RE: LeoThread 2025-10-17 22-37

[carmacd]

Good news at last!

Comments

[carmacd]

Theorem: The maximum possible duration of the computational singularity is about 470 years
Proof: The total FLOPs capacity of all computers in 1986 is estimated at most 4.5×10^14 (Hilbert and López 2011)

[carmacd]

Using public Nvidia revenue and GPU specifications, that capacity reaches at least 1×10^22 FLOPs by 2025, implying an average annual growth of roughly 55% since 1986

[carmacd]

The physical universe can support at most 10^104 FLOPs (Lloyd 2000)

[carmacd]

Therefore, even allowing faster-than-light travel, the computational singularity—an era of elevated social and technological unpredictability driven by rapid global compute growth—cannot persist longer than (2025 − 1986) + (104 − 22)/log10(1.55) ≈ 470 years

[carmacd]

References:
S. Lloyd, “Ultimate physical limits to computation,” arXiv preprint quant-ph/9908043, 1999, doi:10.48550/arXiv.quant-ph/9908043

[carmacd]

M. Hilbert and P. López, “The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information,” Science, vol. 332, no. 6025, pp. 60–65, Apr. 2011, doi:10.1126/science.1200970