What if the singularity lies beyond a plateau we cannot cross?

The acceleration we've experienced has allowed us to "outrun" our problems. In earlier generations, that meant famine or disease. Today, it might be climate change. Tomorrow, it'll be something else entirely.

Technological progress has generally been the reason humanity should be optimistic against challenges: it gives us ever improving tools to solve our hardest problems faster than we succumb to them. Without it, that optimism becomes much harder to justify.

Even if there is a plateau we can't cross, if we believe we drive more benefit from technology than the problems it creates, it makes sense to extract as much progress as we can from the physics we have.

Do you even need an MMU, if you have memory safe languages?

Honestly, maybe semi scaling is a problem for AI, but for most other software today, the problem is bugs, bloat, latency.

In time, AI and VR/AR will converge to allow us to evolve new ways to educate/entertain new generations, to distill knowledge in a faster and much more reliable way. We will experience societal upheavals before the "plateau". Our current world order will probably experience major changes.

AGI will probably be a long, long way ahead of us -- in its current state, LLMs are not going to spontaneously develop sentience. There is a massive scale (power, resources, space, etc) issue to contend with.

Smartphones sell 1.2 billion every year. Add in server, laptop, embedded chips, GPUs, TPUS - even if transistor density and process improvements stall soon, the amount of compute power on Earth is vast and increasing rapidly until 'soon' happens, and can still increase rapidly by churning out more compute with the best available process indefinitely after that. You haven't made a case that process improvements are necessary or that they are not going to happen, you've only said that they might be neccessary and might not happen. "All it takes is for public sentiment to turn a bit more hostile towards technology, and progress can stall indefinitely" - again, true in terms of process improvements, not true in general because we could potentially make progress towards AGI with existing compute power by changing how we organise it and what we do with it; at least, you haven't given a good reason why that couldn't happen.

> "In fact, one of the strongest counterpoints to the article's thesis is molecular biology, which has a remarkable amount of momentum and a lot of room left to run."

One of the strongest counterpoints is that human brains exist - there's definitely some way to get to human-equivalent intelligence, on Earth, within the laws of Physics, the energy and temperature constraints which exist here. Handwaving "what if AGI is impossible because of the laws of physics" needs you to make a case why the laws of physics are a blocker, not just state that there are some physical limits to some things sometimes.

Yes transistors are hard to make smaller but that is not the only option - we've developed stacked 3D transistors to pack more into a small volume, hardware acceleration through design for more and more algorithms (compression, video compression, encryption) to better use existing transistor budgets, we've developed better more cache-friendly and SIMD friendly algorithms, chips where part of them can power down to allow more power for other parts without hitting thermal limits. More than one S curve involved, not just one plateau.