Comment Kurzweil would disagree... (Score 1) 712
What utter nonsense. While the singularity folks don't have me running off to turn myself into a robotic nano-swarm just yet, the proof of continued growth is more than just speculation. The author is setting a false measure of the expansion of knowledge and then concluding that growth has slowed when society falls do measure up. A flying car argument by any other means is still a flying car argument.
He admits as much by citing Moore's but quickly shifts gears to focus on going to the moon and curing cancer. Amusingly, we've made vast headway in the last 50 years in the later topic. Cancer death rates have been declining decade over decade since the 60. Cancer death amongst the young has shown huge declines during this time, a statistic that often flies off the radar due to how cancer mortality rates are reported. While there isn't a cure yet, the incremental gains we've made over the past century have turned a cancer diagnosis from a sure death sentence to a survivable disease.
Just because knowledge growth has come in the form of digital growth doesn't mean that it has failed to grow or accelerate. It just means that you won't get getting your flying car (or in this case super Apollo++ rocket) anytime soon. The law of accelerating returns isn't about the market accelerating in the direction you want, it's about accelerating in the direction the market wants.