What if the singularity lies beyond a plateau we cannot cross? (opens in new tab)

You're right, I should have tied that back to the opening.

The acceleration we've experienced has allowed us to "outrun" our problems. In earlier generations, that meant famine or disease. Today, it might be climate change. Tomorrow, it'll be something else entirely.

Technological progress has generally been the reason humanity should be optimistic against challenges: it gives us ever improving tools to solve our hardest problems faster than we succumb to them. Without it, that optimism becomes much harder to justify.

Even if there is a plateau we can't cross, if we believe we drive more benefit from technology than the problems it creates, it makes sense to extract as much progress as we can from the physics we have.

I doubt that editing our genome will ever accomplish much. Maybe some minor improvements here and there, primarily with reducing the incidence of certain diseases. But there's no free lunch in biology and every advantage comes with disadvantages. For example, some people want to be taller but they don't realize that increases the risk of back problems later in life.

Most people don't even get close to their genetic limits anyway. We're capable of much more than we realize but we fall into mental traps and fool ourselves into thinking we're incapable. Some guy just set a world record by holding his breath for 29 minutes: a few years ago most people would have said that's impossible.

https://www.uow.edu.au/media/2025/the-science-behind-a-freed...

I was thinking about this the other day; and realized this would probably end the tech industry as we know it.

No new unicorns, no new kernel designs, no need for new engineered software that often. With the industry in stasis, the industry is finally able to be regulated to the same degree as plumbing, haircutting, or other licensed fields. An industry no longer any more exceptional than any other. The gold rush is over, the boring process of subjecting it to the will of the people and politicians begins.

I think we're also getting to the limits, across the board, soon. Consider AWS S3, infrastructure for society. 2021 - 100 trillion objects. 2025 - 350 trillion objects. Objects that need new hard drives every 3-5 years to store, replenished on a constant cycle. How soon until we reach the point even a minor prolonged disruption to hard drives, or GPUs, or DRAM, forces hard choices?

The entire scope of human storage or memory is not a constraint, but comes bottlenecked before constraints at arbitrary symbols, images and metaphors. The data even though it's analog, is still bottlenecked. Nothing specific even embedded or parameterized geometrically solves the bottleneck (AI can't do it, that's it's Achilles Heel, as it is ours). Think of language as a virus or parasite here, add symbols and logic, all a rendered from the arbitrary. How come nobody talks about this? We're mediocre thinkers using largely folk science in lieu of very evidently absent direct perception. In other words: we bought the sensation of language without ever verifying it, or correlating it to brain events or real events. The slow down to extinction was inevitable across all these mediums, technologies, preproductions, databases. Nothing solves it.

I tend to dislike the term AGI/ASI, since it's become a marketing label more than a coherent concept (which everyone will define differently)

In this case I use "singularity", by which I mean it more abstractly: a hypothetical point where technological progress begins to accelerate recursively, with heavily reduced human intervention.

My point isn't theological or utopian, just that the physical limits of computation, energy, and scale make that kind of runaway acceleration far less likely IMO than many assume.

True, semi scaling is slowing down.

But our software could be orders of magnitude more efficient. Am I wrong?

> "massive upfront investment and large and complex" and therefore predict progress stopping ages ago?

Regulatory and economic barriers are probably the easiest to overcome. But they are an obstacle. All it takes is for public sentiment to turn a bit more hostile towards technology, and progress can stall indefinitely.

> Opening with the recursively improving AGI and then having a section of "areas of promise for step-function improvements" and not mentioning any chance of an AGI breakthrough?

The premise of the article is that the hardware that AGI (or really ASI) would depend on may itself reach diminishing returns. What if progress is severely hampered by the need for one or two more process improvements that we simply can’t eke out?

Even if the algorithms exist, the underlying compute and energy requirements might hit hard ceilings before we reach "recursive improvement."

> How many autoimmune diseases have been cured, ever? Where does this “Probably” come from — the burden of proof very much lies with that probably.

The point isn't that we're there now, or even close. It’s that we likely don’t need a step-function technological breakthrough to get there.

With incremental improvements in CAR-T therapies — particularly those targeting B cells — Lupus is probably a prime candidate for an autoimmune disease that could feasibly be functionally "cured" within the next decade or so (using extensions of existing technology, not new physics).

In fact, one of the strongest counterpoints to the article's thesis is molecular biology, which has a remarkable amount of momentum and a lot of room left to run.

> We might not be that far away from a plausible space elevator.

I haven't seen convincing arguments that current materials can get us there, at least not on Earth. But the moon seems a lot more plausible due to lower gravity and virtually no atmosphere.

But I'd be very happy to be wrong about this.

> Based on what we know today, there isn’t “a” plateau — there are many, and they give way to newer things.

True. But the point is that when a plateau is governed by physical limits (for example, transistor size), further progress depends on a step-function improvement — and there's no guarantee that such an improvement exists.

Steam and coal weren't limited by physics. Which is the same reason why I didn't mention lithium batteries in the article (surely we can move beyond lithium to other chemistries, so the ceiling on what lithium can deliver isn't relevant). But for fields bounded by fundamental constants or quantum effects, there may not necessarily be a successor.