The USP of the bicycle is that it negates gravity, so that personal lateral translation becomes a matter of managing only inertia & momentum, not also managing energy-lossy movement up and down the gravity well.
So an analogous USP of computer tech would be... the negation of paper ?
To me, it's always fascinating to think about computing up until maybe the early aughts; that seemes to be the point where there was a sort of compute scarcity; which culminated with the limit of not being able to play more than one video at once on a Windows PC. Further back, you had Steve Jobs seemingly evangelizing from the rooftops about the Mac and, by extension, personal computers being a bicycle of the mind. Back then people had so little to work with, but it seemed like the imagination of solutions were endless.
And here we are, today, with pocket computers whose market was broken by corporate interests, magnitudes more powerful than any $10,000 pc from even 1999, but their intended usage is for 'consumption.' Sure, you can record videos, or take a high quality video, but, for the most part, you can't use them for general compute. You can't setup a database server that would use maybe a cpu core or two of an iphone. The sort of solutions people dreamed of seemed to have been forgotten.
Now we have AI, though, which makes our computers feel limited again. Even with the sophistication of the most bleeding edge flagship GPU from nvidia, you need a massive array to run something like chatGPT, which is still error prone and hallucinates. Can anyone even actually fathom what kind of leaps in techology we'll need to even approach AGI? Will we be any closer to that in 30 years, when people will buy 4090s and H100s for a couple of dollars on ebay for "retro builds" and youtube videos? Or will we enter a sort of dark age induced by the laws of physics, where the sort of progress made in the moores law era of computing becomes a distant memory, and shrinking transistors become an increasing quixotic battle?
The USP of the bicycle is that it negates gravity, so that personal lateral translation becomes a matter of managing only inertia & momentum, not also managing energy-lossy movement up and down the gravity well.
So an analogous USP of computer tech would be... the negation of paper ?
To me, it's always fascinating to think about computing up until maybe the early aughts; that seemes to be the point where there was a sort of compute scarcity; which culminated with the limit of not being able to play more than one video at once on a Windows PC. Further back, you had Steve Jobs seemingly evangelizing from the rooftops about the Mac and, by extension, personal computers being a bicycle of the mind. Back then people had so little to work with, but it seemed like the imagination of solutions were endless.
And here we are, today, with pocket computers whose market was broken by corporate interests, magnitudes more powerful than any $10,000 pc from even 1999, but their intended usage is for 'consumption.' Sure, you can record videos, or take a high quality video, but, for the most part, you can't use them for general compute. You can't setup a database server that would use maybe a cpu core or two of an iphone. The sort of solutions people dreamed of seemed to have been forgotten.
Now we have AI, though, which makes our computers feel limited again. Even with the sophistication of the most bleeding edge flagship GPU from nvidia, you need a massive array to run something like chatGPT, which is still error prone and hallucinates. Can anyone even actually fathom what kind of leaps in techology we'll need to even approach AGI? Will we be any closer to that in 30 years, when people will buy 4090s and H100s for a couple of dollars on ebay for "retro builds" and youtube videos? Or will we enter a sort of dark age induced by the laws of physics, where the sort of progress made in the moores law era of computing becomes a distant memory, and shrinking transistors become an increasing quixotic battle?