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

We've been here before

[(Anonymous)]

Remember 1000 bit cd players ? Then suddenly one (1) bit was enough. I forsee that Gillette may go to six blade but then they will launch a super one blade with super techonology and that will be enough and competitors will follow suite.

Maybe a single blade with rotating nano size cutters.

Re: We've been here before

[(Anonymous)]

Uh.. no. Maybe you mean 16-bit (65535 discrete levels)

1000 bit would be ~10^300 discrete levels: we don't have the technology to do that.

1-bit DACs work by using a higher frequency (like 2Mhz instead of 44.1kHz), then using some kind of Digital signal processing to make the two discrete voltage levels sound good in the audible frequency range (20Hz-22KHz).

As some people hinted at, electric razors already have hundreds of "blades" (If you count all the holes on the screens).