"Looking at things like anaphora resolution and how far we have progressed in the last 20 years, I'm not optimistic we'll make the deadline."
It may just take a new perspective on the problem. Just look at the changes in the internet over the last decade. IMHO, there's been an obvious rate increase in dissemination and cross-pollenization of ideas. Blogs and sites like this only decrease the generation time even further.
It's the ever increasing second derivative that makes the idea of the singularity plausible (with all due respect to the S-curve believers (I think they are right, but what's the point if the top of the S is so significantly higher than where we are now)).
Sure, breakthroughs are always possible, and more pieces of information are linked to each other and so on. I'm not saying it's not possible that someone has a good idea tomorrow that changes everything.
But no, ideas don't cross pollinate. It's individuals who cross pollinate ideas in their heads and there's a limit to how much information a person can possibly juggle in her head.
It's that creative process that we don't really understand yet which is the bottleneck. No amount of linked information will be able to somehow supercharge our coginitive capacity. Sometimes just having time to think without interruption is more important than more information.
I think the likelyhood for breakthrough ideas is largely a function of the number of people working on hard problems. I'm not sure how fast that rate rises. Not very fast I would think. And the second derivative may very well be zero.
It may just take a new perspective on the problem. Just look at the changes in the internet over the last decade. IMHO, there's been an obvious rate increase in dissemination and cross-pollenization of ideas. Blogs and sites like this only decrease the generation time even further.
It's the ever increasing second derivative that makes the idea of the singularity plausible (with all due respect to the S-curve believers (I think they are right, but what's the point if the top of the S is so significantly higher than where we are now)).