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There's a lot of headroom left in the efficiency of computation, and human development more generally. For example, the marginal cost of R&D is tending towards
by infogulch 5y ago
There's a lot of headroom left in the efficiency of computation, and human development more generally. For example, the marginal cost of R&D is tending towards zero as modeling software enables designers to experiment with millions of potential designs with the same energy that it used to take to develop and test one.
- dredmorbius 5y agoComputation is one place where increased efficiencies seem to have only very limited impacts on other process efficiency. There's also been a tremendous tendency for gains to be eroded through additional ancillary compute tasks, as well as malevolent applications. Where do you see computation having delivered actual real-world increased efficiencies on the same order of magnitude as the increase in compute efficiencies? From 1960 to present we've seen 60 years of doubling every 3 years, roughly 20 doublings or a millionfold performance increase. What compute-driven applications have seen 1-million-times efficiency gains? What overall economic impact (GDP increases) have these created?