Yes, but have you seen what's happened to hardware improvements over the past 20 years?
From the 1960s to the mid-2000s, every 10 years you'd have a big enough improvement in computing power that you could basically throw out the old computers and replace them with two new ones that were each massive improvements for the same cost (this varied, of course, from hyperbole to massive understatement). We achieved this by shrinking transistors, so we could fit more onto the die. With that, we could dramatically increase clock speeds and the amount of RAM we could cram into a machine
But then we hit the wall of physics. Things haven't stopped improving since ~2015, but they've slowed down so, so much. We've made transistors so small that there's very little more improvement we can get by continuing down that path—they're already seeing serious quantum tunneling effects that need to be adjusted for.
We can no longer assume that we can just powerscale our way out of any computation-cost problem. And breakthroughs, by their very nature, cannot be relied upon—we have no guarantee that there's even a possible way to improve our silicon to scale the way we did before, let alone that it'll be something achievable this decade, or that it'll be cost-effective.
The bottleneck right now isn't making hardware more powerful, it's manufacturing it fast enough. Hardware right now is expensive because of scarcity, and those with a monopoly on it have no incentive to change that.
The Chinese would love to produce AI hardware much cheaper, but are blocked from doing so because US sanctions stop a Dutch company from selling them the machines capable of doing so. Coincidentally the companies with a monopoly happen to be in the US.
There's a big difference between physical products, which, once the government has them, it can just use them, and digital infrastructure, which has a number of issues.
The two big ones I see off the top of my head are:
1) Once the government has paid for digital services from some private company, they are then providing those digital services to their country's public.
2) Because of that, they are then also storing their people's data in those systems.
If (say) Ford decides they don't like the government of (say) Belgium, and don't want to sell them any more transit vans (or whatever), that's not really a huge deal. Belgium has the vans already, and they can just get another supplier for the next set.
If Microsoft decides they don't like the government of Belgium, even if they don't decide to do anything nefarious with the data (which is absolutely a real concern, both from malice and incompetence), they can shut off their services overnight and then the people of Belgium have no governmental websites or digital services. (And if they have a contract that says they can't...well, what's Belgium going to do about it? Ask Trump real real nice to make Microsoft keep the lights on?) Or, even if they're perfectly polite and commit to an orderly transition, Belgium still has to put in absolutely massive amounts of time, effort, and money to select a new vendor and migrate all their data and retrain all their people on the completely different interfaces and such.
Whereas when they start buying new vans from Mercedes...the drivers might have to remember that the radio's volume knob is 5cm away from where it was in the Fords...?
Because it doesn't matter what you say to the bot. You might as well have a conversation with yourself about the PR.
The bot isn't making decisions. It's not choosing to submit extensive PRs with bad code. The colleague is the one who needs to actually learn something here, and the problem is that confronting him about it directly is widely considered to be bad form. This is, of course, a deeply unhealthy aspect of our corporate culture. We need to be more open to honest communication, even when it's either uncomplimentary of one of the people involved, or counter to the prevailing opinions within the company.
Most sci-fi from prior to the smartphone age did not foresee pocket-sized interconnected computing and communications devices, and certainly did not foresee how they would be commonly used. Where they addressed it at all, they largely predicted computing to either remain in roughly the form factors of the ages they were writing in, or move to something holographic and largely impractical, with the most commonly-expected advancement being sentience (and that sentience being expected well before 2026 in many cases—eg, 2001: A Space Odyssey).
Despite certain people's protestations to the contrary, we are nowhere near having a human-level conversational computer assistant able to fuzzily interpret our requests correctly every time...but our computing is also not primarily done on "comconsoles" or any of the other versions of stationary computers, nor are we jabbing and swiping our hands at interfaces projected on the air in front of us.
More generally speaking, except in the hardest of hard sci-fi, the most common kinds of advancement "predicted" are those that are convenient for the story. This means a lot of faster-than-light travel, universal translators, and for visual media many voice-enabled interfaces of one sort or another, as well as the aforementioned holographic interfaces (so we can see the user's face and the interface at the same time).
In Dan Simmons' Hyperion, the characters have a device called comlog. It's a portable device which connects to a broad network. It also has the ability to read vital constants.
The author is quite vague about it, no doubt, and that's one of his staples. But he foresaw something human would carry to get connected to other humans and information.
Neat, and one I haven't heard of! But the existence of one or a small handful of sci-fi authors who happened to predict it doesn't change the fact that they're the exception, few and far between. Search through the vast library of science fiction written in the past century and a half and you will find at least one example of something you can interpret as predicting almost any modern technology. But there are elements that become much more prominent, whether because they become individually well-known, or because they spread through an entire branch of the genre, and nothing that looks particularly like smartphones was among them.
There's been a fair amount of research done on this, and while Marx's alienation theory isn't totally out there, what makes the most difference for workers is autonomy and purpose. We need to feel like we have some control over what we do, and like what we do is meaningful.
That's easier with things like farming, but it's totally possible with highly-automated jobs; you just can't have managers treating us like we're machines.
Leaving aside whether a carbon tax would be an effective solution to CO2 (I genuinely don't know), there's no reason to suspect it would be an effective solution to our water crisis, particularly given the huge growth in solar recently.
Datacenters don't need cooling because they're burning gas for their power. They need cooling because computation produces heat. Even if they were feeding as much clean solar power back into the grid as they were using, we would still need to find a solution to their voracious thirst.
Ultimately 'profit' is the result of transitive dependencies on things people want fulfill what they are willing to pay for. But I agree that we should subsidize residential water and electricity usage. But the base price before subsidy should reflect the externalities.
Georgists have figured this out long ago. To make a regressive tax progressive all you need to do is turn the revenue gained from it into a flat per capita tax rebate. Also residential water use is tiny. Maybe your water bill goes up $400 a year but that doesnt matter when you get a $1000 rebate because most of the tax is paid by agriculture.
From what I understand, there's a very good chance that Venezuelan forces of some kind collaborated on that—possibly to the point of delivering Maduro gift-wrapped.
> OBVIOUSLY if you absolutely HAVE to spend money because your life depends on it
Food. Clothing. Shelter.
For most people in the world, all or nearly all (or, in some cases, more than all!) of their annual earnings go toward these absolute necessities.
The way you talk here makes you sound incredibly out of touch, as if you think everyone has vast amounts of disposable income they can just chuck toward whatever investment opportunity looks best at the time.
> Change the comment to say "the tax rate keeps climbing so I quit working" and it would not occur to anyone to challenge it.
Um, what?
Many people would challenge that, because it's absolutely bonkers.
The only way it could possibly make sense is if you're already wealthy enough to be able to retire. Which cuts out nearly everyone, even on this hopelessly-skewed forum.
From the 1960s to the mid-2000s, every 10 years you'd have a big enough improvement in computing power that you could basically throw out the old computers and replace them with two new ones that were each massive improvements for the same cost (this varied, of course, from hyperbole to massive understatement). We achieved this by shrinking transistors, so we could fit more onto the die. With that, we could dramatically increase clock speeds and the amount of RAM we could cram into a machine
But then we hit the wall of physics. Things haven't stopped improving since ~2015, but they've slowed down so, so much. We've made transistors so small that there's very little more improvement we can get by continuing down that path—they're already seeing serious quantum tunneling effects that need to be adjusted for.
We can no longer assume that we can just powerscale our way out of any computation-cost problem. And breakthroughs, by their very nature, cannot be relied upon—we have no guarantee that there's even a possible way to improve our silicon to scale the way we did before, let alone that it'll be something achievable this decade, or that it'll be cost-effective.
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