> The pace of technological development has always been permanently increasing.
Not in the same way though. The pace of technological development post-industrial-revolution increased a lot faster - technological development was exponential both before and after, but it went from exponential with a doubling time of maybe a century, to a Moore's law style regime where the doubling time is a couple of years. Arguably the development of agriculture was a similar phase change. So the point is to imagine another phase change on the same scale.
You keep mentioning moore’s law, but that specifically applied to the amount of transistors on a die, not the rate of general technological advancement.
Regardless, I don’t see any change in this pattern. We’re advancing faster than ever before, just like always.
We’ve been doing statistical analysis and prediction for years now. It’s just getting better faster, like always.
I don’t see this big change in the rate of advancement. There’s just a lot more media buzz around it right now causing a bubble.
There was a big visible jump in text generation capabilities a few years ago (which was preceded by about 6 years of incremental NLP advances) and since then we’ve seen paced, year over year advances in that field.
As a medical layman, I imagine that alpha fold may really push the rate of pharmaceutical advances.
But I see no indication for a general jump in the rate of rate of technological advancement.
> that specifically applied to the amount of transistors on a die, not the rate of general technological advancement.
Sure. But you can look at things like GDP growth rates and see the same thing.
> I don’t see this big change in the rate of advancement. There’s just a lot more media buzz around it right now causing a bubble.
Maybe. I'm just trying to give a sense of what the concept of a "weak singularity" is. I don't have a view on whether we're actually going to have one or not.
We’ve always been getting better at making things better.