Yes really, there is no law of accelerating returns as far as I’m concerned. Kurzweil clearly tried to opportunistically generalize Moore’s law and take credit for what he thought was a bigger idea, but sadly doesn’t produce a compelling argument, given that 1) Moore’s law died a decade ago, it no longer holds, and cost of calculations per second is no longer decreasing exponentially, and 2) Kurzweil claimed that things like US GDP and human life expectancy are evidence of his so-called law, and these claims are clearly bullshit. And not just wrong but intentionally misleading, that’s the part that bothers me. Did you look at the final figure? It’s not possible to make that diagram or write the accompanying text without knowing you’re lying. How about the first or second ones, wtf even are they? The majority of plots in Kurzweil’s piece, some 20-odd figures, are direct byproducts of Moore’s law from after Moore observed/predicted it, and nothing more.

In case you missed it, my point is not that flops didn’t increased exponentially for most of the last century, it’s that Kurzweil wasn’t the first to observe it, and didn’t add anything rigorous to what Moore & others had already done. Kurzweil only made a mockery of it by fabricating some of the data and using the larger argument to claim we’re headed toward immortality, joining an illustrious list of people who get attention by hawking the fountain of youth.

BTW feel free to re-read Kurzweil’s predictions about computation growth in the article and ask yourself whether they’re true. One of his scheduled predictions is up this year. He’s off by a few orders of magnitude according to his own definitions, and furthermore his definitions are off by a few more orders of magnitude according to other researchers, and on top of that his claim that enough flops equal human brain capability are, to date, false. These things put the remainder of his predictions really far behind schedule, and possibly slipping at an exponential rate, which kinda undermines the whole point, right?