Nine years to the Singularity

[avram]

Someone at The Economist with a bit of extra time on his hands was looking at the recent proliferation of many-bladed razors, and noticed that the time gap between blade increments seems to be shrinking: 70 years before someone added the second blade, a couple of decades to the third, only two or three years between the four-bladed Schick Quattro and the five-bladed Gillette Fusion. Might there be a Moore’s Law for razors blades? Hence the chart over there.

Now, that power-law curve predicts 14-bladed razors by the year 2100, but that’s not the interesting curve. The interesting curve is the hyperbolic one, for two reasons: One, it matches the real-world data. And two, it goes to infinity in 2015. And how are you going to get an asymptotically-accelerating number of blades onto a razor? Why, you’d need godlike super-technology to do that.

Right. There it is, proof of the approaching Vingean Singularity, sooner than anyone expected it, clear as the chin on your face.

(Update!)

Comments

tmqb called it

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/9213999
(near the bottom)
tuesday morning quarterback writes a column. he used to call "gillette stadium" in foxboro, massachusetts "next-one-will-have-five-blades field".

from his feb 7, 2006 column:

Patriots Announce Stadium to be Renamed: Next One Will Have 11 Trans-Dimensional Nanoprobe-Embedded Force-Field-Projecting Blades Field: Reader Josh Byrne of Philadelphia relates the news that Gillette's six-blade razor has already been trumped -- Hitachi just released a 10-bladed razor, which "plays at invariable speed, ensuring the overall effectiveness." As noted last week, TMQ's Law of Razors holds that each century will see a razor with blades equal to the factorial of the highest number of blades on a razor of the previous century. This means that in the 22nd century, someone will market razor with 3,628,800 blades (10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1).