[Electricity from solar power] is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.
Suppose that solar power achieves and then surpasses “grid parity,” meaning that it produces electrictity less expensively than conventional power sources. Once that happens, solar power would inevitably become the dominant energy source. Call it the Solar Singularity.
Arnold Kling spends much of the rest of his article arguing that Kurzweil’s solar optimism is misplaced. I disagree, but Kling’s “solar singularity” idea is worth exploring.
Kurzweil’s extrapolation on solar is simplistic. But it will also be right. It’s not that Kurzweil thinks that Solar will improve (just) because we’ll be able to write more solar cells in a smaller space like transistors on a computer chip. Instead, Kurzweil is describing a fundamental law of progress of which Moore’s law is only the latest iteration.
Kurzweil (and others) have described the power of exponential doubling with a “Rice and the Chessboard” parable:
A king wanted to reward his faithful wiseman. The wiseman stated that all he wanted was a single grain of rice for the first square on a chessboard, 2 grains for the second square, and so on… doubling until all 64 squares were filled.
The King ordered that this “modest” request be honored – until he learned that his wiseman was really a wiseguy. 64 doublings would be all the rice ever harvested in the entire world.
Enter “Spock’s Chessboard“
Exponential trends are powerful in ways that are hard to foresee even with something as simple as rice. But the doubling of information technology is much more surprising.
Moore’s law (and its predessesors and successsors) have been progressing through an information technology chessboard. Every two years or so puts us on a new square with twice the computation per dollar spent. But that’s not all. Because computation is the basis for the development of everything else, the computation board spawns other exponential chessboards. Solar technology gets its own board. Other energy technologies like fusion, biodiesel, and alcohol fuels are also progressing on their own chessboards.
Life extension gets a chessboard. In fact, Aubrey de Grey has already described a life extension singularity. It’s his “bootstrapping to escape velocity” idea.
Each mini-board has its own singularity. Kling has described the solar singularity. A similar singularity could happen for fusion power. The age of personal medicine will arrive, I think, about the time that a $1,000 genome sequencing becomes possible. That will be a singularity for the genetics mini-board.
Along the way each mini-chessboard is fed by the main computation board, but they also sometimes feed other mini-chessboards or even feed the progress of the main computation board.
It’s hard to overstate the challenge of forecasting the future of technology with so many interlocking variables. But with so many exponential processes working in our favor, I’m not going to bet against Kurzweil’s optimism.