OK, well, I didn’t actually say the quoted bit next to my name—and in the referenced comment I was talking about something a bit different—but I’ll happily adopt the mantle of someone claiming that Moore’s law is a manifestation of an iterative self-improvement process where the developments in each generation go on to cumulatively accelerate the rate of progress that leads to the next.
Yes, Intel’s engineers have computers on their desks. But the serial speed or per-unit price of computing power is not, so far as I know, the limiting resource that bounds their research velocity.
I wouldn’t expect so either—that’s the wrong sum.
You’d probably have to ask someone at Intel to find out how much of their corporate income they spend on computing clusters / supercomputers, but I would guess it’s not much compared to how much they spend on salaries or fab plants.
Again that doesn’t tell us much of interest.
We seem to be agreed that the genetics of the human brain are for all intents and purposes in a state of stasis.
However, I see culture and machines educating and augmenting human intelligence (respectively) in a iterative fashion—leading to cumulative improvements over time—whereas you seem to barely acknowledge such effects.
How much is down to culture and machines—and how much is raw, native brain power? Well, the culture and machines make the difference between skyscrapers and spaceships and mud huts and horses—i.e. quite a bit of difference.
Give an agumented human an IQ test, and watch as she photographs the test with her cellphone, forwards the snapshots to an Indian IQ-test-solving sweat shop, and completes the test inside twenty minutes with a ridiculous score.
Sure Intel’s chips have only minor direct effects on productivity within Intel. However, they have effects all over the planet—they help the people who write software tools (that are then subsequently used by Intel). They help people on the internet—creating resources that are then accessed by Intel employees. They help other people designing other components of the computer systems Intel uses, monitors, screens, keyboards, etc. Intel CPUs are just one organ in the self-improving ecosystem that is human civilisation.
Essentially, this type of self-improvement cycle is the reason we observe steady progress over time. If we were not part of a self-improving system, we would not be observing a steady technological march forwards as time passes.
OK, well, I didn’t actually say the quoted bit next to my name—and in the referenced comment I was talking about something a bit different—but I’ll happily adopt the mantle of someone claiming that Moore’s law is a manifestation of an iterative self-improvement process where the developments in each generation go on to cumulatively accelerate the rate of progress that leads to the next.
I wouldn’t expect so either—that’s the wrong sum.
Again that doesn’t tell us much of interest.
We seem to be agreed that the genetics of the human brain are for all intents and purposes in a state of stasis.
However, I see culture and machines educating and augmenting human intelligence (respectively) in a iterative fashion—leading to cumulative improvements over time—whereas you seem to barely acknowledge such effects.
How much is down to culture and machines—and how much is raw, native brain power? Well, the culture and machines make the difference between skyscrapers and spaceships and mud huts and horses—i.e. quite a bit of difference.
Give an agumented human an IQ test, and watch as she photographs the test with her cellphone, forwards the snapshots to an Indian IQ-test-solving sweat shop, and completes the test inside twenty minutes with a ridiculous score.
Sure Intel’s chips have only minor direct effects on productivity within Intel. However, they have effects all over the planet—they help the people who write software tools (that are then subsequently used by Intel). They help people on the internet—creating resources that are then accessed by Intel employees. They help other people designing other components of the computer systems Intel uses, monitors, screens, keyboards, etc. Intel CPUs are just one organ in the self-improving ecosystem that is human civilisation.
Essentially, this type of self-improvement cycle is the reason we observe steady progress over time. If we were not part of a self-improving system, we would not be observing a steady technological march forwards as time passes.