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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 st

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.
- sillysaurus3 11y ago
  If we can't make faster CPUs, then we're not getting much further. On the contrary. In our day to day lives, we can do far more today than we could a decade ago. In 2006, Intel released Pentium 4 chips clocked at 3.6 GHz. In 2016 we use quadcore chips where each core is about as fast as that. Yet we're way more powerful today than a mere 4x multiplier, if you measure what we can do. Think of how limited our tools were just a decade ago. Clock speed isn't a great measurement, but the point is that making CPUs faster doesn't make the field more powerful. It seems like we're talking past each other. I was referring to effects that computers have on the world and our daily life, but it sounds like you're referring to total worldwide computation speed, and how it will change over time. If you're saying the rate will slow sigmoidally, similar to the progress in physics, I agree. But the thesis is that the rate at which the world changes w.r.t the field of computing is unrelated to the total available computation power. Our minds are the bottleneck. Compare this situation to the field of physics. The rate that the world changes w.r.t physics was related to how important the discoveries were. The contrast is pretty stark, and it might have some interesting long-term consequences.
  - andosa 11y ago
    >Think of how limited our tools were just a decade ago. Not sure what you mean here. What were the limits a decade a go? Many top programmers still swear by vi(m)/emacs, both started 40 years ago. C is 40+ years olds, C++ is 30+ years old, Python is turning 25, Javascript 20, Rails is 10 years old. Turbo Pascal, which is over 30 years old, was arguably on par with modern IDEs on very many fronts. I would say the contrary, there has been very little improvement in the tools aspect.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > It seems like we're talking past each other. I was referring to effects that computers have on the world and our daily life, but it sounds like you're referring to total worldwide computation speed, and how it will change over time. Interesting, because you seem to be arguing for each other's side. If you look at what we have then yes - for scientific purposes, total computational power has increased enormously and continues to do so. But if you ask what effects computers have on daily life of you and me, then not much has changed in the last two decades. Software bloat, piling up abstraction layers, turning everything into webapps - it all eats up the gains in hardware. Yes, the screens have better resolution and we now have magic shiny rectangles as another interface, but it seems like software only gets slower and less functional with time. > Yet we're way more powerful today than a mere 4x multiplier, if you measure what we can do. Scientists? Maybe. SpaceX can run moar CFD for their rockets on a bunch of graphics cards than the entire world could a decade or two ago. Rest of us? Not much, it really feels our tools are getting less powerful with time, and I don't feel like I can do that much more (and if anything, the primary benefits come from faster access to information - Googling for stuff instead being stuck with just the spec and the source code speeds things up considerably).

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.

sillysaurus3 11y ago
If we can't make faster CPUs, then we're not getting much further. On the contrary. In our day to day lives, we can do far more today than we could a decade ago. In 2006, Intel released Pentium 4 chips clocked at 3.6 GHz. In 2016 we use quadcore chips where each core is about as fast as that. Yet we're way more powerful today than a mere 4x multiplier, if you measure what we can do. Think of how limited our tools were just a decade ago. Clock speed isn't a great measurement, but the point is that making CPUs faster doesn't make the field more powerful. It seems like we're talking past each other. I was referring to effects that computers have on the world and our daily life, but it sounds like you're referring to total worldwide computation speed, and how it will change over time. If you're saying the rate will slow sigmoidally, similar to the progress in physics, I agree. But the thesis is that the rate at which the world changes w.r.t the field of computing is unrelated to the total available computation power. Our minds are the bottleneck. Compare this situation to the field of physics. The rate that the world changes w.r.t physics was related to how important the discoveries were. The contrast is pretty stark, and it might have some interesting long-term consequences.
- andosa 11y ago
  >Think of how limited our tools were just a decade ago. Not sure what you mean here. What were the limits a decade a go? Many top programmers still swear by vi(m)/emacs, both started 40 years ago. C is 40+ years olds, C++ is 30+ years old, Python is turning 25, Javascript 20, Rails is 10 years old. Turbo Pascal, which is over 30 years old, was arguably on par with modern IDEs on very many fronts. I would say the contrary, there has been very little improvement in the tools aspect.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > It seems like we're talking past each other. I was referring to effects that computers have on the world and our daily life, but it sounds like you're referring to total worldwide computation speed, and how it will change over time. Interesting, because you seem to be arguing for each other's side. If you look at what we have then yes - for scientific purposes, total computational power has increased enormously and continues to do so. But if you ask what effects computers have on daily life of you and me, then not much has changed in the last two decades. Software bloat, piling up abstraction layers, turning everything into webapps - it all eats up the gains in hardware. Yes, the screens have better resolution and we now have magic shiny rectangles as another interface, but it seems like software only gets slower and less functional with time. > Yet we're way more powerful today than a mere 4x multiplier, if you measure what we can do. Scientists? Maybe. SpaceX can run moar CFD for their rockets on a bunch of graphics cards than the entire world could a decade or two ago. Rest of us? Not much, it really feels our tools are getting less powerful with time, and I don't feel like I can do that much more (and if anything, the primary benefits come from faster access to information - Googling for stuff instead being stuck with just the spec and the source code speeds things up considerably).