Transhumanism, is it possible?

First, we must differentiate three different concepts:

a)   Technological singularity: the apparently exponential increase of our technological advances will tend to infinity in a very short time. By then, anything we may want to do, will be possible.

b)  Transhumanism: the amelioration of the human species by means of technology.

c)   Posthumanism: the generation of a new species as a hybrid of human beings and technology.

Moore's law, a self-fulfilling prediction?

Gordon Moore

In an article that can be downloaded from the Stanford University website, entitled Are ideas getting harder to find?, the authors raise the following situation:

In many models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence... showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s... [W]e find that ideas — and the exponential growth they imply — are getting harder to find. Exponential growth results from large increases in research effort that offset its declining productivity.