[speedplane]

> one of the biggest realizations ive had recently is that technology does not cut equally in both directions. everyone in my generation has thought of technology as a neutral entity: for every benefit of a given technology, one can point out a corresponding disadvantage.

Maybe that's just because technological innovation is slowing down.

[pretendscholar]

I'm not sure I agree that I see it slowing down. I wish it would for a bit so everyone could catch their breath. Social we are just catching up with the implications of social media and there is so much we haven't come to terms with like CRISPR. It seems like just what we've accomplished in the last 10-15 years would happen over several generations previously. We really aren't ready for the changes that are baked in now.

[speedplane]

> I'm not sure I agree that I see it slowing down. I wish it would for a bit so everyone could catch their breath. Social we are just catching up with the implications of social media and there is so much we haven't come to terms with like CRISPR.

Societal changes lag technological ones by at least 5-10 years. So the changes we're feeling now were largely the result of technological changes in the early 2010s. But I do think technology today is slowing down. Individual processor speed certainly has, which has far reaching implications. Cloud computing and GPUs have given general purpose processes another step in "perceived" performance, but those are pretty much one-trick ponies.

If processor individual performance doesn't increase, the economies of scale that a large data center gives you eventually has diminishing marginal returns, and you're again limited by individual processor speed. GPUs similarly give a speed-up for applications that can optimize for them, but eventually they will run into the same performance walls that general purpose chips run into.

Other technologies, like machine learning and much of genetics heavily rely on exponential improvements in the underlying hardware.

If the death of moore's law is really happening, it will have far reaching implications in all computational based industries.

[bronz]

im not sure what you mean.