Before considering further the implications of the Singularity, let’s examine the wide range of technologies that are subject to the law of accelerating returns. The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as Moore’s Law. In the mid-1970s, Gordon Moore, a leading inventor of integrated circuits and later chairman of Intel, observed that we could squeeze twice as many transistors onto an integrated circuit every twenty-four months (in the mid-1960s, he had estimated twelve months). Given that the electrons would consequently have less distance to
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