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> Process scaling is coming to an end and it is a social imperative that we find a new path to extend the Moore's Law exponential. ... is it? Are our human rig

> Process scaling is coming to an end and it is a social imperative that we find a new path to extend the Moore's Law exponential. ... is it? Are our human rights at risk here? This sentence feels weird.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Indeed, I can think of a few areas of progress where social imperative is much greater, such as agriculture, healthcare and carbon free energy
- mediocregopher 5y ago
  Can you explain _why_ it's so important to you? I literally don't get it, but I've also always assumed Moore's Law would run out eventually, so my worldview has that baked in.
- hinkley 5y ago
  You can only solve the problems you understand, and human knowledge and civilization have expanded to the point where people are not interchangeable. I only know enough about the carbon and agriculture problems that I can explain them to other techies. I can't solve them. I can't even be sure my advice on which legislation needs to pass or be repealed is right. It's all a semi-educated guess. We are a giant parallel engine and insisting that we order all work crashes the capacity of the system to a rounding error. It's actively psychologically damaging because it gatekeeps people out of acknowledging that they can help be part of a solution instead of pretending to be silent witnesses to the effort of others.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "insisting that we order all work crashes the capacity of the system to a rounding error" I am not arguing "no-one gets to party untill we solve world hunger", I am questioning the 'social imperative claim' - computer performance has improved what, 3-5x in the last 5 years? It's not clear to me how this has benefitted the average Joe in a measurable way, who is struggling to put food on the table. By contrast, if energy/food prices fell 5x, or became x more nutritious, the impact would be hard to miss. Even reduced prices of space rockets seem to have made more of a difference.
    - azeirah 5y ago
      I personally think it has to do with the belief that improvements in ALL important areas such as agriculture, energy, medicine etc are supported strongly by increased computational power. This is perhaps a belief, an ideology, an assumption or perhaps a theory. It doesn't matter much what you call it. The important part is to understand that computation today plays a similar role as to what mathematics did before we got computation. Interestingly enough, Alan Kay performed a talk a couple of years ago about this topic, questioning why despite sustained growth and investment into computing power in medicine, medicine discovery was actually _dropping_ as a result. I don't recall exactly if it was "medicine discovery", but it was something important related to that idea. So, that's an important topic to discuss if you hold the belief that computation will improve all areas of living in invisible ways by being some sort of mathematical infrastructure or whatever you want to call it.
betwixthewires 5y ago
It does feel weird, in general I'm averse to terms like "social imperative", but what I like to think the author is getting at is that humanity can get vastly more utility out of computing if we move away from this abstraction layer between the operations we want to perform and the hardware we perform them on. General purpose hardware is great when you're working out what sorts of things you want to do with it, experimenting, but when you already know exactly what you want to do it is extremely inefficient, and just churning out a machine that does exactly what you want is much better for everybody.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

Indeed, I can think of a few areas of progress where social imperative is much greater, such as agriculture, healthcare and carbon free energy

mediocregopher 5y ago
Can you explain _why_ it's so important to you? I literally don't get it, but I've also always assumed Moore's Law would run out eventually, so my worldview has that baked in.
hinkley 5y ago
You can only solve the problems you understand, and human knowledge and civilization have expanded to the point where people are not interchangeable. I only know enough about the carbon and agriculture problems that I can explain them to other techies. I can't solve them. I can't even be sure my advice on which legislation needs to pass or be repealed is right. It's all a semi-educated guess. We are a giant parallel engine and insisting that we order all work crashes the capacity of the system to a rounding error. It's actively psychologically damaging because it gatekeeps people out of acknowledging that they can help be part of a solution instead of pretending to be silent witnesses to the effort of others.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "insisting that we order all work crashes the capacity of the system to a rounding error" I am not arguing "no-one gets to party untill we solve world hunger", I am questioning the 'social imperative claim' - computer performance has improved what, 3-5x in the last 5 years? It's not clear to me how this has benefitted the average Joe in a measurable way, who is struggling to put food on the table. By contrast, if energy/food prices fell 5x, or became x more nutritious, the impact would be hard to miss. Even reduced prices of space rockets seem to have made more of a difference.
  - azeirah 5y ago
    I personally think it has to do with the belief that improvements in ALL important areas such as agriculture, energy, medicine etc are supported strongly by increased computational power. This is perhaps a belief, an ideology, an assumption or perhaps a theory. It doesn't matter much what you call it. The important part is to understand that computation today plays a similar role as to what mathematics did before we got computation. Interestingly enough, Alan Kay performed a talk a couple of years ago about this topic, questioning why despite sustained growth and investment into computing power in medicine, medicine discovery was actually _dropping_ as a result. I don't recall exactly if it was "medicine discovery", but it was something important related to that idea. So, that's an important topic to discuss if you hold the belief that computation will improve all areas of living in invisible ways by being some sort of mathematical infrastructure or whatever you want to call it.

betwixthewires 5y ago

It does feel weird, in general I'm averse to terms like "social imperative", but what I like to think the author is getting at is that humanity can get vastly more utility out of computing if we move away from this abstraction layer between the operations we want to perform and the hardware we perform them on. General purpose hardware is great when you're working out what sorts of things you want to do with it, experimenting, but when you already know exactly what you want to do it is extremely inefficient, and just churning out a machine that does exactly what you want is much better for everybody.