3 ms·

I'd say we're already in the Manhattan project era of computing. There's no possible way. We were born at the beginning of civilization. There were the ancie

I'd say we're already in the Manhattan project era of computing. There's no possible way. We were born at the beginning of civilization. There were the ancients, then us. A hundred thousand years from now, what we write today has a chance of still being around. The language that people speak will be completely alien. But what we write -- our programs -- will still be runnable. There will be emulators for our architectures, and random work from random people in 2015 AD will happen to persist to 102,283 AD. We're going to be the oldest ancients that they consider real. They'll be able to look at and interact with our work. And even modify it and remix it. And we'll be thought of as just barely more advanced than cavedwellers. Now, with that sort of context, there seems no possible chance that we can know how far away we are from the Manhattan project era of computing. Very far, suffice to say. To a certain extent, it's not possible to compare the progress in physics with computing. On one hand, we've unravelled nature to the point where there are no mysteries left except in high-energy physics. There's also no way to know how profoundly the remaining mysteries might impact the world. Whereas the depth and the mysteries within computing are eternal. If there are still humans in 102,283 AD, there will still be computing, and they'll still be coming up with ever-more complex ways of computing. All of the institutional effort between now and then will push the field way, way beyond the limited horizons that we can currently imagine.

coldtea 11y ago
>Now, with that sort of context, there seems no possible chance that we can know how far, far away we are from the Manhattan project era of computing. Just piling up years doesn't mean much. Yeah, civilization might go on for 100,000 years. Or 1,000,000 years. Or 20,000,0000. That doesn't mean it will progress the same as it did the first x years. Just think of how we had homo sapiens for 200,000 years but progress was almost flat until around 4-5 thousands years ago. The mere availability of time doesn't ensure incremental progress at scale, or even monotonically increasing progress. There are things such as low hanging fruit, diminishing returns, etc. One can already see in physics that the most earth-shattering progress was made until around 1930-1950, and from then on it's mostly small pickings. When you start fresh, there are lots of low hanging fruits to get. At some point, you've reached several limits (including physical limits in measuring and experimental equipment without which you can't go further, and which you can't overcome because they're, well, physical limits). And that's even without taking into account a regression (e.g. because of a huge famine, a world war, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, a deadly new "plague" like think, etc.).
- sillysaurus3 11y ago
  One can already see in physics that the most earth-shattering progress was made until around 1930-1950, and from then on it's mostly small pickings. When you start fresh, there are lots of low hanging fruits to get. At some point, you've reached several limits (including physical limits in measuring and experimental equipment without which you can't go further, and which you can't overcome because they're, well, physical limits). Certainly. And you've hit on the core reason why computing is so eternal: there aren't physical limits. When a computer becomes ten times faster, we don't affect the world ten times more profoundly. So the physical limits that hold back clock speeds don't matter too much. But when we suddenly no longer need to own cars because we can hail one on demand, our lives become completely different. The limitations are social, rather than physical. Our own minds, and our lack of ability to manage complexity, is the primary bottleneck standing between us affecting the world, right now. Tonight. Imagine a hypothetical superhuman programmer who can write hundreds of thousands of applications per day. Think of how that'd reshape the world with time. It seems true to say the amount that'd affect the world is linear w.r.t. time. The longer that superhuman programmer churns out permutations of apps in as many fields as possible, the more the world will change. But that's exactly what's happening: hundreds of thousands of applications are being written per day, by humanity as a whole. Project that process forward to 102,283 AD. Are you sure the rate of change will be a sigmoidal falloff like physics?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Certainly. And you've hit on the core reason why computing is so eternal: there aren't physical limits. On the contrary, there are several. The speed of light. The plank constant. Heat issues. Interference issues. Issues with printing ever smaller CPU transistors. Plasma damage to low-k materials (whatever that means). And all kinds of diminishing returns situations in Computer Science (e.g. adding more RAM stops having that much of a speed impact over some threshold, or you can make a supercluster of tens of thousands of nodes, but you're limited by communication speed between them, unless the job is totally parallelizable, etc). >When a computer becomes ten times faster, we don't affect the world ten times more profoundly. So the physical limits that hold back clock speeds don't matter too much. Huh? What does that mean? If we can't make faster CPUs, then we're not getting much further. Increasing cooling etc only helps up to a point. >Imagine a hypothetical superhuman programmer who can write hundreds of thousands of applications per day. Think of how that'd reshape the world with time. We already have hundreds of thousands of applications. It's not exactly what we're lacking. We're talking about qualitative advances, not just churning out apps.
sangnoir 11y ago
> There will be emulators for our architectures, and random work from random people in 2015 AD will happen to persist to 102,283 AD That will need the required ISAs to be recorded somewhere robust enough to last 100 millennia; you can bet it won't be "the cloud". They might even need "Programmer Archaeologists" who will know where to hunt for the ancient specs, and prove Vernor Vinge right (A Deepness in the Sky) I hope there won't be some Library of Alexandria event in the intervening period.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > I hope there won't be some Library of Alexandria event in the intervening period. It would take a pretty well-coordinated attack, but you could probably erase the better part of modern Internet by striking a dozen targets simultaneously[0]. [0] - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    Are you suggesting that AWS will last 100 millenia?! I know we still have some roads the Romans built, but 100,000 years is a long time (compared to recorded history). Amazon will be lucky to last 100 years.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Agreed. Let's take another examples: do you know how many thousands of tommes of 19th century/early 20th century books we have but we don't give a fuck about and we don't digitize/preserve? Even if we have digitized them and had access to them, how many would even care? Heck, most people don't even read the books of their own time -- heck, 50+% read 1 book a year (if that). And those that read are already overloaded with stuff. So why assume people in 100,000 will give much fucks about books and data from 2015? Apart from some archeologists, that is -- and even them would have tons of higher level descriptions of our century, in the forms of history books, movies and documentaries, so they wont care much about the hundreds of thousands of individual artifacts we have produced.

coldtea 11y ago

>Now, with that sort of context, there seems no possible chance that we can know how far, far away we are from the Manhattan project era of computing. Just piling up years doesn't mean much. Yeah, civilization might go on for 100,000 years. Or 1,000,000 years. Or 20,000,0000. That doesn't mean it will progress the same as it did the first x years. Just think of how we had homo sapiens for 200,000 years but progress was almost flat until around 4-5 thousands years ago. The mere availability of time doesn't ensure incremental progress at scale, or even monotonically increasing progress. There are things such as low hanging fruit, diminishing returns, etc. One can already see in physics that the most earth-shattering progress was made until around 1930-1950, and from then on it's mostly small pickings. When you start fresh, there are lots of low hanging fruits to get. At some point, you've reached several limits (including physical limits in measuring and experimental equipment without which you can't go further, and which you can't overcome because they're, well, physical limits). And that's even without taking into account a regression (e.g. because of a huge famine, a world war, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, a deadly new "plague" like think, etc.).

sillysaurus3 11y ago
One can already see in physics that the most earth-shattering progress was made until around 1930-1950, and from then on it's mostly small pickings. When you start fresh, there are lots of low hanging fruits to get. At some point, you've reached several limits (including physical limits in measuring and experimental equipment without which you can't go further, and which you can't overcome because they're, well, physical limits). Certainly. And you've hit on the core reason why computing is so eternal: there aren't physical limits. When a computer becomes ten times faster, we don't affect the world ten times more profoundly. So the physical limits that hold back clock speeds don't matter too much. But when we suddenly no longer need to own cars because we can hail one on demand, our lives become completely different. The limitations are social, rather than physical. Our own minds, and our lack of ability to manage complexity, is the primary bottleneck standing between us affecting the world, right now. Tonight. Imagine a hypothetical superhuman programmer who can write hundreds of thousands of applications per day. Think of how that'd reshape the world with time. It seems true to say the amount that'd affect the world is linear w.r.t. time. The longer that superhuman programmer churns out permutations of apps in as many fields as possible, the more the world will change. But that's exactly what's happening: hundreds of thousands of applications are being written per day, by humanity as a whole. Project that process forward to 102,283 AD. Are you sure the rate of change will be a sigmoidal falloff like physics?
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Certainly. And you've hit on the core reason why computing is so eternal: there aren't physical limits. On the contrary, there are several. The speed of light. The plank constant. Heat issues. Interference issues. Issues with printing ever smaller CPU transistors. Plasma damage to low-k materials (whatever that means). And all kinds of diminishing returns situations in Computer Science (e.g. adding more RAM stops having that much of a speed impact over some threshold, or you can make a supercluster of tens of thousands of nodes, but you're limited by communication speed between them, unless the job is totally parallelizable, etc). >When a computer becomes ten times faster, we don't affect the world ten times more profoundly. So the physical limits that hold back clock speeds don't matter too much. Huh? What does that mean? If we can't make faster CPUs, then we're not getting much further. Increasing cooling etc only helps up to a point. >Imagine a hypothetical superhuman programmer who can write hundreds of thousands of applications per day. Think of how that'd reshape the world with time. We already have hundreds of thousands of applications. It's not exactly what we're lacking. We're talking about qualitative advances, not just churning out apps.

sangnoir 11y ago

> There will be emulators for our architectures, and random work from random people in 2015 AD will happen to persist to 102,283 AD That will need the required ISAs to be recorded somewhere robust enough to last 100 millennia; you can bet it won't be "the cloud". They might even need "Programmer Archaeologists" who will know where to hunt for the ancient specs, and prove Vernor Vinge right (A Deepness in the Sky) I hope there won't be some Library of Alexandria event in the intervening period.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> I hope there won't be some Library of Alexandria event in the intervening period. It would take a pretty well-coordinated attack, but you could probably erase the better part of modern Internet by striking a dozen targets simultaneously[0]. [0] - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
- sangnoir 11y ago
  Are you suggesting that AWS will last 100 millenia?! I know we still have some roads the Romans built, but 100,000 years is a long time (compared to recorded history). Amazon will be lucky to last 100 years.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Agreed. Let's take another examples: do you know how many thousands of tommes of 19th century/early 20th century books we have but we don't give a fuck about and we don't digitize/preserve? Even if we have digitized them and had access to them, how many would even care? Heck, most people don't even read the books of their own time -- heck, 50+% read 1 book a year (if that). And those that read are already overloaded with stuff. So why assume people in 100,000 will give much fucks about books and data from 2015? Apart from some archeologists, that is -- and even them would have tons of higher level descriptions of our century, in the forms of history books, movies and documentaries, so they wont care much about the hundreds of thousands of individual artifacts we have produced.