Comment by philipallstar
10 hours ago
These damn articles. Software moved into an industrial revolution when you could write in a high level language, and not in assembly. This has already happened.
10 hours ago
These damn articles. Software moved into an industrial revolution when you could write in a high level language, and not in assembly. This has already happened.
The article makes this very point. From the article: “software has been industrialising for a long time: through reusable components (open source code), portability (containerisation, the cloud), democratisation (low-code / no-code tools), interoperability (API standards, package managers) and many other ways”
Partially, but no. First:
- Other input that a deck of cards. Terminals and teletypes were a revolution.
- Assembly was much better than hardware switches.
- Also, a proper keyboard input against some "monitor" software was zillions better than, again, a deck of cards/hardware toggles. When you can have a basic line basic editor and dump your changes in a paper tape or print your output you have now live editing instead of suffering batch jobs.
You either see what codex and opus are capable of and extrapolate the trendline or you don’t; the author clearly saw and extrapolated.
Not that I disagree: I’m on record agreeing with the article months ago. Folks in labs probably seen it coming for years.
Yes we’ve seen major improvements in software development velocity - libraries, OSes, containers, portable bytecodes - but I’m afraid we’ve seen nothing yet. Claude Code and Codex are just glimpses into the future.
And if we extrapolate 5% economic growth per year we will consume all the energy in our light cone in 1000 years.
Huh. Your statement was probably hyperbole? But just back of the napkin:
If we use about 20 TW today, in a thousand years of 5% growth we’d be at about 3x10^34. I think the sun is around 3.8x10^26 watts? That gives us about 8x10^7 suns worth of energy consumption in 1000 years.
If we figure 0.004 stars per cubic light-year, we end up in that ballpark in a thousand years of uniform spherical expansion at C.
But that assumes millions ( billions?) of probes traveling outward starting soon, and no acceleration or deceleration or development time… so I think your claim is likely true, in any practical sense of the idea.
Time to short the market lol.
If we extrapolated the rise in the standards of living of a Detroit Black blue-collar factory worker in Detroit from the early 60s to our current days, most of them should own 64ft yachts by now.
of course, but no need to look that far into the future - 400 years at 2.3% pa is enough to boil oceans.
AI capabilities are growing exponentially thanks to exponential compute/energy consumption, but also thanks to algorithmic improvements. we've got a proof that human-level intelligence can run at 20W of power, so we've got plenty of room to offset the currently-missing compute.
Economic growth is not directly proportional to energy consumption. A major feature of any useful tool is that it (often dramatically) reduces energy consumption.
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Portable bytecodes predate Windows and Macintosh, and maybe DOS too. (The Z Machine).