RE: In Defense of Consortium Blockchains
I don't know what physics you refer to but nothing in the universe as I understand it "lacks entropy".
A vacuum is one example.
On top of it being 'set it and forget it', it also promotes automation by design.
The engineering and research quest to produce smaller and smaller transactors is not capable of being automated. It requires the random occurrence of ingenuity. I am not going to write a treatise on this here.
The logical way efficiency is increased is by cost reduction of the business operations.
For mining it is mostly all about the electrical efficiency of the ASIC chips.
Once the ASIC is built into the Intel CPUs
These can never be even orders-of-magnitude as efficient as the dedicated, state-of-the-art ASIC chips.
But you do realize due to physics we will reach a maximum efficiency for chips pretty soon.
Malthusians never defeat human (nature's) ingenuity.
Paradigms will change as necessary, e.g. quantum computing, etc.. The ingenuity race will not cease.
That is where you are wrong. Chip design can and is already automated. Algorithm generation is also already automated. Even program synthesis (programming) is automated.
If we have a prediction market are you telling me you are willing to bet against AI being able to automate the mining industry within the next 20 years?
And my point about chips is there is a physical limit beyond which no chip can become more efficient. There will be a final ASIC design and once that design is found there will be no need to continue to innovate there because physics cannot be improved beyond the optimal design. This will happen for sure in our lifetime. So once the final design is produced it becomes a matter of how many chips you have as the "new currency" of POW rather than how efficient of a chipset you have. Even blogging on Steemit is not future proof because algorithms can blog too and soon AI will be able to do it better than people so why would I think I can blog for much longer? I see the writing on the wall.
References
Van Berkel, S., Turi, D., Pruteanu, A., & Dulman, S. (2012, July). Automatic discovery of algorithms for multi-agent systems. In Proceedings of the 14th annual conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation (pp. 337-344). ACM.
You're citing automation of existing technology, not the new innovations that have been required along the way to keep Moore's law advancing, such as Intel's 3D transactions, etc..
I have already stated the facts and provided a link to where I have explained it in much greater detail. You are free to believe anything you want to. It will still not make it correct.
Please go interview someone knowledgeable at Intel to become more aware of the reality. For example just reading a story about how difficult it was for Intel to release the latest generation CPUs and the human ingenuity it required to sort out various issues with the smaller transistors. In short, you're oversimplifying your assumption about the capabilities of AI.
As well, you do not comprehend the generative essence which is the entropy argument (which insures the capabilities of AI will never replace/dominate the necessary imperfection and randomness of nature). And I have no desire to try to explain it further to laymen (beyond what I already linked to), who have some fantasy about what they saw on Star Trek.
Any intellectual activity that requires the randomness of ingenuity will remain the domain of humans. Remember for example humans can leverage AI against AI. AI is a replicated low entropy tool for humans. Every human is biologically unique. That random imperfection can't be captured by AI, because AI is top-down replicated phenomenon.
To the extent that AI ever does become randomly imperfect and unique like humans (i.e. if it truly becomes alive), then it will lose it's illogically postulated ability to form a universal total order (i.e. imperfections require partial orders). Humans can compute just as fast as AI can, we use computers to do it. I already explained why the notion of AI autonomously directing itself faster than humans directing AI is low entropy and thus not dominant.
In short, Kurzweil is selling snake oil.
Hey man, I know you are smart and everything but if you want people to listen to you stop talking to them like they are idiots.
If you swallow your pride and check your ego you will get much more acomplished. I like the subject matter you discuss but the way you present it is not pleasant to read and comes off more like you have a personal grudge than knowledge to share.
Perhaps the forcefulness of my factual exposition is due to trying to explain it nicely dozens of times already in the past and realizing that humans are necessarily hard-headed.
The necessity of irrationality was alluded to in my exposition.
Also take in account that @dana-edwards is declaring that I am wrong, and she/he clearly did not even take the time to go read all the linked explanation I provided my first polite post before he/she responded declaring that I am wrong.
I understand very well her/his fantasy and misunderstanding. I have explained this point numerous times over and over and over again. The disease of the propaganda about the AI Singularity is at the same level of junk (false) science as human caused global warming, feminism, oestrogenizing vegetarianism & fat-free diets, and other absolute bullshit propaganda that people believe.
Btw, I have no animosity towards @dana-edwards. I am friendly with everyone, but w.r.t. to factual debate, I have the responsibility to present my knowledge in a way that the other side actually takes notice of the facts. Unfortunately the nice and soft approach was not working with her/him. Yet I think my last response is not mean-spirited. Just trying to be forceful enough with the facts to penetrate the cranium and emotional centers of the brain and reach the pre-frontal cortex where the logic circuitry is.
Thanks for your feedback. I hope my explanation satisfies you to some degree.