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Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machine

Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.

curtisblaine 4y ago
Unless they have other means of solving those calculations better than computers; in that case, call those other means "computers" and the study of older computers "retro-computing".
- em-bee 4y ago
  something like the amish, relying on 100 year old technology developed by humans instead of those newfangled tools that aliens brought that no human can understand.
actionfromafar 4y ago
1 is easy to imagine - a large enough collapse that making new ones is very very hard, especially compared to scrounging and repurposing the huge amount of existing ones. Imagine a huge population decline, and search parties looking through the ruins for useful tech, like computers, decades later. Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired. Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-)
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  No it isn't (No1 easy to imagine). Computers are only useful because we have a stable society that we can build on. Post apocalyptic societies have zero practical use for computers.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Post-apocalyptic doesn't necessarily mean unstable. We weren't post-apocalyptic back in the 1930s or 1950s, and computing machines had plenty of uses already (and even earlier).
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    > Post apocalyptic societies have zero practical use for computers. Post global nuclear war reconstruction would really benefit from having even a simple spreadsheet program to aid with resource allocation, wouldn’t it?
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      > Whatever you do with them [computers] is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. During a nuclear war reconstruction scenario, computing wouldn't be seen as ancient or unchanging. We'd be in a transitory period where we try and recreate computing infrastructure with what we have and the power sources we have access to. But we wouldn't develop an ancient tradition or anything.
  - speed_spread 4y ago
    At lot can be done with pen and paper but if you were rebuilding civilisation from scratch I'd be be happy to have a solar powered computer holding a copy of wikipedia and heaps of documentation to help me put to use any artifacts I'd find from the old world.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
Step 1 and 3 are, arguably, quite probable to happen in the future. I don't think you're appreciating just how many circular dependencies we have in the global supply chains. We're one big cataclysm or global war to reverting back to pre-industrial times, and if that were to happen, we'd likely be stuck there for quite a long time. Consider the following observations: A. For obvious reasons, we continuously improve tooling and processes. This creates circular dependencies that make our civilization non-restartable. As a toy example, imagine we made tool A, which let us create tool B, which let us, among other things, upgrade A to A'. A' can still produce B, but can also produce upgraded B'. B' obviously lets us make A'', but also C', and A'' + C' let us make B''. Rinse, repeat for a hundred years. The result is that the whole industry relies on tools A'''''''''' and B''''''''''. The hobbyists still play with A and B, maybe even A' and B', but there's nothing between A' and A'''''''''' in actual use or production, nor anyone who remembers their design, because they've all been made obsolete long ago. If the calamity hits, and we can no longer make new A'''''''''' and B'''''''''', we don't get to downgrade a step or two - we go back all the way to A' and B'. And all the other tools and technologies that also relied on our advanced capacity - they all stop working and go "back to beginning" in lock step. B. Making and operating tools involves ever increasing energy use. C. We've used up all easily-available high-density energy sources long ago. Both our renewable tech and our fossil fuel mining and combustion processes are A''''''''''-level tech. With that in mind, it's not that big of a stretch to write a plausible backstory for a culture as described in the article.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Even if we're ignoring wind and water power, boosted by charcoal, computers would be quite useful for lots of business purposes. And if things are so low tech, the long-distance communication would be far more impressive than the story suggests!
- dougmoscrop 4y ago
  I can't decide if I would enjoy reading real examples of these cycles. Just knowing how precarious the supply of natural rubber is, and how inadequate artifical solutions are (including prospective ones from continental), makes me uneasy, but I'll be damned if there isn't some kind of allure there as well. It seems almost certain that climate change is going to severely disrupt several of these cycles in decade or two, and a slightly different failure mode of what you allude to in C. is that our tech and processes become capped before we adequately scale up renewables, and overshoot kicks in and it's actually a negative feedback loop that certainly doesn't just stop with computers.
naravara 4y ago
I can imagine it, but it would require a lot of worldbuilding to explain. I reckon the primary means of computing for the lay person becomes interacting with prompts to make the computer do what you want, but the actual knowledge of software engineering and computer science is gone. Even the prompts, due to linguistic evolution, are in a language that regular people don't understand and people's mastery of the language is akin to moderns trying to reconstruct something like Akkadian. We sort of know what specific words mean and the general grammar, but we simply don't know 90% of the vocabulary to express most ideas. Whatever the language model was populated on training data from an archaic language and is also full of weird idioms and phrases and misspellings that we can't reconstruct in an organized way. In this context, the computers might be able to solve some basic problems for us, but everything we do with them is basically just received incantations from other crusty old people. Innovations keep happening, but they're small scale and mostly revolve around finding out new ways to tweak the incantations to do novel things. But the most we can do is say, like, "draw a picture" or "sort this list."
kaoD 4y ago
As I was reading the post I assumed (1) happened because something better came and completely replaced computers: magic, raw energy manipulation, biomachines, hextech... something like that.
sleepybrett 4y ago
1 happens every fucking day, hell wasn't there an article today about people who have older equipment that depend on floppy disks and how hard it is to find reliable disks these days? The article discussed an older embroidery machine, the only way to supply it with patterns to embroider was 3.5 inch floppy. His are starting to fail. But this is also true of older samplers, drum machines, synthesizers, etc. Sometimes someone manages to spin up new manufacturing of retro components or things to replace the retro components (there are a few pcbs running around that can replace floppy drives that conform to certain interfaces with usb sticks or sd cards or even a network): Vacuum tubes, parts for vintage cars, parts for vintage watches, vinyl records, etc. but often before that happens the entire known supply needs to be scavenged. So I can imagine a world where we manage to start doing the things we are doing with some new technology that is not digital silicon based computers that run on electricity. But there will be edges where the new technology is not compatible with some system, and in that edge lives this kind of speculation.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  We stop making specific models, and lose how to make spare parts for those models. We don't lose how to make the machines in general. This story would be completely different if the old silicon computers were replaced with neo-computers. Also for anything that uses a standard floppy drive there are cheap and plentiful adapters to use flash storage instead of disks.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    I have yet to see a thing I can insert into a floppy drive that will pretend to be a disk. I have seen plenty of things that can replace the drive itself with something that pretends to be a floppy drive. The problem with those are that not all equipment that uses floppy drives conforms to standards. If you have a 50 year old embroidery machine from a company that no longer even exists you'd need someone pretty fucking technical to pull that shit apart and figure out if any of those drive replacements will even work in your weirdass machine. If you are lucky your machine used some off the shelf drive from a reputable company (I've seen some old weird drum machines machines that had Apple Disk ][ drives hanging off them) but otherwise...

curtisblaine 4y ago

Unless they have other means of solving those calculations better than computers; in that case, call those other means "computers" and the study of older computers "retro-computing".

em-bee 4y ago
something like the amish, relying on 100 year old technology developed by humans instead of those newfangled tools that aliens brought that no human can understand.

actionfromafar 4y ago

1 is easy to imagine - a large enough collapse that making new ones is very very hard, especially compared to scrounging and repurposing the huge amount of existing ones. Imagine a huge population decline, and search parties looking through the ruins for useful tech, like computers, decades later. Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired. Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-)

olddustytrail 4y ago
No it isn't (No1 easy to imagine). Computers are only useful because we have a stable society that we can build on. Post apocalyptic societies have zero practical use for computers.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Post-apocalyptic doesn't necessarily mean unstable. We weren't post-apocalyptic back in the 1930s or 1950s, and computing machines had plenty of uses already (and even earlier).
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  > Post apocalyptic societies have zero practical use for computers. Post global nuclear war reconstruction would really benefit from having even a simple spreadsheet program to aid with resource allocation, wouldn’t it?
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    > Whatever you do with them [computers] is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. During a nuclear war reconstruction scenario, computing wouldn't be seen as ancient or unchanging. We'd be in a transitory period where we try and recreate computing infrastructure with what we have and the power sources we have access to. But we wouldn't develop an ancient tradition or anything.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  At lot can be done with pen and paper but if you were rebuilding civilisation from scratch I'd be be happy to have a solar powered computer holding a copy of wikipedia and heaps of documentation to help me put to use any artifacts I'd find from the old world.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

Step 1 and 3 are, arguably, quite probable to happen in the future. I don't think you're appreciating just how many circular dependencies we have in the global supply chains. We're one big cataclysm or global war to reverting back to pre-industrial times, and if that were to happen, we'd likely be stuck there for quite a long time. Consider the following observations: A. For obvious reasons, we continuously improve tooling and processes. This creates circular dependencies that make our civilization non-restartable. As a toy example, imagine we made tool A, which let us create tool B, which let us, among other things, upgrade A to A'. A' can still produce B, but can also produce upgraded B'. B' obviously lets us make A'', but also C', and A'' + C' let us make B''. Rinse, repeat for a hundred years. The result is that the whole industry relies on tools A'''''''''' and B''''''''''. The hobbyists still play with A and B, maybe even A' and B', but there's nothing between A' and A'''''''''' in actual use or production, nor anyone who remembers their design, because they've all been made obsolete long ago. If the calamity hits, and we can no longer make new A'''''''''' and B'''''''''', we don't get to downgrade a step or two - we go back all the way to A' and B'. And all the other tools and technologies that also relied on our advanced capacity - they all stop working and go "back to beginning" in lock step. B. Making and operating tools involves ever increasing energy use. C. We've used up all easily-available high-density energy sources long ago. Both our renewable tech and our fossil fuel mining and combustion processes are A''''''''''-level tech. With that in mind, it's not that big of a stretch to write a plausible backstory for a culture as described in the article.

Dylan16807 4y ago
Even if we're ignoring wind and water power, boosted by charcoal, computers would be quite useful for lots of business purposes. And if things are so low tech, the long-distance communication would be far more impressive than the story suggests!
dougmoscrop 4y ago
I can't decide if I would enjoy reading real examples of these cycles. Just knowing how precarious the supply of natural rubber is, and how inadequate artifical solutions are (including prospective ones from continental), makes me uneasy, but I'll be damned if there isn't some kind of allure there as well. It seems almost certain that climate change is going to severely disrupt several of these cycles in decade or two, and a slightly different failure mode of what you allude to in C. is that our tech and processes become capped before we adequately scale up renewables, and overshoot kicks in and it's actually a negative feedback loop that certainly doesn't just stop with computers.

naravara 4y ago

I can imagine it, but it would require a lot of worldbuilding to explain. I reckon the primary means of computing for the lay person becomes interacting with prompts to make the computer do what you want, but the actual knowledge of software engineering and computer science is gone. Even the prompts, due to linguistic evolution, are in a language that regular people don't understand and people's mastery of the language is akin to moderns trying to reconstruct something like Akkadian. We sort of know what specific words mean and the general grammar, but we simply don't know 90% of the vocabulary to express most ideas. Whatever the language model was populated on training data from an archaic language and is also full of weird idioms and phrases and misspellings that we can't reconstruct in an organized way. In this context, the computers might be able to solve some basic problems for us, but everything we do with them is basically just received incantations from other crusty old people. Innovations keep happening, but they're small scale and mostly revolve around finding out new ways to tweak the incantations to do novel things. But the most we can do is say, like, "draw a picture" or "sort this list."

kaoD 4y ago

As I was reading the post I assumed (1) happened because something better came and completely replaced computers: magic, raw energy manipulation, biomachines, hextech... something like that.

sleepybrett 4y ago

1 happens every fucking day, hell wasn't there an article today about people who have older equipment that depend on floppy disks and how hard it is to find reliable disks these days? The article discussed an older embroidery machine, the only way to supply it with patterns to embroider was 3.5 inch floppy. His are starting to fail. But this is also true of older samplers, drum machines, synthesizers, etc. Sometimes someone manages to spin up new manufacturing of retro components or things to replace the retro components (there are a few pcbs running around that can replace floppy drives that conform to certain interfaces with usb sticks or sd cards or even a network): Vacuum tubes, parts for vintage cars, parts for vintage watches, vinyl records, etc. but often before that happens the entire known supply needs to be scavenged. So I can imagine a world where we manage to start doing the things we are doing with some new technology that is not digital silicon based computers that run on electricity. But there will be edges where the new technology is not compatible with some system, and in that edge lives this kind of speculation.

Dylan16807 4y ago
We stop making specific models, and lose how to make spare parts for those models. We don't lose how to make the machines in general. This story would be completely different if the old silicon computers were replaced with neo-computers. Also for anything that uses a standard floppy drive there are cheap and plentiful adapters to use flash storage instead of disks.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  I have yet to see a thing I can insert into a floppy drive that will pretend to be a disk. I have seen plenty of things that can replace the drive itself with something that pretends to be a floppy drive. The problem with those are that not all equipment that uses floppy drives conforms to standards. If you have a 50 year old embroidery machine from a company that no longer even exists you'd need someone pretty fucking technical to pull that shit apart and figure out if any of those drive replacements will even work in your weirdass machine. If you are lucky your machine used some off the shelf drive from a reputable company (I've seen some old weird drum machines machines that had Apple Disk ][ drives hanging off them) but otherwise...