May 5th, 2009 by Keith Kleiner
Filed under singularity.
Over at Hacker News there was a discussion about our ebay genome story that I thought was cool enough to post below. In the first part of the thread user davidmathers is talking about the cost to sequence an entire human genome (which we have written about many times). As user Femur later points out, there are obviously many such trends, which of course is a foundational aspect of Kurzweil’s works. Do you know of similar trends that are your favorites? Let us know in the comments. Just to break the ice, I will go first. Check the comments!
Tags: exponential trends, genetics
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One of my favorite exponential trends is the one regarding the rise of solar power, a green technology that can potentially provide all of our energy needs. Kurzweil quote:
“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” he said. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”
From: http://tinyurl.com/22qexf
While I’m not sure Ray has mapped this out as a “reliable” exponential trend, my favorite is brain mapping / brain simulation capabilities.
For example, Henry Markham’s Blue Brain project (with IBM) completing a simulation of a rat cortical collumn last year (2008), and projecting complete rat brain simulation by 2012, and possibly a human brain by 2018.
Closely related is the mammalian brain mapping project (http://tinyurl.com/cmahjh) being pursued by many academic and indsutry players. Such brain-mapping capabilities might reasonably be expected to benefit from significant deflationary pressures in a similar manner to the genome mapping costs discussed above.
I would like to point out that there is a flaw in the way we calculate life expectancy that skews those numbers to make them look way more astounding than it is – when an infant dies at age one or less, that counts.
Say you have a village with 4 residents (thought experiment, bear with) – and all four die at the exact same time. Two were 90 year old men, two were about a year old. Average life expectancy for this village: 45.
My great great grandfather was born around the 1850s, worked in mines all his life, and lived to 95. One of his daughters lived past 100, one to 85, and all of his grandkids (my grandfather’s sibling group anyway) all lived to 86 or longer (and my grandpa would probably still be alive if he hadn’t painted boats with solvents that said “throw your clothes away at the end of the day after using this”… and of course they didn’t because they were poor. he still lived 26 years after dying, being revived and then undergoing quadruple bypass surgery. The cancer that took his kidney at age 85 metastasized and killed him at age 86. That cancer was what made him finally quit mowing the lawn. At age 85.) However, my grandfather had a 6th sibling, one that died shortly after childbirth.
Thus, even though people living in that time did live to what was considered incredible ages, the high infant mortality rate kept the life expectancy really low – our improvement of infant care has raised our life expectancy, much more than how long our population actually lives. While that has increased, people are just now living up into their 110s, but people born as long ago as 1850 could live to within 15 years of that. And think about this – all our our current super-centenarians were born in the 19th century.
So the average life expectancy may currently be 76 – but that’s cut short by unexpected events. If all things were equal and we had a lot less motorcycle riders, drunk drivers, smokers and unhealthy eaters (I’m talkin Paula Deen style eatins), our life expectancy would shoot through the roof.
That being said, my favorite exponential growth factor has got to be the sum total of human knowledge, more and more of which is getting recorded so we don’t lose it like we lost our pyramid building skills and clockwork computing and whatever else was lost with the multiple sackings of ancient civilizations. Two more objects to consider in lost knowledge – the Kerkythea mechanism and the chromed swords of the chinese Quin emperor who build the terracotta army (yes, they chromed steel 2000 years ago and then forgot how).
Google gets this – that’s why they want to digitize EVERY book, even though anyone with monetary interest in the publishing, distributing and selling of these earth-raping dead-tree manuscripts is fighting them tooth and nail.
I just published an article on the biotech trend. [http://techencoder.com/index.php/2009/05/accelerating-future-part-2/]
It’s too hard to pick a favorite, but this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8] is awesome at pointing out many of them!
Oh, remembered a couple others –
Hard drives – my first gigabyte cost 400 bucks (circa 96/7). Now, a terabyte is under 100 bucks.
Ram – my first 8 meg upgrade to my computer cost 300 (circa 94/95). Now, 8 gigabytes is less than half that.
My last processor was about 180 bucks for a 1.8 ghz single core. A few years later, I bought my current 2.4 ghz quad core for the same price.
One thing I wish was exponential but is kinda slow: display technology. In the last 10 years, I’ve gone from a 21″ monitor to a 24″ monitor. And as far as “good” computer displays go, you can’t really buy a better one – you can get bigger, but they have the same amount of pixels so you just lose resolution.
Oh! Digital imaging sensors. Sure, the average camera is still only about 10 megapixels. But the kinda stuff that’s in our near future…. check out http://www.red.com – sure, it’s about 30 grand, but you can get a camera that shoots movies with a resolution of 4K (i.e. 4000xwhatever vs 1920×1080, or about the equivalent of a 12 megapixel still camera, but in full 30FPS) – that’s at least double the best you can do with HDTV quality displays – and their next generation will be able to do up to 12K (they don’t bother rating this one in megapixels, but for comparison – average consumer level DSLR still camera has a 22mm wide sensor, the Red Epic will have a 168mm wide sensor. Average HD camcorder has like a 16mm wide sensor.)
MRI! With the advent of MRFM (magnetic resonance force microscopy) MRI has increased it’s resolution a million-fold from what’s currently used to scan brains. We can now 3d scan viruses down to 4nanometer resolution. This does full volumetric rendering.
Electron Microscopes – when I started these courses a few years back, a few very specialized microscopes could see a couple atoms, even move them, but they couldn’t really image large areas. For the most part, to examine the structure of the atoms in a material, you had to use diffraction and all these crazy, mind-numbing calculations to figure out what pattern you were actually seeing and then visualize a reconstruction of how those atoms looked. Now we have TEMs capable of scanning areas hundreds of atoms wide and imaging the actual atoms with sub-nanometer precision. They’re super-expensive now, but so was the torturous old way when it was new, and now they’re practically throwing those away.
Genome sequencing is a great exponential trend, but I think my favorite is supercomputer performance. The scientific research these computers make possible holds amazing potential.
My favorite is the GDP growth rate of China.It is currently around the knee-bend of the curve.It is expected to overtake the GDP(nominal) of the US by around 2022*.It has been doubling every 7 years since 1978 and what this means is that by 2030 it will be twice as big as the US and by 2040 4 times as much.It currently has the second largest R&D budget in the world at $136 billion(a 20 percent increase from last year) and is planning to invest 3% of the GDP in R&D by 2020 which could amount to $800 billion(also going to continue doubling every 7 years)**.
Imagine the pace of technological progress when millions of scientists in China are empowered by hundreds of billions of dollars of funding by 2020.Imagine the same at 2030.Imagine all the new Intels and Genentechs and Knomes emerging from an economy the size of the US.Imagine the same at 2030.Not to mention the economic growth of Russia,India and Brazil.
Infact, this is one half of the reason why i think the singularity will happen by the 2030s.
(*)
http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg64/z0rgggg/others2/gdp.png (IMF report,April 2009)
(**)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People’s_Republic_of_China#Science_and_technology
A minor trend i enjoy is the growth of cell phones and wireless networks all over the world enabling access to information to people all over the world and
>Provide access to all points of view and and help tear down religious/national and other ideological barriers
>Provide world class education(with rich multimedia) to the remote corners of the globe
I also particularly enjoy the growth in computing power as it helps simulate drug testing, narrow down the set of genes responsible for a particular disease/condition,etc.
Anyway, keep up the great work Keith!
Sorry about the text in bold above.I am unable to edit it.
I agree with CogSci. The acceleration of science and technology that will take place as a result of the modernizing of the developing nations is going to be astounding. Its time we had some competition, hopefully it will start a peaceful science and technology race.
There is a paper from the Top 500 project about the best supercomputers of the last 15 years. It shows an exponential growth in performance: it doubles every 13 month.
http://www.top500.org/files/TOP500_Looking_back_HWM.pdf
I’ll give you my DNA on your T-shirt for free.
Well, it’s not my favorite but the Swine Flu is growing exponentional. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Influenza-2009-cases.png