Moore's Law and the End of Humanity?

[Jiggz]

The very uncomplicated layman's explanation is that Moore's Law implies technology doubles every 18 months.

In other words, as far as I understand it, the amount you could store on a certain sized memory card today will be doubled in 18 months.

Many say Moore's Law has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that technology manufacturers are actively trying to keep up with the law.

This all sounds wonderful, except, what happens when we run out of physical space, and the information outgrows the storage capacity of the hardware? This is an area where many futurists have put their incredibly large brains to work. And some of their future speculations are frightening indeed.

We have technological singularity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) for a starter, continue the speculative journey and you get to the apocalyptic Grey goo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo) theory. I find this all very interesting, and a little scary. Besides all these sc-fi-esque predictions, there's the fact that Moore's Law has a definite end. A maximum capacity. And when technology stops progressing at the rate we're used to, what are the implications for the world, which is already dependent on these advances?

What are your feelings on this? Do you buy into the ominous futurist predictions of a self-replicating nanotechnology consuming all things "living"? Do you think alternatives will be found for actual mechanical storage space? I'm not too clued up on the in-depth technicalities, so maybe some of you could enlighten the rest of us as to how probable all this really is...

[BlackHood]

Personally I'm not sure about the apocalyptic technological singularity, it seems to rely heavily on intelligence and imagination being the same thing.

No matter how fast a computer can think, it can only answer questions on a true or false basis, millions upon millions of IF functions. To truly change a design an imagination is needed, a new thought which can be applied to a current system. A robot may be able to reach a river, calculate its contents thanks to sensors, but unless it has already been programmed into some look-up table somewhere, it would never come across the notion of swimming.

Everything has a finite capacity for speed defined by the materials from which it is made, so although machines will one day be able to design themselves to be hyper-efficient beyond the ability of humans, they cannot create a new idea from scratch, and can therefore never progress any further than the organic being which has a sense of self a wearness, allowing it to truly interact with its surroundings, rather than simply compare sensor readings to a look-up table.

As for the technology-ruling-the-world stuff I believe that it is possible, and given an infinite amount of time humans would become vegetables, thanks to a reliance on computers, but a self-serving robot would have to be designed, which also had aspirations, and I'm not sure anyone would be stupid enough to do that.

Having said that, I suppose anything is possible, but I should imagine it will be a few hundred years before this all comes to fruition.

[Hunnter]

As BlackHood said.

BUT, the 2nd paragraph.
All it takes is someone to create a robot with "blocks" similar to a neuron, then program in base commands, then let it run wild.
Doing that in a nanobot is where the danger lies.
In essence, a human is just a computer, we have sensors, wiring, a power source and so on.
We have "base coding" just like a computer has, which was built up over the millenia.
Reaction is another name for it.
Humans answer as many IFs as any other computer (well, ALOT more)

While AI at the moment is rather simple, when we start getting processors with 100+ cores in them, it will be interesting to see how AI will evolve.
I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen if IBM stuck an AI (read: good AI) on its BlueGene supercomputer.

I believe it could happen very easily, if someone wasn't careful enough. (same goes with gene manipulation in the coming years..gene wars)
Skynet is a real possibility as well, when the internet gets upgraded, the connected nodes would seem more like the current supercomputing model, loads of computers on racks connected together, except it is global.
Once "it" has access to the net, that's it, game over.

Another thing to ponder is what happens after these AI have improved themselves more than we ever could.
Global government? Matrix? Stargate / SG:Atlantis - Replicators?
If 1 were to happen, i think it would be a great thing, but it could also be too extreme.
A country is threatening to bomb another? That country is completely wiped out with no care for life.
Then again, this comes down to whether or not these robots would gain consciousness.
Humans still have no clue what it is.
and i sometimes even feel a little bad turning off an AI-based simulation (good ones at that)