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

Re: S curve

[doctor-frank.livejournal.com]

How many people right now could tell the difference between a 3-blade shave and a 4 blade shave?
Oh that's easy - simply count the number of equidistant red parallel lines on the person's face ;)

(arrived here via Majikthise via Pharyngula). I'd actually been meaning to do a post myself about the razor thing since I saw it in a presentation by Doug Hoftstadter discussing the `Singularity'.