(November 4, 2016 at 2:48 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote:Sam Harris Wrote:It's crucial to realize that the rate of progress doesn't matter. Any progress is enough to get us into the endzone. We don't need Moore's Law to continue; we don't need exponential progress... we just need to keep going.
"We just need to keep going". Assumption right there that we will be able to.
Think of it in terms of the scale of the problem compared to the rate of progress. He is making the assumption that it will happen in 50 years time but that's because he does not understand the scale of the problem. We don't yet know what is possible. This is the very nature of research. We do know that the current form of computation won't hack it. We just don't know what the next form will be. So we can't say how long it will take. It might take hundreds or thousands of years. Who can say what society will be like in 50 years yet along hundreds? We can't predict this because we can't know in advance what our needs will be because we can't know what technology will enable us in the future.
