My two picks for the category are reversible computers and space industries (in the long run).
For space industries like data centers, the logic of the post mostly checks out assuming you don’t have AIs that can fully automate the industries needed for space industries to be big, and human employment is optional, but if they do exist, then space becomes profitable because it’s way, way cheaper to send robotics/AIs up into space when you don’t need to support anything like livable conditions for standard humans, and the rewards of creating megastructures are much bigger (the main effect of megastructures in my mind is that they force a jump of 10-20 OOMs or more of compute power, meaning far, far more fields are amenable to full simulation without requiring empirical evidence, dramatically improving data efficiency of AI, for one example).
Harsimony’s post on the end of semiconductors and what comes next does sort of imply that he’d be convinced that reversible computers have a use case if space compute was more useful (to oversimplify things), so the space case on it’s own is probably enough, but I do have two points to make on computing tech, one general and one specialized to reversible computing specifically.
On reversible computers, I agree that you can’t make energy dissipation as heat go to 0, and that there’s a minimum energy calculated in this paper for all computing methods, which is likely much lower than classical, but not enough to make reversible computers have arbitrarily low energy at constant speed of computation.
That said, even just providing multiple OOMs worth of energy efficiency is enough, which I think is still likely inside the realm of possibility.
More general point is that I interpret the evidence for unconventional paradigms not mattering is happening in large part because we don’t need to do it, since chips already can get multiple OOMs of energy efficiency and we don’t need to invest in new approaches that soon, rather than fundamental limitations on unconventional computing.
Put another way, the demand for unconventional computing is low largely because there is no need to pick new paradigms to increase efficiency, not because they wouldn’t be valuable if successful.
My two picks for the category are reversible computers and space industries (in the long run).
For space industries like data centers, the logic of the post mostly checks out assuming you don’t have AIs that can fully automate the industries needed for space industries to be big, and human employment is optional, but if they do exist, then space becomes profitable because it’s way, way cheaper to send robotics/AIs up into space when you don’t need to support anything like livable conditions for standard humans, and the rewards of creating megastructures are much bigger (the main effect of megastructures in my mind is that they force a jump of 10-20 OOMs or more of compute power, meaning far, far more fields are amenable to full simulation without requiring empirical evidence, dramatically improving data efficiency of AI, for one example).
Harsimony’s post on the end of semiconductors and what comes next does sort of imply that he’d be convinced that reversible computers have a use case if space compute was more useful (to oversimplify things), so the space case on it’s own is probably enough, but I do have two points to make on computing tech, one general and one specialized to reversible computing specifically.
On reversible computers, I agree that you can’t make energy dissipation as heat go to 0, and that there’s a minimum energy calculated in this paper for all computing methods, which is likely much lower than classical, but not enough to make reversible computers have arbitrarily low energy at constant speed of computation.
That said, even just providing multiple OOMs worth of energy efficiency is enough, which I think is still likely inside the realm of possibility.
More general point is that I interpret the evidence for unconventional paradigms not mattering is happening in large part because we don’t need to do it, since chips already can get multiple OOMs of energy efficiency and we don’t need to invest in new approaches that soon, rather than fundamental limitations on unconventional computing.
Put another way, the demand for unconventional computing is low largely because there is no need to pick new paradigms to increase efficiency, not because they wouldn’t be valuable if successful.