The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (98 page)

78
. See “The 3 by 5 Initiative,” Fact Sheet 274, December 2003,
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/2003/fs274/en/print.html
.

79
. Technology investments accounted for 76 percent of 1998 venture-capital investments ($10.1 billion) (PricewaterhouseCoopers news release, “Venture Capital Investments Rise 24 Percent and Set Record at $14.7 Billion, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers Finds,” February 16, 1999). In 1999, technology-based companies cornered 90 percent of venture-capital investments ($32 billion) (PricewaterhouseCoopers news release, “Venture Funding Explosion Continues: Annual and Quarterly Investment Records Smashed, According to PricewaterhouseCoopers Money Tree National Survey,” February 14, 2000). Venture-capital levels certainly dropped during the high-tech recession; but in just the second quarter of 2003, software companies alone attracted close to $1 billion (PricewaterhouseCoopers news release, “Venture Capital Investments Stabilize in Q2 2003,” July 29, 2003). In 1974 in all U.S. manufacturing industries forty-two firms received a total of $26.4 million in venture-capital disbursements (in 1974 dollars, or $81 million in 1992 dollars). Samuel Kortum and Josh Lerner, “Assessing the Contribution of Venture Capital to Innovation,”
RAND Journal of Economics
31.4 (Winter 2000): 674–92,
http://econ.bu.edu/kortum/rje_Winter’00_Kortum.pdf
. As Paul Gompers and Josh Lerner say, “Inflows to venture capital funds have expanded from virtually zero in the mid-1970s. . . .”Gompers and Lerner,
The Venture Capital Cycle
, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). See also Paul Gompers, “Venture Capital,” in B. Espen Eckbo, ed.,
Handbook of Corporate Finance: Empirical Corporate Finance
, in the Handbooks in Finance series (Holland: Elsevier, forthcoming), chapter 11, 2005,
http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/espen.eckbo/PDFs/
Handbookpdf/CH11-VentureCapital.pdf
.

80
. An account of how “new economy” technologies are making important transformations to “old economy” industries: Jonathan Rauch, “The New Old Economy: Oil, Computers, and the Reinvention of the Earth,”
Atlantic Monthly
, January 3, 2001.

81
. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis (
http://www.bea.doc.gov
), use the following site and select Table 1.1.6:
http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/SelectTable.asp?Selected=N
.

82
. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis,
http://www.bea.doc.gov
. Data for 1920–1999: Population Estimates Program, Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical National Population Estimates: July 1,
1900 to July 1, 1999,”
http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/popclockest.txt
; data for 2000–2004:
http://www.census.gov/popest/states/tables/NST-EST2004-01.pdf
.

83
. “The Global Economy: From Recovery to Expansion,” Results from
Global Economic Prospects 2005: Trade, Regionalism and Prosperity
(World Bank, 2004),
http://globaloutlook.worldbank.org/globaloutlook/
outside/globalgrowth.aspx
; “World Bank: 2004 Economic Growth Lifts Millions from Poverty,”
Voice of America News
,
http://www.voanews.com/english/2004-11-17-voa41.cfm
.

84
. Mark Bils and Peter Klenow, “The Acceleration in Variety Growth,”
American Economic Review
91.2 (May 2001): 274–80,
http://www.klenow.com/Acceleration.pdf
.

85
. See notes 84, 86, and 87.

86
. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, news report, June 3, 2004. You can generate productivity reports at
http://www.bls.gov/bls/productivity.htm
.

87
. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Major Sector Multifactor Productivity Index, Manufacturing Sector: Output per Hour All Persons (1996 = 100),
http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/outside.jsp?survey=mp
(Requires JavaScript: select “Manufacturing,” “Output Per Hour All Persons,” and starting year 1949), or
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/srgate
(use series “MPU300001,”“All Years,” and Format 2).

88
. George M. Scalise, Semiconductor Industry Association, in “Luncheon Address: The Industry Perspective on Semiconductors,”
2004 Productivity and Cyclicality in Semiconductors: Trends, Implications, and Questions
—
Report of a Symposium (2004)
(National Academies Press, 2004), p. 40,
http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309092744/html/index.html
.

89
. Data from Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, now part of ScanSoft (formerly Kurzweil Computer Products).

90
. eMarketer, “E-Business in 2003: How the Internet Is Transforming Companies, Industries, and the Economy—a Review in Numbers,” February 2003; “US B2C E-Commerce to Top $90 Billion in 2003,” April 30, 2003,
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1002207
; and “Worldwide B2B E-Commerce to Surpass $1 Trillion By Year’s End,” March 19, 2003,
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1002125
.

91. The patents used in this chart are, as described by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, “patents for inventions,” also known as “utility” patents. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Table of Annual U.S. Patent Activity,
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.htm
.

92
. The doubling time for IT’s share of the economy is twenty-three years. U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, “The Emerging Digital Economy,” figure 2,
http://www.technology.gov/digeconomy/emerging.htm
.

93
. The doubling time for U.S. education expenditures per capita is twenty-three years. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 2002,
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/digest02/tables/dt030.asp
.

94
. The United Nations estimated that the total global equity market capitalization in
2000 was thirty-seven trillion dollars. United Nations, “Global Finance Profile,”
Report of the High-Level Panel of Financing for Development
, June 2001,
http://www.un.org/reports/financing/profile.htm
.

If our perception of future growth rates were to increase (compared to current expectations) by an annual compounded rate of as little as 2 percent, and considering an annual discount rate (for discounting future values today) of 6 percent, then considering the increased present value resulting from only twenty years of compounded and discounted future (additional) growth, present values should triple. As the subsequent dialogue points out, this analysis does not take into consideration the likely increase in the discount rate that would result from such a perception of increased future growth.

Chapter Three: Achieving the Computational Capacity
of the Human Brain

1
. Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,”
Electronics
38.8 (April 19, 1965): 114–17, ftp://download.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf.

2
. Moore’s initial projection in this 1965 paper was that the number of components would double every year. In 1975 this was revised to every two years. However, this more than doubles price-performance every two years because smaller components run faster (because the electronics have less distance to travel). So overall price-performance (for the cost of each transistor cycle) has been coming down by half about every thirteen months.

3
. Paolo Gargini quoted in Ann Steffora Mutschler, “Moore’s Law Here to Stay,” ElectronicsWeekly.com, July 14, 2004,
http://www.electronicsweekly.co.uk/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=36829
. See also Tom Krazit, “Intel Prepares for Next 20 Years of Chip Making,”
Computerworld
, October 25, 2004,
http://www.computer world.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,96917,00.html
.

4
. Michael Kanellos, “ ‘High-rise’ Chips Sneak on Market,” CNET News.com, July 13, 2004,
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-5267738.html
.

5
. Benjamin Fulford, “Chipmakers Are Running Out of Room: The Answer Might Lie in 3-D,” Forbes.com, July 22, 2002,
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0722/173_print.html
.

6
. NTT news release, “Three-Dimensional Nanofabrication Using Electron Beam Lithography,” February 2, 2004,
http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news04e/0402/040202.html
.

7
. László Forró and Christian Schönenberger, “Carbon Nanotubes, Materials for the Future,”
Europhysics News
32.3 (2001),
http://www.europhysicsnews.com/full/09/article3/article3.html
. Also see
http://www.research.ibm.com/nanoscience/nanotubes.html
for an overview of nanotubes.

8
. Michael Bernstein, American Chemical Society news release, “High-Speed Nano-tube Transistors Could Lead to Better Cell Phones, Faster Computers,” April 27, 2004,
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-04/acs-nt042704.php
.

9
. I estimate a nanotube-based transistor and supporting circuitry and connections require approximately a ten-nanometer cube (the transistor itself will be a fraction of this), or 10
³
cubic nanometers. This is conservative, since single-walled nanotubes are only one nanometer in diameter. One inch = 2.54 centimeters = 2.54 × 10
⁷
nanometers. Thus, a 1-inch cube = 2.54
³
× 10
²¹
= 1.6 × 10
²²
cubic nanometers. So a one-inch cube could provide 1.6 × 10
¹⁹
transistors. With each computer requiring approximately 10
⁷
transistors (which is a much more complex apparatus than that comprising the calculations in a human interneuronal connection), we can support about 10
¹²
(one trillion) parallel computers.

A nanotube transistor–based computer at 10
¹²
calculations per second (based on Burke’s estimate) gives us a speed estimate of 10
²⁴
cps for the one-inch cube of nanotube circuitry. Also see Bernstein, “High-Speed Nanotube Transistors.”

With an estimate of 10
¹⁶
cps for functional emulation of the human brain (see discussion later in this chapter), this gives us about 100 million (10
⁸
) human-brain equivalents. If we use the more conservative 10
¹⁹
cps estimate needed for neuromorphic simulation (simulating every nonlinearity in every neural component; see subsequent discussion in this chapter), a one-inch cube of nanotube circuitry would provide only one hundred thousand human-brain equivalents.

10
. “Only four years ago did we measure for the first time any electronic transport through a nanotube. Now, we are exploring what can be done and what cannot in terms of single-molecule devices. The next step will be to think about how to combine these elements into complex circuits,” says one of the authors, Cees Dekker, of Henk W. Ch. Postma et al., “Carbon Nanotube Single-Electron Transistors at Room Temperature,”
Science
293.5527 (July 6, 2001): 76–129, described in the American Association for the Advancement of Science news release,“Nano-transistor Switches with Just One Electron May Be Ideal for Molecular Computers,
Science
Study Shows,”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-07/aaft-nsw062901.php
.

11
. The IBM researchers solved a problem in nanotube fabrication. When carbon soot is heated to create the tubes, a large number of unusable metallic tubes are created along with the semiconductor tubes suitable for transistors. The team included both types of nanotubes in a circuit and then used electrical pulses to shatter the undesirable ones—a far more efficient approach than cherry-picking the desirable tubes with an atomic-force microscope. Mark K. Anderson, “Mega Steps Toward the Nanochip,”
Wired News
, April 27, 2001, at
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,43324,00.html
, referring to Philip G. Collins, Michael S. Arnold, and Phaedon Avouris, “Engineering Carbon Nanotubes and Nanotube Circuits Using Electrical Breakdown,”
Science
292.5517 (April 27, 2001): 706–9.

12
. “A carbon nanotube, which looks like rolled chicken wire when examined at the atomic level, is tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair, yet remarkably strong.” University of California at Berkeley press release,“Researchers Create First Ever Integrated Silicon Circuit with Nanotube Transistors,” January 5, 2004,
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/01/05_nano.shtml
, referring to Yu-Chih Tseng et al., “Monolithic Integration of Carbon Nanotube Devices
with Silicon MOS Technology,”
Nano Letters
4.1 (2004): 123–27,
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/nalefd/2004/4/i01/pdf/nl0349707.pdf
.