off the cuff claims made by executives, like "there will never be a need for more than, like, 5 computers in the whole world" are different from calculated engineering limits though. While faster-than-light travel may be possible someday, it's beyond our current technology (though there are some interesting theories at the edge of physics). Fundamental engineering limits tend to be harder to work around. eg despite all our scientific advances, cars engines are still lmited by the Carnot cycle. Moving to electric cars doesn't get rid of that limitation, just makes us subject to other limitations (currently, battery technology).
We just won't know until we get there. We have hit fundamental limits of physics for other technologies. Planes don't really go any faster today than they did 40 years ago. Cars can go faster than they did 40 years ago, but they don't in practice. We don't have flying cars. Etc.
I'm not saying that none of these other computing substrates won't work, just pointing out that the simple fact that we are exploring them does not mean that they will. Technological progress is neither guaranteed nor automatic.
Yes, technology is limited by physics, but by many measures it's still very far from the limits. We build tons of things out of steel, ferchrissakes. Computers use many orders of magnitude too much power, even neglecting reversibility. They don't even use the third dimension!
What's the term for when some great technology is constrained by our own human limits?
We all have a 2000's supercomputer equivalent in our pocket but still can't type faster than 60wpm.
The first car to reach 100kmh did it in 1899 but we're still driving at that speed on many highways around the world (+-20%) because us humans can't react quickly enough to drive it safely above that speed.
I was promised a flying DeLorean when I was a kid, I'm starting to think that won't be the case before I'm older than Old Biff Tannen.
I wouldn't really see it like that. The limits of physics are with us every day. That is why cars are impractical at speed and why there is latency to other continents. For all the development in technology, it is mostly the same since the 80s. "Just" more of it.
I don't doubt there is, but we really don't know when we'll hit the limits technology allows for. Present and future technological plateaus may just be temporary.
Everything is limited by physics. But I think the limit is not close to where we are right now. Consider a smart phone. Physically, what is it? Some silicon, glass, a lithium-ion battery, and some other trace metals. If you were to have the raw inputs in front of you, it would be a small pile of dust. Yet, with just that small amount of material, a person can get access to a near infinite amount of information and entertainment. And smartphones can run software, which allows the phone to be updated for near-zero marginal cost. And this is only something invented in the last few decades. There are so many amazing things being created around us all the time. I don't know how you can look at this situation and think "yup, we've reached the end of human ingenuity."
There are indeed hard limits to chemical rocketry, and we mostly hit them after a decade or two of work by people with pencils and slide rules.
Computers might be a better analogy. We started designing computers without the aid of other computers. We made very rapid progress on architecture and semiconductors. We’re now completely dependent on computers to help us design future ones, and despite all our efforts and hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, our rate of progress has slowed to a crawl and we seem to rapidly be approaching the end game. Dennard scaling has been done for 15 years. We can make wires that are smaller but just proportionally worse. We can use more silicon area, but then latency and power consumption get proportionally worse. A super clever hyper optimizing AI might push a couple things forward a little bit (or more likely wind up at the exact same destination slightly earlier than we other wise might have), but there’s no compelling reason to think it gets to design computers that face different constraints.
Yes, I was referring to the subject at hand - human achievement / technology / innovation - not making a universal statement about everything that may have limits.
But I can see how my post could read that way. I'll make that clearer.
Clarke's third law is largely about fiction. It's a rule of thumb for writers, not a rule for reality.
In reality there are limits; there's no reason to think technology can improve indefinitely. We may still be far from those limits, as e.g. Drexler's books show, but fundamental rules such as "Effort requires energy input" are unlikely to ever change, and it's equally unlikely that most modern scientists would regard limit-tech as being magic.
As for the average guy on the street, he probably considers computers to be magic...
It’s like the difference between SpaceX Starship development and faster-than-light spaceship development.
We know that we can make a bigger reusable rocket, it’s just a matter of working out the details. We have no idea if FTL is even possible, let alone how.
I feel like AI is at the same point: technology demonstrators have proven that there is a way forward, now we just need oodles of computer power to make it happen.
Chat bots that can answer complex English questions used to be pure science fiction just a year ago!
Progress doesn't work like that. Once you've picked the obvious low-hanging fruit it stops being a research problem and starts being an engineering one. Which means tradeoffs and no free lunch and no more magic.
We're never gonna have an airliner that is 10 times faster than the ones we have now. Same principles with computing too.
True. However decades long periods of exponential improvement in technology is the norm, not the exception. The most spectacular example is Moore's law, but it is hardly alone. If you read The Innovator's Dilemma you will find plenty of other examples, ranging from the maximum range of a steam ship to the volume of dirt a backhoe can scoop per hour.
The interesting questions are how much computing power you need to perform equivalent tasks to a human brain, and whether current technology will reach that before it plateau's out.
Not every technology advances at the same rate as electronics. An order of magnitude improvement in supercruise efficiency over Concorde--which is one of the biggest bottlenecks--would be a significant innovation alone.
Or possibly, we have reached the limits of what can be achieved in certain disciplines? Take batteries for example; a great many other technologies would be greatly enhanced by a quantum leap in battery energy storage (e.g. mobiles and wearables, robots, transportation) but we may have reached a practical limit in what can be achieved with the chemistry of the universe.
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