As I was saying, one experience yesterday morning at Siggraph jumped out at me. At the nVidia booth, they were showing how they can use machine learning to turn a single photograph into a 3D model. The interesting part was that the process takes three seconds.
My first thought, after all this week’s talk about Moore’s Law, is that in another ten years this process will take one hundredth as long. This is because every ten years, computers become 100 times faster.
In other words, by 2033, we will be able to turn a single photograph into a 3D model in real time. At that point it will seem instantaneous.
Like Turner Whitted said, certain effects go beyond the quantitative, and become qualitative. When we can create 3D worlds instantaneously from single images, that will be a qualitative change in our ability to manipulate reality.