Is the Singularity Near?

It’s getting kind of weird out there.

30 years ago, I was introduced to dial-up internet. This completely changed my world forever, but it was mind-numbingly slow by today’s standards. Gen Xers, do you remember how exciting it was when they upgraded us to 56 kbps from 28 kbps?

It took several minutes to display a high quality still image on the screen, and still images were pretty much all you could get back then.

Today’s connections are hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of times faster, and we watch videos in real time. And, while the speed of the connections has continued to pick up pace, computer processing speeds have done a marvelous job of keeping up with them (or vice versa).

This blend of ever-faster, better, and cheaper hardware and software is a close cousin of the phenomenon known as Moore’s Law, where the number of transistors on a chip has roughly doubled every two years for more than four decades.

All this doubling means the change isn’t linear—it’s exponential. Every ch…