When zoomed in growth is not linear – it never was, it never is going to be.
What is more telling than the ups and downs in growth is how much stuff is obviously unsolved that will obviously be solved, but where it's not obvious yet how it's going to be solved. One such example is human (and then super human) natural language recognition and processing.
Right now it's worse than human, who are not even particularly good at it, giving language barriers and also hearing impediments. It fails all the time. It is slow. The input needs to be clear and slow.
But why should would any of that be? Why would a computer not eventually be better at recognising signal through horrible noise, better than the best human even could be? There will be instruments in every consumer electronic device that can beat every humans at audio input (that might already be true). Then, clearly, a connected device will be able to understand/translate/process the input better than any single human. And lastly, that device will then be able to offer more context and action for that information, and quicker, than any human.
This is an example for something already obvious. I don't need to know how it's going to happen. It will happen 100%, because it's obviously useful and there is hard technical or physical limitation to any of this. At some point all the required tech will have progressed enough that you are going to mumble an arbitrary request be able to say "book me x at y and also inform x to tell her i am running and an AI is making it happen and you thinking absolutely nothing off it.
As long as we are not there, as long as the obvious and obviously doable stuff is not done, tech progress is not slowing down. It's just not linear.
What is more telling than the ups and downs in growth is how much stuff is obviously unsolved that will obviously be solved, but where it's not obvious yet how it's going to be solved. One such example is human (and then super human) natural language recognition and processing.
Right now it's worse than human, who are not even particularly good at it, giving language barriers and also hearing impediments. It fails all the time. It is slow. The input needs to be clear and slow.
But why should would any of that be? Why would a computer not eventually be better at recognising signal through horrible noise, better than the best human even could be? There will be instruments in every consumer electronic device that can beat every humans at audio input (that might already be true). Then, clearly, a connected device will be able to understand/translate/process the input better than any single human. And lastly, that device will then be able to offer more context and action for that information, and quicker, than any human.
This is an example for something already obvious. I don't need to know how it's going to happen. It will happen 100%, because it's obviously useful and there is hard technical or physical limitation to any of this. At some point all the required tech will have progressed enough that you are going to mumble an arbitrary request be able to say "book me x at y and also inform x to tell her i am running and an AI is making it happen and you thinking absolutely nothing off it.
As long as we are not there, as long as the obvious and obviously doable stuff is not done, tech progress is not slowing down. It's just not linear.