Electricity eats Singularity in 2026

Great minds in computer science have been fretting about the impending singularity for a while. Some of them are so smart, they could put an exact time on the certain future event - 2026. As we slowly approach the doomsday, there may be a few things to consider.

Is it possible we can escape it? Technologists have been terrible forecasters of the future. Their training and perhaps overconfidence in their own capabilities have led them astray many times before. A positive slope in performance in anything, hardware and software included, has always attracted capital providers like flies circling a rotten apple. And with zero cost capital come overinvestment and lack of innovation. The tendency has been to pump up performance through scale, by throwing silicon at an ever-increasing rate. As could have been forecasted by less smart humans, such a process will ultimately lead to a single company who has all the capital in the World.

Right now, we have three companies, monopolies in search, social and operating system, whose lawyers have been adept at escaping anti-trust laws, who are able to improve the performance of transformers and such by concentrating silicon where they could still find ice and glaciers. But it still requires electricity, the boring stuff that most computer scientists typically do not think off. Right now, the production capacity of electricity of the World is capped. In the absence of a step-function change in generation, such as Fusion, even the monopolies will be constrained as they start to pipe the juice off from communities of ordinary people. So, it is possible that the “grand success,” of the great companies could become their Achilles heel.

What they may need to do is to abandon the need for infinite data and processing power and look for newer and more efficient methodologies. For that, they have to open their windows and look to less sexy industries where innovation still happens. Just as many times before, an industry on steroids to try to pump up growth through sheer scale may have overdone it. Let’s hope electricity will eat singularity in couple of years.