Approaching a singularity on multiple technological fronts

[ImaNihilist]

I would agree with the software front. We have so much compute power right now we don't even know what to DO with it. There is no code. We need a new generation of computer scientists. Most people, including myself, are just interested in making bucks off of simple project for the web. There aren't a lot of people these days really pushing interesting code. The incentive really isn't there.

The most interesting project I've seen in a long time is Watson, and the interesting thing about Waston is that if you can get input latency low enough the compute power doesn't have to be local, it can be on a server somewhere else, even ephemeral. Watson uses something like 3,000 cores of computer power, but it took a team of geniuses to figure how to make it do anything at all. I think Watson and simple things like Siri show that we have the technology, we just don't have the software. There is no NASA for computer programming.

If tomorrow Intel found out that they could make a Core i7 that was 10x faster across the board, I'm not sure it would really make that much of a difference. Sure, encoding times would drop…but really that's the only thing I can think of these days that sees real world gains from faster CPUs.