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People are trying, Tesla is investing HEAVILY into battery technology and research. CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived

People are trying, Tesla is investing HEAVILY into battery technology and research. CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived at our modern era through incremental improvements, not by saying "we need to stop and wait for someone to invent something better!"

gammateam 8y ago
Now printers on the other hand....
- tapland 8y ago
  Could arguably partially have been replaced by portable devices with high resolution displays.
  - Normal_gaussian 8y ago
    And electronic databases and forms. I have very very few pieces of paper in my life, but loads of webforms.
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    They'd have to be damned cheap. I give away printed bits of paper all the time ...
sandworm101 8y ago
Cpus were new tech, brand new tech. They have only been around now a few decades. Batteries have been studied for centuries. Even incremental improvements are much less likely, and much more expensive, when dealing with such mature technology.
jjoonathan 8y ago
Fun story: the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. Yesterday's miracle battery of tomorrow that never quite happened, right? Well, the big picture story is a bit different. It was invented shortly before the lead acid battery and US civil war. It accumulated a few refinements and fewer practical uses over the years, until the Apollo era when there was a huge breakthrough (polymer electrolyte membranes). Then it went back to slowly accumulating incremental advancements, and that's still the story today. Exploitation is exponential (the scale of each success determines the resources people are willing to bet on the next win), but exploration is a punctuated equilibrium, and it's a recipe for disappointment to assume that all progress should behave like the former rather than the latter.
nradov 8y ago
32 bit CPUs like the Intel 80386 and Motorola 68030 were already in widespread use 30 years ago.
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
this. Think of the absurd amount of wasted investment that's stupidly gone into internal combustion engine research over the last century.
- refurb 8y ago
  What? Cars today are way more fuel efficient and have way fewer emission than they did even 10 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. I'd say that investment turned out to be very valuable.
  - djaychela 8y ago
    That is true, but they are also immensely complex - I wouldn't say it was 'wasted' effort (as the above poster did), but modern ICE engines are ludicrously complex electro-mechanical devices. If this much effort is expended on improving battery technology (as I think it will be), then the future is very bright for EVs because they are already much better than ICE in many ways - simplicity and reliability as well as emissions. I think it will be much like in F1 - remember when the limitation on gearbox and engine replacements in a season were introduced and many commentators said it would lead to there being no cars on the grid at the end of the season? What actually happened was the engineers created hitherto undreamt of levels of reliability. I'm sure the same will happen for EV batteries once they are the only game in town and ICE is no longer any kind of option.
    - mavhc 8y ago
      Did they create that F1 rule to see if better engines could be developed?
  - vbuwivbiu 8y ago
    That's like arguing that cigarettes are a bit less harmful than they used to be. They're still a crap technology. Of all the possible ways to move a vehicle the ICE is the stupidest: essentially it's a device for burning oil as close to humans as possible while destroying the planet. Oh and by the way, those 'reduced' emissions were faked.

gammateam 8y ago

Now printers on the other hand....

tapland 8y ago
Could arguably partially have been replaced by portable devices with high resolution displays.
- Normal_gaussian 8y ago
  And electronic databases and forms. I have very very few pieces of paper in my life, but loads of webforms.
- swish_bob 8y ago
  They'd have to be damned cheap. I give away printed bits of paper all the time ...

sandworm101 8y ago

Cpus were new tech, brand new tech. They have only been around now a few decades. Batteries have been studied for centuries. Even incremental improvements are much less likely, and much more expensive, when dealing with such mature technology.

jjoonathan 8y ago

Fun story: the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. Yesterday's miracle battery of tomorrow that never quite happened, right? Well, the big picture story is a bit different. It was invented shortly before the lead acid battery and US civil war. It accumulated a few refinements and fewer practical uses over the years, until the Apollo era when there was a huge breakthrough (polymer electrolyte membranes). Then it went back to slowly accumulating incremental advancements, and that's still the story today. Exploitation is exponential (the scale of each success determines the resources people are willing to bet on the next win), but exploration is a punctuated equilibrium, and it's a recipe for disappointment to assume that all progress should behave like the former rather than the latter.

nradov 8y ago

32 bit CPUs like the Intel 80386 and Motorola 68030 were already in widespread use 30 years ago.

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

this. Think of the absurd amount of wasted investment that's stupidly gone into internal combustion engine research over the last century.

refurb 8y ago
What? Cars today are way more fuel efficient and have way fewer emission than they did even 10 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. I'd say that investment turned out to be very valuable.
- djaychela 8y ago
  That is true, but they are also immensely complex - I wouldn't say it was 'wasted' effort (as the above poster did), but modern ICE engines are ludicrously complex electro-mechanical devices. If this much effort is expended on improving battery technology (as I think it will be), then the future is very bright for EVs because they are already much better than ICE in many ways - simplicity and reliability as well as emissions. I think it will be much like in F1 - remember when the limitation on gearbox and engine replacements in a season were introduced and many commentators said it would lead to there being no cars on the grid at the end of the season? What actually happened was the engineers created hitherto undreamt of levels of reliability. I'm sure the same will happen for EV batteries once they are the only game in town and ICE is no longer any kind of option.
  - mavhc 8y ago
    Did they create that F1 rule to see if better engines could be developed?
- vbuwivbiu 8y ago
  That's like arguing that cigarettes are a bit less harmful than they used to be. They're still a crap technology. Of all the possible ways to move a vehicle the ICE is the stupidest: essentially it's a device for burning oil as close to humans as possible while destroying the planet. Oh and by the way, those 'reduced' emissions were faked.