Comment by tim333
2 months ago
>Why everyone missed solar’s exponential growth
As someone who follows Kurzweil that seems odd as he predicted it accurately well ahead of time (eg https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/futurist-ray-k... )
For me the more interesting question is why are people in denial about Kurzweil's tech predictions? And this author presumably unaware of them. Even if you personally think the man's a crank, his basic procedure of plotting tech growth on a log scale and doing an extrapolation isn't really rocket science.
And most are still in denial about the singularity/immortality stuff. Prepare for a lot of 'why everyone missed' articles on that in a decade or two. (https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-ray-kurzweil/)
The main issue I have with Kurzweil's predictions is that they assume exponential growth, instead of sigmoid. Exponential growth doesn't really happen in physical processes, eventually they run out of inputs & level off. The hard part of predictions is figuring out where they level off.
Fair enough. I find he mostly tries to stick to the exponential bits and avoid things that are about to level out. Like he focuses on compute per dollar that can run a lot and not on Moore's transistors per unit area which is already getting close to atomic limits.
Where I find him to go off the rails a bit is anything that's not an exponential extrapolation, like I've never really seen the nanobots thing.