What is the Pace of Technological Change?

Speaker 1

Our next speaker will be James Carroll. James has a PhD in computer science and a minor in ancient Near Eastern History. As a graduate student, he taught Pearl of Great Price, Isaiah, and the Book of Mormon in the BYU Ancient Scripture Department. He is currently working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. doing ensemble machine learning research and computer assisted radiographic analysis it’s a lot of words for nuclear stockpile stewardship. Please welcome James.

James L. Carroll

Today I would like to talk about, while we’re looking for my slides, the pace of technological change. This is a debate that has something of a longstanding history, especially in Transhumanist circles. And I know that everyone here is probably familiar with the idea of the astounding nature of exponentials. In this sense, I’m speaking to the choir. But they really do do some pretty amazing and surprising things.

James L. Carroll

For example, if I take a chessboard, put one grain of wheat on one square, then two on the next, four on the next. 8, 16, 32, etc. , it sounds like you’re not going to get a lot of wheat, but if you actually do this, this is the math, you add all those up. Those are some pretty big numbers at the bottom. And you end up with this 18 quintillion. That’s actually enough wheat to bury India The entire nation of India, about five feet of wheat. If you lay them end to end, you can go to Alpha Centauri and back four times. So that’s pretty cool, right?

James L. Carroll

Exponential curves do some pretty surprising things, and some people have noticed that certain technological events look like they’re exponential. The most famous is Moore’s Law. So the question is, how long is that going to continue?

James L. Carroll

Well, so Ray Kurzweil has noticed this exponential trend and said some pretty amazing things. For example, this is the ENIAC, the world’s first programmable computer. In about fifty years or so, we ended up with an iPhone, which is millions of times smaller, millions of times cheaper and a billion times faster, and it fits in the poll. Of your hand, if that rate of change continues, in another about 50 or so years, it will fit inside a red blood cell, it will keep you alive, it will keep you healthy, so he claims, and potentially grant you essential immortality. And that depends on the exponential change increasing.

James L. Carroll

People who criticize him often try to talk about the complexity and difficulty of the problem. And those people simply do not understand the rate of exponential change. If exponential change is and remains exponential, he will be right. The real question is whether the rate of technological change really is exponential and whether it really will continue.

James L. Carroll

Because if the rate of change is linear We will not m do this. We won’t even come close. It’ll be thousands of years if it’s linear. If at all.

James L. Carroll

If it’s exponential, it doesn’t matter how hard the problem is. We will solve it very rapidly in a way that will surprise you. It could be a billion times harder, and we’re talking maybe 30 more years. That’s all a billion times harder by you, is 30 more years. So let’s forget how hard the problem is. It does not matter. And ask the question: is this really exponential or not? Because that’s all we care about. That makes sense?

James L. Carroll

So here’s another one of Kurzwald’s amazing predictions, right? That in 2045, about when we have nanobots that make keep us alive forever, we also have computers for a thousand bucks that are about as powerful as every human brain on the entire planet. or that could simulate every brain on the entire planet. So is he right?

James L. Carroll

Well, let’s start with the arguments for linear growth. The first of them is that technological change happens according to this idea of low-hanging fruit. You pluck the low-hanging fruit first. And so the further you go, the harder it gets and the slower it goes. It looks exponential at first, but then it slows down as you start trying to pick higher and higher fruit. That’s the low-hanging fruit argument.

James L. Carroll

And what’s the evidence for that? We have some actually. This is gene sequencing. It was beating Moore’s Law for a long time. People were really excited about the fact that it was beating Moore’s Law. And then it bottomed out, and it’s hardly moving anymore. So there could be some evidence for this.

James L. Carroll

The other comes from Wikipedia. This one’s fun. This is the total active editors. This is The edits, and this is the growth in new articles. All of these things are showing a deceleration in change and movement.

James L. Carroll

But perhaps the most interesting argument they make, and I think the most convincing, is this idea of life impact. And this idea says, even if technology continues to evolve exponentially, the impact on our lives is slowing. Even if I make new inventions at an exponentially increasing rate. it doesn’t change my world as much as the inventions that came before.

James L. Carroll

Frankly, what name an invention in the last hundred years that has changed people’s lives more than indoor plumbing? And when you start thinking about cholera and the thousands of people who died because of lack of clean water, you realize there is none. We have not created an invention in the last hundred years that has had near this impact. Even though we’ve created vastly more complex technologies, exponentially more difficult technologies like the Internet that haven’t had the same impact on our life. So

James L. Carroll

Here’s another example. Let’s talk about technology or communication technology for a while. First, we had kind of the before that we couldn’t even communicate. If someone moved across the nation, you probably never saw them again. If your daughter left because she married Joseph Smith, And then wandered off to Nauvoo, you never talked to your parents again.

James L. Carroll

And then we get the Pony Express, and some communication becomes possible. And that really changes people’s lives because they can stay connected with people that they’ve Otherwise, we would have lost.

James L. Carroll

And then we get the telegram, and that changes everything because now I can communicate with them the same day. That really has an impact on my life.

James L. Carroll

And then we get the phone. They were really annoying. You know, you had to share a line. The quality wasn’t very good. You had to decide who wanted to talk to who by how many rings there were, longs and short, you know. And there was no privacy. Everyone on the line could listen in. But you could talk to somebody. I mean, that was cool, but no real long distance.

James L. Carroll

Well, then we improved. Now we have phone numbers and lines and long distance and the phone itself improved. And then the phone design improved so that it was easier to use and easier to handle and easier to hold. And then we started getting buttons so your finger didn’t hurt as bad. Dialing the little rotary thing.

James L. Carroll

And then, you know, we get cell phones. Now you can take them with you, but they’re big and they’re heavy. And then they get small and light, and they can play angry birds on them. And then it gets really cool because now I can see the person I’m talking to.

James L. Carroll

Now think about what’s happening here. The bandwidth requirement for each of these technologies Is rising exponentially. To see someone’s face is exponentially more bandwidth. So that’s that exponential green curve. That’s what’s happening to the complexity of each technology as we move forward.

James L. Carroll

But what’s happening to the impact? Does it really change my world that I can see the person I’m talking to? It’s useful, I mean, especially when I want to show my dad something that my cute son is doing. But did it change the world the same as when I couldn’t talk to my parents at all? And so the idea here is that the change and impact on our life is asymptoting out. Not growing exponentially, even though we’re creating exponentially harder technologies.

James L. Carroll

Here’s another example. This is a flight, right? So in 1903, the Wright brothers flew about seven miles an hour. About 50 years later, we were going about 570 miles an hour on a Boeing 707.

James L. Carroll

The latest iteration of this is the Dreamliner. It turns out that supersonic speed has been a bust. It’s not worth the cost. and it didn’t make money. So now we’re flying Boeing 787 Dreamliners 50 years later, and they go about the same speed. And they’re exponentially more complicated machines, though.

James L. Carroll

They really are. I mean, the composite materials and the complexity of the computers that drive them. This is an exponentially more complex technology, and it really doesn’t get you there any faster.

James L. Carroll

And the experience of going there is better. You get to watch a movie, you know. And it saves gas. It’s much more fuel efficient. But but has it really changed the world the same way as being able to get up, get on a plane and fly to the MTA conference, even if you live in where do you live? London, right? Europe somewhere, I know That changed the world. The 707, it just made the world a little bit better, and yet it’s exponentially more complex. So

James L. Carroll

What are the arguments for exponential growth now? Now I’ve given the arguments for linear growth. What are the arguments or slowing growth? What are the arguments for exponential growth?

James L. Carroll

The first is combinatorics. The idea here is that each technology is a combination of previously existing technologies. So let’s look at the stone axe. It’s pretty much one thing. That was our starting technology. But then we built a hammer. And you could use a hammer to build, to cut down trees to build saws. And you could use saws to cut down trees better to build better hammers, to build eventually log mills.

James L. Carroll

And so the idea behind this is that we use each technology to build the next, and you look at the computer mouse and compare it to the To the axe, and it’s made out of thousands of different parts, lots of different materials. It’s a combination of the technology of digitization, communication, lasers, plastics. And you put all those together and you create a pointing device that’s extraordinarily complex, exponentially more complex.

James L. Carroll

And so the idea behind this is that the more technology you have, since new technologies are built out of combining previous technologies, The more low-hanging fruit you get. And so this counters the low-hanging fruit argument because it says you get a larger amount of

James L. Carroll

Adjacent possible. In other words, as technology grows, think of the circle as the amount of technology we have. As it grows, the area around the edge of the circle grows, and so there’s more room for growth. And so it grows faster and faster, and the low-hanging food argument is wrong. This is the common autorix and adjacent possible argument.

James L. Carroll

The next is based on history. This is Kurzweil’s favorite. And what he tries to say is that if exponential trends have been going For a hundred years, they’re likely to go for the next ten. If they’ve been going for a thousand years, they’re likely to keep going for the next hundred. If they’ve been going since the dawn of the universe, they’re likely to keep going for the next couple billion years at least. And so he tries to look for exponential trends that go back far in history. And the further back they go, then the further forward they go, right?

James L. Carroll

So the first one is Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law is the most famous exponential trend. And How does the laser work? Red button. Red button. Aha. Okay, so here we go.

James L. Carroll

Here’s Moore’s Law. It’s an exponential trend. It’s very famous, but Kurzweil points out it’s Just one of a paradigm that went clear back to the 1900s. And so his argument there is that Moore’s law, when it hits the quantum limits, which it will about 2020, 2025, there will be something to replace it because there was something before it. That’s his argument. So the further back the trend goes, the more likely it is to continue.

James L. Carroll

Here’s another one. If we can go back to the dawn of the universe, it gets even better. So, this goes all the way back to the formation of the Milky Way galaxy, and all he’s done is he’s taken what he considers world-changing events and plotted the time to the next world-changing event. And notice that the time to the next world-changing event is dropping exponentially. Therefore, the time to the next world-changing event will speed up and speed up until we have world-changing events every second, and then singularity.

James L. Carroll

He’s done that with several different combinations of world-changing events. Here’s a different one, same trend. Then he took a bunch from a bunch of different people, put them all together, same trend. So who’s right here?

James L. Carroll

This is a debate that as transhumanists will vastly impact what we predict about the future. And whether what we hope for in terms of the creation of God or becoming like God if He already exists, depending on which view you take from the earlier talk, how that works will depend. And how it will unfold will depend on what view you take with regard to this argument. It is the most important argument, in my view, for determining what the future is going to be like.

James L. Carroll

Well, let’s start with this one: life impact. They’re right, the linearists are right, we haven’t created something nearly as impactful as indoor plumbing in a good hundred years. However, There are two technologies on the horizon, the first being artificial intelligence and the next being biotech, that I believe have the potential to be as earth-shattering as indoor plumbing. And so if you believe that maybe things kind of start and bump and slow down, we may be next to the next big bump that will Change everything. And so again, there’s some mixed messages here.

James L. Carroll

Yes, impact has slowed. No, that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay slow. We may be on the very verge of something really big here. We should pay attention.

James L. Carroll

So I’m going to keep score here. And I’m going to say that the Exponentialist won that because there is a big impact technology potentially right on the threshold of being able to do. But let’s talk about this one.

James L. Carroll

The easiest counter to this argument is that Kurzweil suffers from something I’m going to call presentism. Presentism is the idea that when I start listing things that were important to me, the further back you go, you get an exponentially less smaller chance that that thing will be important to me. And so, what Kurzweil might be noticing is just exponentially less important events to him happened at the Big Bang. And to everyone who makes this list, that’s true. It may have nothing whatsoever to do with the rate of technological change. It might. but it might not. And so trying to sort that out, it turns out, is really difficult. How do you divulge yourself of all presentism bias and really figure out if things are improving exponentially? And have been for eons.

James L. Carroll

Well, so one of the ways to do this is to limit yourself to phase shifts, what I’m going to call a phase shift. It’s an exponential or a It’s a point where you take the level below you and use it to create a fundamentally new level that then gets combined to create another fundamentally new level. And if we limit ourselves to those events in history, maybe we can avoid presentism. So let me show you what I mean.

James L. Carroll

If you saw my talk last year about the existence of God, you know what I mean about specialization, cooperation, and combining levels to create the next level. So we start with the Big Bang, right? That’s the most obvious beginning point. And then at some point in history, the quarks and gluons all kind of cool and they start forming atoms. So, from a lower level we get a new level with new features and complexities we’re going to call the atom. Then atoms combine to form molecules.

James L. Carroll

There’s two ways to do this, at the moment they first form molecules or the moment they first form self-replicating molecules. I’m going to do the replicating version. The reason I picked that is because I want to know when that level will create the next level down the replicating chain, because that’s the chain that leads to us and that creates our progress. So we get atoms to self-replicating molecules Self-replicating molecules to single cells. Now, part of the problem is we don’t know when the self-replicating molecules happened relative to the cells. So we have to guess about some of these dates. Then we get the single cell.

James L. Carroll

And then something really funny happens. A bunch of single-celled organisms merge together. They specialize and they cooperate and they create something new, a new single organism that is actually a collection. of the previous level of organisms, and that’s the molt the the uh eukaryotic cell, which has cells essentially inside of cells

James L. Carroll

And then we get the multicellular organism, where many eukaryotic cells merge together to create a brand new multicellular organism, and each of them begin to specialize in trade, just like our skin specializes in one thing. And our T specialize in another, right? And then there’s another level where we as a group of multicellular organisms merge together and create some sort of collective intelligence.

James L. Carroll

And that’s something that hasn’t quite happened yet. It’s in process. So picking this data is really hard, because you could pick when we first create hunter-gatherer societies. You could pick when we first create. City states, you could decide when we first create the printing press, when we first create the internet. You could pick a lot of dates for that because it’s a smooth process that is still in process and will continue, I believe. as we become ever more tightly integrated into a collective organization. So I chose the Internet for that one. It’s just a random guess.

James L. Carroll

And now the problem comes: when is the next thing going to happen? Before I can even put this one on the curve, I need time to next. I mean, that’s how they’re plotted, right? And we don’t even know what the next level is. I can’t put it on the graph. So I’m going to use this one to put this one on the graph in terms of time to next, and then plot these over here. And when you do that, this is what you get.

James L. Carroll

And it’s not exponential. It has no clear pattern, even as far as I can tell. And so this may not be the answer some of you want, but the only technique I know to throw away presentism leads to a conclusion that I have no idea if there really is an exponentially increasing change. That goes all the way back to the dawn of the Big Bang, like Kurzweil would really like. It just it may be there, it may not be, but I can’t tell.

James L. Carroll

And I think that there are people who really have an opinion about this, and I always kind of smile at them, whatever your opinion is. And I think you think you know more than you know. if you take a side stand on this, because it’s just not nearly as clear as Kurzweil would like. So I’m going to add one to the uncertain category here.

James L. Carroll

This is one the linearists used because they like to show that the exponential progress of gene sequencing has stalled.

James L. Carroll

That’s important because biotech was one of the two that I said was on the horizon that could really change the world, right? Well, there’s a caveat hidden in this graph, and it’s right here, in this word at the top, price. It’s not the cost, it’s the price. So we’ve begun to specialize to the point where if you want sequencing done, you tend to take your gene to a bank and they sequence it for you because they can do it better than you can, even though you can buy gene sequencing kits. It’s cheaper to let them do it in mass production now. That was an interesting shift. And guess when it happened?

James L. Carroll

Right about here. And what that means is these people are using the economics of scale to really sequence fast and to make it cheap. But price is not just a function of the cost of doing something, it’s a function of price, cost and demand, supply and demand. And what happened right about here was an exponential rise in demand for gene sequencing. And so the price stalled, unsurprisingly. We are now meeting an exponentially rising demand with a flat cost. And that’s pretty impressive.

James L. Carroll

So, you know, I think this argument actually fails the linearists. I don’t think it shows quite what they think it shows. It’s hard to tell because these in-house groups Tend to keep their costs secret. So we don’t actually know, I believe, what’s happening under the hood here anymore.

James L. Carroll

And the result of that is another a failure for the linearists or an uncertain. It’s hard to tell. But I’m going to put that one in the uncertain category. It’s at least a failure for the linearists, but it may not be a score for the exponentialists. We don’t know yet.

James L. Carroll

The next one is this pretty graph of Kurzweil’s. It’s really fun because he claims there’s not just an exponential, but he claims there’s an exponentially rising Speed of exponentiating, right? He’s got a double exponential. The exponential would be linear on this log plot, but he’s got an exponential curve on a log plot, which is an exponential exponential. And that really changes things, right?

James L. Carroll

However, I’ve looked at this data, the raw data for this, and I’ve gathered data since this was done in 2005. Data that kind of moves off into this direction. And I’ve tried to ask the question, is he right about the double exponential? And what I believe I see are two exponential trends with a phase shift. There’s an exponential shift right here, or trend right here. And then there’s a new exponential trend that takes off right here. And the newest data seems to follow this red line, not up Kurzweil’s double exponential. And if you start asking questions, why would that be, do you think? If you look at the date, the date here is the invention of the ENIAC. And so, right at the invention of the ENIAC, there appears to be, the first programmable computer, a phase shift in the rate of exponentiation. And it’s been strictly single exponential since. So to use this double exponential to extrapolate, I think, is a mistake.

James L. Carroll

There’s something else going on here, and that’s about 2025 Moore’s Law will hit its end. Kerzwawl claims that it’s just one trend will find another trend. That may be, but there is something I think. Fundamental about making things smaller. When you hit the limits where you can’t make it smaller, no matter what new technology you move to, something has got to change, either in the way you build the computer. or any number of things. So at Moore’s Law, I think we get another phase shift. And it’ll be hard to say what happens. So I’m going to call that one uncertain because if you come up with the right technology, you could really take off again, or it could flatline for all we know. So we’ve got something else we don’t know about. All right, I need to go faster.

James L. Carroll

Microprocessor clock speed. Kurzwawl predicted it was going to go off exponentially. That was his curve. He wrote his book in 2005. These numbers are predictions based on a white paper he found. It turns out we started melting our chips if you raised the clock speed. And because of heat issues, clock speeds bottomed out right when he wrote his book. He was wrong.

James L. Carroll

So, this is a win for the linearist. However, our fastest supercomputers just kept on going. How did we do that? Well, we started adding more our dies became more efficient even though they didn’t have faster clock speeds, and we added more chips per die, and the supercomputers added more machines to the network. And so this is our number of nodes, number of cores on the supercomputers. And that took off exponentially. And that’s how we did that. And that means something very important, I think. We’ll get to that in just a second.

James L. Carroll

Here’s GPU supercomputers. These are also very important because they’re parallel, they’re a lot more like the brain, and these could provide a technique. For exponentiating beyond Moore’s Law. So we’ve got price and speed, those also seem to be going exponential and show no times of stopping.

James L. Carroll

So here’s the money graph. This is the amount of computing approximately it takes to simulate a full human brain. And you’ll notice where they cross. This graph has continued exponential despite the end of clock speeds, despite everything else. And it crosses Before Moore’s Law quits.

James L. Carroll

So even if Moore’s Law quits on us, it’s going to quit too slow to give us the hardware we need to solve the problems we want to solve. In other words, that big next technology I told you about, we will have the hardware to do it before Moore’s Law quits. So no matter what happens after Moore’s Law quits, it’s too late to stop this. this AI technology.

James L. Carroll

Now we have to deal with software, and that’s a subject for another talk. So today was about hardware. The software to do this is much more tricky to predict. And we’ll try to do that maybe next year. I’m not sure what we’ll do, but we’re going to quit here. Thanks.