Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Bit by Bit: An Illustrated 
History of Computers
(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984); International Association of Electrical and 
Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 
Annals of the History of the Computer
9.2 (1987): 150–53 and 16.3 (1994): 20; 
Hans Moravec, 
Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 
University Press, 1988); Rene Moreau, 
The Computer Comes of Age
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). 
36.
The plots in this chapter labeled "Logarithmic Plot" are technically semilogarithmic plots in that one axis 
(time) is on a linear scale, and the other axis is on a logarithmic scale. However, I am calling these plots 
"logarithmic plots" for simplicity. 

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37.
See the appendix, "The Law of Accelerating Returns Revisited," which provides a mathematical derivation of 
why there are two levels of exponential growth (that is, exponential growth over time in which the rate of the 
exponential growth—the exponent—is itself growing exponentially over time) in computational power as 
measured by MIPS per unit cost. 
38.
Hans Moravec, "When Will Computer Hardware Match the Human Brain?" 
Journal of Evolution and 
Technology
1 (1998), http://www.jetpress.org/volumel/moravec.pdf. 
39.
See note 35 above. 
40.
Achieving the first MIPS per $1,000 took from 1900 to 1990. We're now doubling the number of MIPS per 
$1,000 in about 400 days. Because current priceperformance is about 2,000 MIPS per $1,000, we are adding 
price-performance at the rate of 5 MIPS per day, or 1 MIPS about every 5 hours. 
41.
"IBM Details Blue Gene Supercomputer," 
CNET News
, May 8, 2003, http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-
1000421.html. 
42.
See Alfred North Whitehead, 
An Introduction to Mathematics
(London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), which 
he wrote at the same time he and Bertrand Russell were working on their seminal three-volume 
Principia 
Mathematica
. 
43.
While originally projected to take fifteen years, "the Human Genome Project was finished two and a half years 
ahead of time and, at $2.7 billion in FY 1991 dollars, significantly under original spending projections": 
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/project/ 50yr/press4_2003.shtml. 
44.
Human Genome Project Information, 
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/project/privatesector.shtml; Stanford Genome 
Technology Center, http://sequence-www.stanford.edu/group/techdev/auto.html; National Human Genome 
Research Institute, http://www.genome.gov; Tabitha Powledge, "How Many Genomes Are Enough?" 
Scientist
, 
November 17, 2003, http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20031117/07. 
45.
Data from National Center for Biotechnology Information, "GenBank Statistics," revised May 4, 2004, 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/genbankstats.html. 
46.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was sequenced within thirty-one days of the virus being identified 
by the British Columbia Cancer Agency and the American Centers for Disease Control. The sequencing from 
the two centers differed by only ten base pairs out of twenty-nine thousand. This work identified SARS as a 
coronavirus. Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC, called the quick sequencing "a scientific achievement 
that I don't think has been paralleled in our history." See K. Philipkoski, "SARS Gene Sequence Unveiled," 
Wired News
, April 15, 2003, http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,58481.00.html?tw=wn_story 
_related. 
In contrast, the efforts to sequence HIV began in the 1980s. HIV 1 and HIV 2 were completely sequenced 
in 2003 and 2002 respectively. National Center for Biotechnology Information, 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/framik.cgi?db=genome&gi=12171; HIV Sequence Database 
maintained by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, http://www.hiv.lanl.gov/content/hiv-
db/HTML/outline.html. 
47.
Mark Brader, "A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952)," 
http://www.davros.org/misc/chronology.html; Richard E. Matick,