A mind-jarring piece of perspective on the speed of the world's newest record-setting supercomputer that can perform 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second:

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

That description had me thinking about the review of Glenn Reynolds' book I wrote two years ago and the concept of 'The Singularity':

In other words, even as we step back and recognize the startling pace of change in technology that has occurred over the last fifteen years, "we ain't seen nothin' yet."

Reynolds posits that we'll soon see changes coming at an even thicker and faster rate going far beyond the current computer revolution that will provide "not only intellectual but physical powers previously unavailable to individuals."

Such exponential growth of change is a precursor to a concept called "the Singularity," which author Ray Kurzweil defines in an interview with Reynolds as "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Kurzweil envisions a point in the not so far distant future where artificial intelligence will acquire the ability to improve itself and that "technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it."

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