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I was waiting for someone to bring up human brains. I'm reading Dune now, and much of the HN-crowd that in the Duniverse they don't have computers because of a

by bgroat 5y ago

I was waiting for someone to bring up human brains. I'm reading Dune now, and much of the HN-crowd that in the Duniverse they don't have computers because of a past AI war. What's a little bit less known is that one of the factions in the universe (The Bene Tleilax) actually dabbled with building computers in within the time-span of the narrative. They concluded that it just wasn't worth it. Trained human intellects (augmented with spice) were just better. Now, obviously we don't have access to spice in our reality... but we also aren't doing FTL travel calculations. So maybe we don't need it

jerf 5y ago
Recall that Dune was published in 1965. It took a bold science fiction author to predict the degree that computers would advance even in the 1980s (Nueromancer, 1984, for instance), and it wouldn't fully penetrate scifi for quite a while. Prior to that you'd get a lot of things called "computers" but had very strange performance characteristics. One of my favorites in hindsight is Asimov's Robot series. This is a universe where the Eniac flashing-light-style computer is the height of computing technology, but we can build sentient, human-class brains to stick in robots, and occasionally use outside of robots. A very, very weird technology landscape if you think about it for a while. In isolation, there's a lot of interesting-in-hindsight "hits" in scifi that predict this or that aspect of the modern computerized world, but in totality I'd say the power computers have, the speed with which they acquired them, and their widespread availability was a "miss" for science fiction. Arguably they were even a little late to the party, having to see some of these come from real engineered products before they started showing up in stories. But I don't really criticize them for it... rationally and abstractly, predicting that much exponential advance across that many fronts of performance was arguably not a smart bet. It happened, so it's true, but even in hindsight I'm not sure I could prove that it was some sort of inevitability that everyone should have seen coming. In 1965, it would still be possible to believe that humans, especially bred for the task for a few thousand years and augmented with drugs, would outdo computers forever. In 2021, I find the premise less compelling. I don't care how you try to arrange it, the current people staffing AWS couldn't themselves replace AWS, not even with hundreds of years of breeding for the purpose and a steady feed of drugs. Too many exaFLOPS.

by bgroat 5y ago

jerf 5y ago

Recall that Dune was published in 1965. It took a bold science fiction author to predict the degree that computers would advance even in the 1980s (Nueromancer, 1984, for instance), and it wouldn't fully penetrate scifi for quite a while. Prior to that you'd get a lot of things called "computers" but had very strange performance characteristics. One of my favorites in hindsight is Asimov's Robot series. This is a universe where the Eniac flashing-light-style computer is the height of computing technology, but we can build sentient, human-class brains to stick in robots, and occasionally use outside of robots. A very, very weird technology landscape if you think about it for a while. In isolation, there's a lot of interesting-in-hindsight "hits" in scifi that predict this or that aspect of the modern computerized world, but in totality I'd say the power computers have, the speed with which they acquired them, and their widespread availability was a "miss" for science fiction. Arguably they were even a little late to the party, having to see some of these come from real engineered products before they started showing up in stories. But I don't really criticize them for it... rationally and abstractly, predicting that much exponential advance across that many fronts of performance was arguably not a smart bet. It happened, so it's true, but even in hindsight I'm not sure I could prove that it was some sort of inevitability that everyone should have seen coming. In 1965, it would still be possible to believe that humans, especially bred for the task for a few thousand years and augmented with drugs, would outdo computers forever. In 2021, I find the premise less compelling. I don't care how you try to arrange it, the current people staffing AWS couldn't themselves replace AWS, not even with hundreds of years of breeding for the purpose and a steady feed of drugs. Too many exaFLOPS.