Techmology
As i was driving home today, i thought about how totally cool my car is. I mean, it's really complex, with pistons whizzing up and down in the cylinders, coolant rushing around to keep the burning gasoline from melting stuff, oil lubricating the works, the power going through shafts and gears in the transmission, the tires getting all kinds of abuse from Michigan's terrible roads without complaining, the suspension and steering systems keeping the car comfortable and in control... it's totally amazing that it works so flawlessly and i pay so little attention to it. I rely on it without even thinking about it. Of course it'll work tomorrow morning when i need to go to work!And airplanes? They have these long aluminum tubes with wings glued (mostly) to the sides, with turbofan jet engines which spin stupidly fast, and burn some kind of hydrocarbon to toss themselves through the air, for amazing distances. There's countless airliners doing twelve hour flights right now, over the arctic, over the vast open water of the Pacific, over continents in a single trip... it astonishes me.
But you know what? We achieved that kind of reliability and performance back in the seventies. There's not been any huge improvements to airliners or cars in my lifetime. What has improved vastly in my lifetime is computers, and of course the level of automation allowed by computers has improved all areas of manufacturing and design, so cars and airliners are cheaper to build and better overall... but they're not as good as you'd expect them to be if you compare what they would have looked like 34 years before i was born - back in 1938.
So my biggest question about this is: will computers reach some kind of maturity and stop improving? Yes? No? When? If anyone actually cares, i have a good theory as to why they won't.
I would love to hear your theory Juanito. Eh?
-- jj - 31 December '06 - 20:23My theory: birds can fly, and they look pretty much like airplanes, right? With wings, a tail, and they go mostly forward just like planes. Millenia of development have not yielded any better forms for flying. Our brains have allowed us to come up with some improvements on flight, with turbofan engines, or helicopters. But aerodynamics limit our efficient speed to somewhere just below the speed of sound.
However, there’s no atmosphere through which we must process information. There’s no clear hardware power limits either – our brains are massively parallel processing machines, able to outstrip the greatest kilowatt consuming supercomputers made in raw computing power, and our brains use about 20 watts. So there’s no obvious limit to how much intelligence can grow, indeed, my best ideas about God is that God is infinitely intelligent, with the brains to maintain billions of galaxies with their complexity we can’t even speculate about, as well as maintain a loving personal relationship with tiny, insignificant me. What the? If my theory holds, computers will continue to be developed exponentially faster, not incrementally like so many other technologies.
I recommend Accellerando by Charles Stross. There’s a free, legal download right here.
-- juanito (Email) (URL) - 02 January '07 - 13:57