Kurzweil also ignores economics. The advance of technology is driven in part by economic forces. Computing power may stagnate not because we have reached physical limits but because present-day computers are good enough for what 98% of the market wants.
I see this trend developing. If anything, the trend in consumer computing is toward less powerful but lower-power and more portable computing devices. My current laptop -- a Macbook Air -- is actually slower than my previous laptop. But it is more portable and uses less energy. And it does everything I want. I don't need more power right now.
The only areas driving the performance end are gaming, high performance computing, and high-capacity data centers. How long will those go until they too are basically satiated?
We've seen this in other areas. The envelope for aviation maxed out in the 1970s with things like the U2. Space flight seems to just now be emerging from a long coma with things like SpaceX, but on closer examination SpaceX is just reviving 1960s ideas and doing them at a lower cost with modern control systems and materials technology.
My other reply about energy deals with supply-side limits to growth. This response deals with demand limits to growth.
I don't think Kurzweil ignores economics at all. In fact, many of his arguments are largely based on economics, such as the cost to obtain a given amount of computation. It is undeniable that this has gone down steadily with time. Computation is so cheap that cloud computing (e.g., E2C, Azure) allows individual developers access to more computing than most know what to do with.
Your example of the MacBook Air is invalid because the MacBook Air of today isn't priced principally on performance -- it is priced mostly by build quality and performance/watt/kilogram. Never before have computers had a better performance/watt/kilogram profile. You have to consider the whole package.
The argument that there is less need for performance is also flawed. It is not that humans have less need for computation, it's that the distribution of computation is changing. As mentioned before, a lot of computation is moving to the cloud. In many cases, this is simply the most efficient place for it to be; instead of having an abundance of computation sitting mostly unused on a laptop or desktop, computation is becoming a service where it is used on demand. Think of the computation required for cloud services like speech to text processing or Google Goggles. Most of the computation is farmed out the servers in cloud and only minimal.
I'm not even sure I agree that the decrease in local computational needs is a long term trend. For one thing, migration to the cloud can only continue as long as network bandwidth keeps up with cloud data demands. If network bandwidth is not able to keep up then I predict we'll see local computational needs spike again.
Even with some computation siphoned off to the cloud, AI will create a whole new class of applications for even local computation because it is so data intensive. When the next crop of AI applications emerge and become more common, the early algorithms will probably be inefficient, which will itself cause a spike in computational needs. The applications are here yet but there are many (including myself) that are working hard to change that.
What the market wants is every map, book, song, movie, game, and poem ever made to be instantly accessible, searchable, and reviewable. They want their work to be autosyncing, autobackedup, and to follow them from device to device. They want to be able to securely talk with friends and family at any time, to publically talk with friends and family at any time, to discover new friends and family, and to be able to completely disconnect from friends and family at will. They want intelligent tools that keep them from making dumb decisions, tools to help them make even better good decisions, and tools that won't get in the way of them making dumb decisions.
I think that the market for computing power has a looong way to go before it taps-out what the market demands.
But how much do they want all this, and does this require major improvements in computing power?
It looks to me that almost everything you listed could be done on the computers of five years ago. It's all nothing but software improvements. Existing hardware is good enough.
Two years ago, I was developing some HVAC equipment modeling software as part of a sales automation package whose worst case scenario needed to calculate the max cooling capacity, and a few other thermodynamic stats, for roughly 18 million different configurations. No matter how much I optimized it, the CPU didn't have enough juice to "instantaneously" plow through all of that math. The best I could get it down to was about 20 seconds. More CPU power would definitely be nice.
But how much did that 20 seconds delay cost you? It would have been nice to have the answer faster, but how much would you have been willing to shell out for it?
I'm talking about economics. I'm talking about what people are willing to pay for.
The customer would have loved for it to go faster, because then it would have looked like magic.
In 1998, it would have been nice if I had had photo-realistic computer games, but I patiently made do with what I had. Today, people eagerly shell-out money for hardware that can run this year's even-more-photorealistic version of Madden Football.
I think the demand for more power is definitely there.
It seems that there is a shift from PC gaming to console gaming... Here's me citing my single data point - Rage. id focused on the console experience above the pc experience, so when you have a predominately pc-driven company focusing on consoles, you feel that the industry is/has changed. That, and that current consoles are half way through their life-cycle according to MS/Sony, so new console designs are not slated until beyond 2015.
Graphics hardware companies like nvidia/amd will continue pushing the envelope though
Kurzweil also ignores economics. The advance of technology is driven in part by economic forces. Computing power may stagnate not because we have reached physical limits but because present-day computers are good enough for what 98% of the market wants.
I see this trend developing. If anything, the trend in consumer computing is toward less powerful but lower-power and more portable computing devices. My current laptop -- a Macbook Air -- is actually slower than my previous laptop. But it is more portable and uses less energy. And it does everything I want. I don't need more power right now.
The only areas driving the performance end are gaming, high performance computing, and high-capacity data centers. How long will those go until they too are basically satiated?
We've seen this in other areas. The envelope for aviation maxed out in the 1970s with things like the U2. Space flight seems to just now be emerging from a long coma with things like SpaceX, but on closer examination SpaceX is just reviving 1960s ideas and doing them at a lower cost with modern control systems and materials technology.
My other reply about energy deals with supply-side limits to growth. This response deals with demand limits to growth.