authors

the report?

First, assume a spherical economy in a frictionless vacuum...

(/s)

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 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...?

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.

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).

To be fair, it was Puritan propaganda for a long time first.

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.

We need to find a way to limit its use for profit, while still allowing actual humans who need it to get as much of it as they need.

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.

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.

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.

And these are the people who are going to be most affected by inflation and other price shocks.

Most things aren't binary.

Google 100% has the choice not to include AI overviews. Which they know are often false.

It would mean egg on their face, to be sure, but would it even meaningfully impact revenue?

Oh, I don't, believe me! But the thing is, Putin is already doing this.

AIUI, he has been conscripting soldiers to fight in Ukraine for quite some time—to the point that he's had a hard time finding more conscripts already. I don't think there's much more he can do to force Russians onto the battlefield for him, wherever that battlefield is.