beginning of a logistic curve. Instead of accelerating into singularity, technological development will hit the inflection point at 2050 and slowly saturate until society and technology comes to an equilibrium.

Simply look at the development of railroads in the United States - there was an intense period of growth for railroad development, but today that has completely stopped.

And the rebuttal:

Moore's Law is a dead horse. Nobody says that the current silicon based photolithographic chips can be made faster exponentially (though it's been good to us for 20 years).

"Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier" These paradigm shifts has been happening for as long as people can remember - bronze to iron to steel, steam engine to diesel to gasoline to rocket and jet, etc. While we're not sure which technology will replace silicon, there are many plausible and hotly researched candidates: photonic, molecular, nanotubes, DNA and protein, quantum.

The saturation point has to do with economic and social carrying capacity - it boils down to the question, "When is enough enough?" This makes it obvious to me that the singularity will happen first in the United States. Americans are never satisfied with "enough". They always want more. There is very little profit in a saturated market - instead of stifling progress, the economy demands innovation.

The main obstacle remains: moral, ethical, and social pressures. Already there exists regulations against genetic research. You can be sure there will be more laws and regulations against genetic augmentation, against cybernetic augmentation, against robots, against AI, etc. People are jealous of things they don't understand or don't want to understand. These attitudes will limit progress to baby-steps (see Asimo, Roomba, etc warming the public up to the idea of friendly robots).