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I don't buy this whole idea of technological progress being exponential, let alone monotonic. The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower

I don't buy this whole idea of technological progress being exponential, let alone monotonic. The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain than the average piece of software from 2001. Consumer-grade CPUs haven't seen a drastic increase in performance for around a decade too. I'm still running an i7-2600k that was released in 2010. A current-tech Ryzen 7 has maybe 30-50% better performance per core, and 2x the number of cores. In 2000, we were still using 800Mhz single-core Athlons. More broadly, we haven't seemed to have a breakthrough on the scale of penicillin, the steam engine, the assembly line or the transistor since the turn of the millennium (with the possible exception of CRISPR). I just don't seem to be able to share in the optimism of people like Altman and Kurzweil when it comes to technological progress like this.

cma 6y ago
Compare voice recognition in 2001 to 2021.
- nielsole 6y ago
  I tend to forget how unthinkable good image recognition was just ten years ago: e.g. https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
  - sxp 6y ago
    That wasn't even 10 years ago. The comic was 9/24/2014: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks I was working on Google Image Search at the time and recognizing photos of animals was bleeding edge tech. It's now a AI 101 project using an off-the-shelf DNN stack.
  - divbzero 6y ago
    Yes, or how truck driving was cited as an example of a job difficult to replace with computers.
- AussieWog93 6y ago
  To be honest with you, if you look at the technology as a whole, I prefer what we had in 2001. Back then it was completely unusable (as opposed to now, where it's only borderline unusable), but at least it wasn't shoved down your throat by smartphone manufacturers and Google.
  - whitepaint 6y ago
    -
    - AussieWog93 6y ago
      I'm assuming you're a non-native speaker? The definite article "the" indicates that I'm talking specifically about voice recognition technology. Of course other areas have improved peoples' lives in meaningful ways, such as C++11 and video streaming (although I'd argue Zoom is worse than the telephone in almost every instance it's deployed).
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - fsflover 6y ago
    In 2021, you have a possibility to buy GNU/Linux smartphones and abandon Google and Apple.
  - potatoman22 6y ago
    Yeah, let's just stop all technological progress. That way it can't be exponential!
Simon321 6y ago
Computer power is still growing exponentially without a doubt: https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ Software efficiency seems to be exponential in many places as well: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-... That doesn't mean ALL technology progress is exponential, people like Altman or Kurzweil don't make that claim either. But as more things become more digitised they will benefit from Moore's law more and more and progress might become exponential there also due to their dependence on computing power.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  > Software efficiency seems to be exponential in many places as well No, in one place. That single example gets touted again and again, but it's just a single class of algorithms, and much of the cited performance gains are from a small set of well-known example problems. (I took Professor Groetschel's linear optimisation class at university). In compilers, for example, progress is much more "majestic": Proebsting's law [1] was shown to be wildly optimistic even back in 2001 [2]: "The reality is somewhat grimmer than Proebsting initially supposed." More recently, it seems like progress has pretty much stalled for most applications, for example: "Using Stabilizer, we find that, across the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite, the effect of the -O3 optimization level versus -O2 is indistinguishable from noise." [3] But while returns are diminishing, the costs of obtaining those diminishing returns have gone up tremendously ("exponentially"?) For example, Minix's time to compile itself (including the compiler) apparently went from 10 minutes to over 2 hours when they switched from their own compiler to clang.[4] For Plan9 the same switch caused times to go from 45 seconds to over 2 hours [5]. And with Swift we get even longer compile times, including the compiler giving up on one-liners after a minute, and the result is slower, too! I could give many more examples, but generally Wirth's law holds: software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. [1] http://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html http://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html [2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=66C1E2905709DBA32EC8D58642284A77?doi=10.1.1.29.434&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=66C... [3] https://emeryberger.com/research/stabilizer/ https://emeryberger.com/research/stabilizer/ [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26452155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26452155 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26452392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26452392
jay_kyburz 6y ago
I don't know about the average software, but my primary tools, Unity 3D and Blender are both significantly more productive than what I was using in 2001. (Was in the same industry). I think a lot of software is just "done" and we see a lot of churn for no real reason. Office software like email, word, and excel are just moving buttons around at this point.
fsflover 6y ago
> The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain This is because there is a lot more software nowadays. Most of it is crap, but there is enough good software for everything.
thebigspacefuck 6y ago
It’s almost like if progress isn’t happening in the one particular area you care about, it isn’t really happening at all?
kilroy123 6y ago
I agree. Not to mention is it all really that different? I'm a little bit older, and admittedly I was living in the future when I was younger, but 20 years ago wasn't that different for me. Back in 2001, I was sitting on a computer even a laptop! I was reading conversations on the internet, watching videos, and listening to music. Not much has changed in 20 years. I have a better pocket computer. I had a smartphone back in 2003. Yeah the iPhone > than blackberry, but not by that much.
- obedm 6y ago
  Consider that you grew up in the most technology advanced part of the world. In 2001 we had dial-up and an IBM machine with paint. I was probably one of the few kids with a computer. Technology is not homogenous across the globe, and advancement also means lots of people getting access to what we consider the norm.

cma 6y ago

Compare voice recognition in 2001 to 2021.

nielsole 6y ago
I tend to forget how unthinkable good image recognition was just ten years ago: e.g. https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- sxp 6y ago
  That wasn't even 10 years ago. The comic was 9/24/2014: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks I was working on Google Image Search at the time and recognizing photos of animals was bleeding edge tech. It's now a AI 101 project using an off-the-shelf DNN stack.
- divbzero 6y ago
  Yes, or how truck driving was cited as an example of a job difficult to replace with computers.
AussieWog93 6y ago
To be honest with you, if you look at the technology as a whole, I prefer what we had in 2001. Back then it was completely unusable (as opposed to now, where it's only borderline unusable), but at least it wasn't shoved down your throat by smartphone manufacturers and Google.
- whitepaint 6y ago
  -
  - AussieWog93 6y ago
    I'm assuming you're a non-native speaker? The definite article "the" indicates that I'm talking specifically about voice recognition technology. Of course other areas have improved peoples' lives in meaningful ways, such as C++11 and video streaming (although I'd argue Zoom is worse than the telephone in almost every instance it's deployed).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- fsflover 6y ago
  In 2021, you have a possibility to buy GNU/Linux smartphones and abandon Google and Apple.
- potatoman22 6y ago
  Yeah, let's just stop all technological progress. That way it can't be exponential!

Simon321 6y ago

Computer power is still growing exponentially without a doubt: https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ Software efficiency seems to be exponential in many places as well: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-... That doesn't mean ALL technology progress is exponential, people like Altman or Kurzweil don't make that claim either. But as more things become more digitised they will benefit from Moore's law more and more and progress might become exponential there also due to their dependence on computing power.

mpweiher 6y ago
> Software efficiency seems to be exponential in many places as well No, in one place. That single example gets touted again and again, but it's just a single class of algorithms, and much of the cited performance gains are from a small set of well-known example problems. (I took Professor Groetschel's linear optimisation class at university). In compilers, for example, progress is much more "majestic": Proebsting's law [1] was shown to be wildly optimistic even back in 2001 [2]: "The reality is somewhat grimmer than Proebsting initially supposed." More recently, it seems like progress has pretty much stalled for most applications, for example: "Using Stabilizer, we find that, across the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite, the effect of the -O3 optimization level versus -O2 is indistinguishable from noise." [3] But while returns are diminishing, the costs of obtaining those diminishing returns have gone up tremendously ("exponentially"?) For example, Minix's time to compile itself (including the compiler) apparently went from 10 minutes to over 2 hours when they switched from their own compiler to clang.[4] For Plan9 the same switch caused times to go from 45 seconds to over 2 hours [5]. And with Swift we get even longer compile times, including the compiler giving up on one-liners after a minute, and the result is slower, too! I could give many more examples, but generally Wirth's law holds: software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. [1] http://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html http://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html [2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=66C1E2905709DBA32EC8D58642284A77?doi=10.1.1.29.434&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=66C... [3] https://emeryberger.com/research/stabilizer/ https://emeryberger.com/research/stabilizer/ [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26452155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26452155 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26452392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26452392

jay_kyburz 6y ago

I don't know about the average software, but my primary tools, Unity 3D and Blender are both significantly more productive than what I was using in 2001. (Was in the same industry). I think a lot of software is just "done" and we see a lot of churn for no real reason. Office software like email, word, and excel are just moving buttons around at this point.

fsflover 6y ago

> The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain This is because there is a lot more software nowadays. Most of it is crap, but there is enough good software for everything.

thebigspacefuck 6y ago

It’s almost like if progress isn’t happening in the one particular area you care about, it isn’t really happening at all?

kilroy123 6y ago

I agree. Not to mention is it all really that different? I'm a little bit older, and admittedly I was living in the future when I was younger, but 20 years ago wasn't that different for me. Back in 2001, I was sitting on a computer even a laptop! I was reading conversations on the internet, watching videos, and listening to music. Not much has changed in 20 years. I have a better pocket computer. I had a smartphone back in 2003. Yeah the iPhone > than blackberry, but not by that much.

obedm 6y ago
Consider that you grew up in the most technology advanced part of the world. In 2001 we had dial-up and an IBM machine with paint. I was probably one of the few kids with a computer. Technology is not homogenous across the globe, and advancement also means lots of people getting access to what we consider the norm.