Comment by spencerflem
2 months ago
This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. What situation would everyone lose the ability to make any CPU, worldwide, and we don't have a much much bigger problem then how to run AWS?
2 months ago
This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. What situation would everyone lose the ability to make any CPU, worldwide, and we don't have a much much bigger problem then how to run AWS?
This reads to me as mostly just an interesting way to teach about expected hardware lifetime assuming we were trying as hard as possible to keep things going. There is an entire genre of speculative SF that posits one major change and tries to think through the repercussions of that change. Often, the change itself is not very sensible, but it's also not the point.
I do think its interesting that digital records may not survive any sort of truly world war.
Its so easy to think of them as lasting forever
We don't have enough time with digital data but it seems extremely doubtful anything digital would survive as long as the Herculaneum scrolls that were buried in mud that was on the front page last week, that's longer than almost any civilization has continuously existed (the exception only being ancient Egypt?) but maybe humans will turn it around in the near future and obliterate that record.
My guess:
Something would need to happen to stop / prevent production for about 30 - 60 years.
Thats roughly equivalent to the Saturn V engine, and Codename FOGBANK which are the 2 examples of technologies that had to be reverse engineered after the fact.
Hypothetically we might choose to stop making new ones if demand dried up significantly.
Short of asteroid Dino-Doom v2.0 hitting the earth, how could CPU demand fall so low that we don't make any new ones?
Some kind of demand reduction.
It could be the case that we finally hit a sold wall in CPU progress, cloud providers demand something they dont have to replace every few years, and the result is some kind of everlasting gobstopper CPU.
Then as failures fall off, so does demand, and then follows production.
A pretty large drop in global population might see the same result. Labor needs to be apportioned to basic needs before manufacturing.
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I don't think it's that bizarre
we already had a sci-fi story, where humanity forgot all beatles songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ
Unabomber2 ? How many people know how to make a CPU?
A war in Taiwan?
Well, we stil have enough know-how outside Taiwan on everything to produce any semiconductors. A bigger world war is most likely what it takes to bring the supply chain to a halt. Even then, nobody magically forgets these things.
Not magically, they forget naturally. No one human knows the whole sequence, from start to finish, no one can really write it down (or shoot a how-to video). Distributed, institutional knowledge is extraordinarily brittle.
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I kinda doubt it. The theoretical knowledge is there, but there’s a huge gulf between that and all the practical knowledge/trade secrets held by TSMC.
Another view on this topic is https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law
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Chips are made elsewhere too. At worst, we (civilization) would lose the cutting edge if that happened.
It would be a sad thing but not as sad as everything else that would happen in a war.
We would go back to brick phones, with gears stuck on the side. Awesome!
No, that won't do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...