[tehjoker]

genetic technology and computing technology have been the biggest drivers for a while. i do think it is remarkable to video call another continent. communication technology is disruptive and revolutionary though it looks like chaos. ai is interesting too if it lives up to the hype even slightly.

catching a rocket is very impressive, but its just a lower cost method for earth orbit. it does unlock megaconstellations tho

[threethirtytwo]

Yeah none of those are step function changes. Video calling another continent is like a tiny step from TV. Yeah I receive video wirelessly on my tv not that amazed when I can stretch the distance further with a call that has video. Big deal.

AI is the step function change. The irony is that it became so pervasive and intertwined with slop people like you forget that what it does now (write all code) was unheard of just a couple years ago. ai surpassed the hype, now it’s popular to talk shit about it.

[incr_me]

A step in which function are you talking about, exactly?

[threethirtytwo]

If you want it stated precisely, the function is human cognitive labor per unit time and cost.

For decades, progress mostly shifted physical constraints or communication bandwidth. Faster chips, better networks, cheaper storage. Those move slopes, not discontinuities. Humans still had to think, reason, design, write, debug. The bottleneck stayed human cognition.

LLMs changed that. Not marginally. Qualitatively.

The input to the function used to be “a human with training.” The output was plans, code, explanations, synthesis. Now the same class of output can be produced on demand, at scale, by a machine, with latency measured in seconds and cost approaching zero. That is a step change in effective cognitive throughput.

This is why “video calling another continent” feels incremental. It reduces friction in moving information between humans. AI reduces or removes the human from parts of the loop entirely.

You can argue about ceilings, reliability, or long term limits. Fine. But the step already happened. Tasks that were categorically human two years ago are now automatable enough to be economically and practically useful.

That is the function. And it jumped.