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> When you have exponential growth, it's always early days. Let‘s take the development of CPUs where for 30-40 years the observable performance actually did gr

• falcor84 1y ago
  In a way, yes, I think that rise smartphones and the resulting proliferation of cheap mobile processors was ground-shattering in terms of what we consider to be a computer. If I'm reading the numbers correctly, there are about 2B people with their own pc/laptop while there are about 5B people with their own smartphone. So 60% of people using computing do so on a type of device that didn't exist in 2005. And this is before we talk about new modalities that might take over in the future, like VR/AR, wearable AI "pins" (which is what I assume that Johnny Ive is working on), neural interfaces, and maybe even quantum computing. So I personally don't see any issue of thinking of what happened 20 years ago, and what's happening at the moment as "early days for computers". This is of course a semantics argument, but in my mind "early days" is a term for the time before things stabilized, and I'm very unclear on what that means for a field that's continuously undergoing rapid growth. As another extreme case - what would you say were the "early days" for life on planet Earth? I assume that most people wouldn't be thinking of just the first 50 years after the first RNA molecules got enclosed in a membrane.