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I think you'd be surprised. There are surprisingly few people who have a bone-deep understanding of much of the technology that modern civilisation relies on t

I think you'd be surprised. There are surprisingly few people who have a bone-deep understanding of much of the technology that modern civilisation relies on to function.

arketyp 4y ago
I can imagine this being true too. How do you come to these conclusions though?
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Pure anecdata. :) I know people who are one-of-a-few experts in technology that is critical to a particular industry, and there's not always good succession plans in place for when they retire. I could absolutely be wrong in this case - it might be well enough understood that you don't need decades of raw experience to begin to scratch the surface - but at the same time there really are so many advanced technologies held together by one or a few experts.
- jl6 4y ago
  I can believe it by extrapolating from my own domain (which is nothing to do with GPUs), where there are a bunch of people with mid-level knowledge, a very small number of people with deep knowledge, and an utterly tiny population of unique individuals who are the ultimate architects. I guess it’s a power law distribution like so many other things.
usr1106 4y ago
So if we suddenly had no GPUs what part of "modern civilization" would fail? Crypto markets, so what? Gaming, ok, I play card games on my year 2015 low end phone. And I could continue. Some startup that claims to do AI. (Actually I work for one, but not on the AI side). Appears to me the effects would be less than the pandemic or the Russian war.
- philistine 4y ago
  Your thought experiment is basically "what if computers could no longer display anything on a screen?" That is absolutely bigger than the pandemic or the Russian invasion.
  - usr1106 4y ago
    Some modern computers use the GPU to display everything. E.g. on Ryzens you don't even get a BIOS screen or text console without a GPU. However that's just design choice because they assume that a GPU would be there anyway. It worked without one for decades. However, what probably wouldn't work as well without GPUs is video production and consumption. Linux users knew that for years, when GPUs were poorly supported. Doing on the CPU does not give you the same resolution/framerate and requires more energy. Some might claim that watching less Youtube/Tiktok and reading more books or exercise outside instead would be good for "modern civilization".
- yellowapple 4y ago
  My first guess would be CAD being a lot harder, which would have a lot of widespread impacts on all sorts of industries.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I mean you are talking about trillions in economic value from those combined industries so while it may not measure up to the pandemic, few things would. And just because you personally prefer card games, a few billion people play video games. Also having a cheap phone from 2015 is quite an outlier. I absolutely get wanting to moderate tech use and I make full use of the digital wellness limiters to cut down on social media and interruptions, but phones are just so damn useful for just about everything in modern life. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater a bit there, no?
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    >phones are just so damn useful for just about everything in modern life Honestly, I'm not sure how true that is. I got rid of my smartphone just before my daughter was born (she's turning 2 this month) and there has never been a single point where I've regretted it. That's not to say I avoid Android entirely. I've still got a tablet at home for Netflix/Chromecast, and we'll use my wife's phone in the car for Google Maps, but that's about it. There really is no need to be 100% connected 24/7.
ineedasername 4y ago
Is bone deep knowledge required to know if fluctuation cause wear due to physical stress of heat/cooling cycles or something else? It seems like something that countless hardware designers would need to know. Certainly there are many more nuances to wear patterns than that, but that was kind of the basic question I was asking. But as I said originally I was asking from a position of interested though ignorant curiousity, so my assumption that most hardware designers would need to understand this sort is stress might be... discontinuous with the factual nature of the physical & human experiential phenomena relevant to the question. (e.g., stupid assumptions) :)

I think you'd be surprised. There are surprisingly few people who have a bone-deep understanding of much of the technology that modern civilisation relies on to function.

arketyp 4y ago

I can imagine this being true too. How do you come to these conclusions though?

AussieWog93 4y ago
Pure anecdata. :) I know people who are one-of-a-few experts in technology that is critical to a particular industry, and there's not always good succession plans in place for when they retire. I could absolutely be wrong in this case - it might be well enough understood that you don't need decades of raw experience to begin to scratch the surface - but at the same time there really are so many advanced technologies held together by one or a few experts.
jl6 4y ago
I can believe it by extrapolating from my own domain (which is nothing to do with GPUs), where there are a bunch of people with mid-level knowledge, a very small number of people with deep knowledge, and an utterly tiny population of unique individuals who are the ultimate architects. I guess it’s a power law distribution like so many other things.

usr1106 4y ago

So if we suddenly had no GPUs what part of "modern civilization" would fail? Crypto markets, so what? Gaming, ok, I play card games on my year 2015 low end phone. And I could continue. Some startup that claims to do AI. (Actually I work for one, but not on the AI side). Appears to me the effects would be less than the pandemic or the Russian war.

philistine 4y ago
Your thought experiment is basically "what if computers could no longer display anything on a screen?" That is absolutely bigger than the pandemic or the Russian invasion.
- usr1106 4y ago
  Some modern computers use the GPU to display everything. E.g. on Ryzens you don't even get a BIOS screen or text console without a GPU. However that's just design choice because they assume that a GPU would be there anyway. It worked without one for decades. However, what probably wouldn't work as well without GPUs is video production and consumption. Linux users knew that for years, when GPUs were poorly supported. Doing on the CPU does not give you the same resolution/framerate and requires more energy. Some might claim that watching less Youtube/Tiktok and reading more books or exercise outside instead would be good for "modern civilization".
yellowapple 4y ago
My first guess would be CAD being a lot harder, which would have a lot of widespread impacts on all sorts of industries.
dougmwne 4y ago
I mean you are talking about trillions in economic value from those combined industries so while it may not measure up to the pandemic, few things would. And just because you personally prefer card games, a few billion people play video games. Also having a cheap phone from 2015 is quite an outlier. I absolutely get wanting to moderate tech use and I make full use of the digital wellness limiters to cut down on social media and interruptions, but phones are just so damn useful for just about everything in modern life. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater a bit there, no?
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  >phones are just so damn useful for just about everything in modern life Honestly, I'm not sure how true that is. I got rid of my smartphone just before my daughter was born (she's turning 2 this month) and there has never been a single point where I've regretted it. That's not to say I avoid Android entirely. I've still got a tablet at home for Netflix/Chromecast, and we'll use my wife's phone in the car for Google Maps, but that's about it. There really is no need to be 100% connected 24/7.

ineedasername 4y ago

Is bone deep knowledge required to know if fluctuation cause wear due to physical stress of heat/cooling cycles or something else? It seems like something that countless hardware designers would need to know. Certainly there are many more nuances to wear patterns than that, but that was kind of the basic question I was asking. But as I said originally I was asking from a position of interested though ignorant curiousity, so my assumption that most hardware designers would need to understand this sort is stress might be... discontinuous with the factual nature of the physical & human experiential phenomena relevant to the question. (e.g., stupid assumptions) :)