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I think this is inspirational but it seems like puffy popular science ("pseudo-science" may or may not be too strong?). I'll quote what I wrote to a friend abou

I think this is inspirational but it seems like puffy popular science ("pseudo-science" may or may not be too strong?). I'll quote what I wrote to a friend about this article: > It was intriguing and piqued my interest. However, it smells a lot like hyped-up crackpot science to me ... if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. There's a lot of vagueness here, "what ifs", etc. Like "What if we could evolve hardware to make use of hidden physics?" Yes, well, what if? What is "hidden physics"? And why doesn't the author try it? :-) > I looked briefly at his bio, and his background is "new media" and "addressing abstract social and technological ideas to mixed audiences" ... (computer) science, not so much. > That said, I do like the idea of reducing abstraction layers, getting closer to the hardware, and using seemingly-strange physics for what it's worth. I'm just very skeptical of his framing of it as something which could make everything 1000x faster overnight. > I remember reading a book years ago by "futurist" Michio Kaku called Visions. At the time I was really inspired by his "visions", which sounded very scientific. However, I think they were probably just vague, well, visions. This writing strikes me as similar.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
> What is "hidden physics"? Physics we don't know about. Our cells are doing that as we speak – though we'd probably call most of it “hidden biochemistry”. I think it unlikely that we'd stumble upon such “hidden physics” unless we were evolving objects at close to the atomic scale, but it's possible; perhaps there's some way of getting phonons to interact with each other that behaves like Brownian motion, and then you can get metaphonons? The author doesn't try it probably because the author doesn't know how. I don't try it because I suspect it's not possible with the technology I have access to.
ganafagol 6y ago
> That said, I do like the idea of reducing abstraction layers, getting closer to the hardware, Abstraction is THE tool to curb complexity. It's a feature that allows us to design, reason about, build, debug, maintain and extend systems with the complexity of todays computers. Reducing abstraction is in itself not a desirable goal. What could be useful is to reduce the overhead introduced by abstraction. Doing that by removing the abstraction itself is only one such way and a quite costly alternative.
wildermuthn 6y ago
In the realm of ideas about possibilities, isn’t his bio is somewhat irrelevant unless his background is in science fiction? I wouldn’t underestimate the power of good science fiction in inspiring science itself, or in the case of this essay/thought-piece, of inspiring existing and future research into alternative computing platforms and/or new paradigms of software execution on existing platforms. On my part, it reminded me to look back into FPGAs and weight-agnostic neural networks.

wizzwizz4 6y ago

> What is "hidden physics"? Physics we don't know about. Our cells are doing that as we speak – though we'd probably call most of it “hidden biochemistry”. I think it unlikely that we'd stumble upon such “hidden physics” unless we were evolving objects at close to the atomic scale, but it's possible; perhaps there's some way of getting phonons to interact with each other that behaves like Brownian motion, and then you can get metaphonons? The author doesn't try it probably because the author doesn't know how. I don't try it because I suspect it's not possible with the technology I have access to.

ganafagol 6y ago

> That said, I do like the idea of reducing abstraction layers, getting closer to the hardware, Abstraction is THE tool to curb complexity. It's a feature that allows us to design, reason about, build, debug, maintain and extend systems with the complexity of todays computers. Reducing abstraction is in itself not a desirable goal. What could be useful is to reduce the overhead introduced by abstraction. Doing that by removing the abstraction itself is only one such way and a quite costly alternative.

wildermuthn 6y ago

In the realm of ideas about possibilities, isn’t his bio is somewhat irrelevant unless his background is in science fiction? I wouldn’t underestimate the power of good science fiction in inspiring science itself, or in the case of this essay/thought-piece, of inspiring existing and future research into alternative computing platforms and/or new paradigms of software execution on existing platforms. On my part, it reminded me to look back into FPGAs and weight-agnostic neural networks.