The issue is that our technology has essentially plateaued in a lot of areas. There was a podcast/interview I watched a while back between Lex Fridman and John Carmack a while back that touched on exactly what you're talking about. I'm too busy to go back through that 5 hour interview to find the specific spot, but Carmack mentioned that dimensions on chips have shrunk to the point to where we have actually witnessed quantum tunneling, or in this case, electrons hopping across contacts in ways it theoretically shouldn't be able to under our conventional understanding of physics. The smaller the die, the more often it occurs, to the point where it creates frequency noise that is just accepted as a byproduct to be brute-forced though. I, as you might have figured, am not an expert in quantum physics, so this is just my understanding as explained by someone more intelligent then myself. The interview as a whole is an interesting listen, Jon Carmack is an absolute well of knowledge and does an okay job at explaining things to those who aren't as intimately familiar with a subject. His QuakeCon keynotes and college lectures are also good listens, the man can talk for hours.
Massive John Carmack fan. Bonus points for being a geek but getting buff and driving a Ferrari. Extra (chk) bonus (chk) points for (chk) having a (chk) speech impediment (chk). He's a great teacher and anyone who has messed around with a bit of computer programming or 3D Modeling can take something from his "lectures".
The issue is that our technology has essentially plateaued in a lot of areas.
The period from around 1950 I think it was to something like 1975, let's say, saw as much industrial output and scientific advancement as the previous 150 years. Since then, it's tailed off. Still no cure for cancer and pretty sure we won't see one now. Middle of last Century? You wouldn't have bet against it.
As for computing. Computers kind of hit the wall a good decade back at least. But there was a triple whammy that kind of made it all the more impactful.
1: Moore's law stagnating.
2: Tech companies finally being able to take advantage of their monopoly status once achieved.
3: Governments finally bringing about their advantage in their quest to "Master the Internet".
First, Moore's Law, sure you can argue the toss over it. Have at it. But generally speaking things did slow down. Moore's Law is applied not just to CPU speed - it is applied also to hard disk space and also RAM storage. It used to be you could get a double sized hard disk for the same price or cheaper every few years, ditto RAM. Well, now, what with the AI bubble, that is no longer the case. In fact, we are seeing what is probably the beginning of the end of general purpose personal computing for the average person, especially if big tech gets its way
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As CPU die sizes got smaller, heat became more of a problem, so they got around that by adding more dies on to the chip. Another advantage was they could start adding stuff like GPU's on the chip design. But yeah, all that concentrated power, whilst technically needing less electricity to generate, caused massive spikes in cooling requirement because it was all concentrated in an ever smaller space.
And that worked for a while too, but we are kind of up against the edge of it now with that as well. The same roughly goes for hard disk space and RAM. I know there are advances being made, but they are ever more expensive and volatile from a stability and reliability viewpoint, then of course there is the cost...
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Second, Tech companies finally being able to take advantage of their long game monopoly play. These companies worked for years at a loss and crushed all competition until they were the only game in town. They did it in tandem with government approval. And then one day, some time around [CURRENT YEAR] there we were, and here we are. Looking at you Google et al.
The consolidation of their power came in many forms. Not least the H-1B scam which although it had been a thing for a decade or two previous, really started to pick up steam around then. Alternative search companies had been bought out and snuffed out, and Google for example, went from being the best search engine to well, what can you say? All of a sudden, entire chunks of the internet went missing. Google did actually used to work pretty good, but by [CURRENT YEAR] again, it was all downhill from there.
It wasn't just Google of course, they were all at it.
The monopolies that these tech companies now held allowed them to dictate the design of the internet and that is where a lot of the enshittifcation of the internet we all now lament, happened. Most people by that point accessed the internet via a Smart Phone, not a boomer desk top computer or even laptop. So the whole Web 2.0 API was indulged and well, boomers BTFO! They already had the boomer's money and the boomers weren't buying any new computers as they already had enough, but the New Generation of young people to target for advertising as well as newer model Smart Phones was too much too resist. I mean, what would you have done? It's not like you would actually design two different forms of a website - one for mobile, one for desktop - would you? And so one day when we woke up we all wondered why the fuck the internet stopped working.
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Third. Governments finally "Mastering The Internet".
That article makes out it was a UK centric thing but in reality it was, as always, a US led thing, that is just too deep to even go in to here. Needless to say, but this point [CURRENT YEAR] it had pretty much come about. And Smart Phones were instrumental in it of course. A Smart Phone is basically a tracking device, that can track al the other tracking devices around it.
Google had got caught 'War Driving' under the guise of collecting data for their "Street View" program. They got busted, said 'oopsie, sorry' and went on doing it anyway, because, well, all that DATA gets sent to the govt. to help them track people and well, Master The Internet.
Now Big Government was really in bed with Big DATA. And they didn't feel the need to say they weren't any more! So they told search companies like Google what they could and could not show in search results. And then they hoovered up any of the DATA that Google themselves had been hoovering up to put in to their new Super Computers, to collate information to get the next stage of the game in their strategy ready: Total Mastery of not just the Internet, but everyone's every day life.
So you had whole informative sites just drop off the surface off the Earth. You couldn't use an alternative search engine to find them. They did not exist any more. Monopolistic intent by Google et al was hand-waved away with a back room deal that all information they gleaned would be shared. What the fuck do we care, said Google. If it allows us to get away with our shit, we're all in.
All of a sudden that website that had quite a few links to the Microbiologists that were systematically murdered in both the UK and the US, did not exist any more. No cache of it either. Google keeps a cache of everything, but more and more they do away with it and less and less are we able to access it. It's gone now to all intents and purposes for the common man.
Phew, that's probably enough for now.
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We're at the point where we can theorize and make hypotheticals, but our understanding and application of material sciences and physics needs a massive relevation before we can even hope to reach those old advancement trends. Our generation was spoiled by how quickly we got to witness technology trends change.
A once in a lifetime experience. Or once in several lifetimes. Or several times in one lifetime. Depending on how you look at it. There will be no cure for cancer. There will be no Nuclear Fusion for energy
. And what's worse there will be no end to the inflation that is "democracy manifest" as we try to chow down on our succulent goy slop, as we try to stay alive long enough to maybe hope to have some kind of revolution. Political? Nah? Of the mind? Who knows? Of the spirit? Probably not.
Our generation might have been spoiled but it was the Boomers that really witnessed the greatest upheaval in man's existence so far on the planet. Moon landing, antibiotics, affordable air flight. Ability to kill other humans in never before dreamed off amounts down to Nuclear bombs...
Technology had evolved alarmingly fast in the last 25 years or so, in a period of a few hundred years where mankind has developed faster than the rest of its collective existence.
Yeah, things have gone quick, but only a non-boomer would think these advances were as important to the human race as those that took place post-war boom. 150 years of industrial output and scientific advancement in just a quarter of a century post 1950. Top that motherfuckers!!!
There haven't been any really great advances for humanity since the middle of the last Century (I'm not a boomer btw). Take a man from a previous century and plop him in to that world and he would have his tiny little mind blown, take a man from now and traverse back and he'd just go "yeah, whatevs". Stil no cure for cancer, no fusion energy, and no one leaving the planet to go to fucking Mars. LOL.
So computers have slowed down a bit, or rather the laws of physics as we know them have hit the wall. It's the least of our problems. I have a Win98 computer and it is blazingly fast with just 64MB of RAM and running Win98SE.
I have a 32 Core CPU computer with over 100 Gigs of RAM and still it can't open files immediately or copy stuff without halting. How far have we come?
Back to John Carmack and computer programming. It's too much to go in to but yeah it should be possible to do this on computers that are like a thousand times faster. What's the hold up?
I'll leave that to you to figure out why that is the case.
Anyway,
Sir, this is a Greggs...
Sorry about that.
