https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#Petascale_computing_in_the_21st_century
Supercomputer from 2004 (IBM Blue) could perform at 70.720 Tflops.
Geforce RTX 4090 can perform at 82.58 tflops of processing power.
Geforce RTX 4090 was released in 2022.
In 18 years we got tech that would take an entire room or two to fit it in and miniaturized it to fit within a desktop pc.
What we call the cutting edge in computing today should be accessible to your kid as a consumer level product by the time he or she is 18 years old.
The human genome project, a project meant to get a complete sequence of the human genome, cost 2.7 billion dollars to complete. Today, human genome mapping costs are as low as 600 dollars in some cases.
https://3billion.io/blog/whole-genome-sequencing-price-and-trends-2024
https://biology.mit.edu/the-human-genome-project-turns-20-heres-how-it-altered-the-world/
In 21 years the price of genome sequencing for humans went down 4.5 million times.
Another case of the price of tech falling to consumer grade prices within one generation since the first version.
It puts into perspective exactly how fast technology is moving from a practical standpoint rather than a theoretical one. The most expensive tech out there today is going to be what the next generation would be carrying around as a consumer product, and this trend will continue, generation after generation.
The ISS ( fist segment launched in 1998 ) cost 150 billion USD to finish development. The Tiangong space station ( by China 2022 ) meanwhile cost only about 8.5 billion USD.
A 17.64X reduction in price in a 24 year timespan.
Conclusion:
The cost is going down and quality of tech products is going up 10-20X every generation. With the current scale of ongoing research into lab grown food, we might even expect a decline in the prices of food products over time, or at least an increase in their quality over time. The quality of consumer goods available to humans is increasing by a wide margin every generation. The only issue currently lies in solving continental scale and planet scale problems such as global warming, clean water access, global food supply chains, etc. With the population growth rate going down while at the same time tech advancement rates keep stable or accelerate, it is pretty much guaranteed that your children will have a higher quality of life than you as long as you are not poor or in the wrong place on the planet.
We are currently moving at rates where we should be able to solve all our problems faster than we create new problems. A continual improvement in quality of life.
The slowdown is most likely coming from two points:
1. If it ain't broke don't fix it attitude, where humans won't solve a problem until it is effecting too many people.
2. People so used to doubling or tripling of specs in the technological sphere that they are no longer focused enough on improving the efficiency of the software they build on top of the hardware.
We are two industrial revolutions away from living in a post scarcity everybody is provided for society.
Stay strong, just survive the next 40 years and it will all work out.
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Except the cutting edge in computing isn't just a faster processor. It's quantum computing.
Trust that the glowies are going to keep the lid on that for as long as they can.
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The glowies literally cannot because if the US won't provide then either China or India will.
We have already seen this in the case of nukes ( North Korea ), cheap tech ( smartphones, 5G, TV ), and pharmaceuticals ( India prescription drugs )
A global network of trade with nation states still existing means that it is impossible to monopolize any tech or innovation except for the cutting edge in the starting few years of discovery.
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Sure, but it will be longer than 18 years before your kid has a quantum computer in his bedroom.
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Depends entirely on whether quantum computers provide anything relevant to consumer grade PCs.
First computer was 1945.
First personal computer was 1974.
First quantum computer was 1998.
First personal quantum computer based on previous rate should be 2027.
So you are probably right.
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It could also be a bit like electric car tech.
Technology that existed for decades, but coincidentally only went mainstream once global car sales were projected to fall for the first time ever.
If it's complicated and expensive enough to develop for consumers, there can be market forces that prevent it.
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Nah, I think its more like AI took off first so that's where all the money went. Quantum computing would get the same sort of funding once AI tech reaches maturity.
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Quantum computers are necessarily good for consumer applications.
They're very specialized.
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Why is Marsey Freeman wearing pearls
And with an arm growing out of her back lol
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Early Marsey prototype.
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AFAIK we're still quite far away from actual quantum computers (that can run shor's algorithm), not to mention ones of useful size. Quantum error correction is necessary and expensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_theorem
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I don't know how complete they are, but one of my
friends who sometimes blabs a bit too much after a few drinks said they can break consumer E2EE almost instantly.
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That's due to hardware/software backdoors, private sector does most of the work for them and all they need to do is plant holes. Feds focus most of their R&D on war toys and media control these days.
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Yes they have backdoors, at least into western consumer tech, but he said cracking E2EE like it wasn't even there is one of the capabilities of the quantum computer he has access to.
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Ehhh I have a few
ppl that will say a lot of stuff with enough drinks and they usually overstate what they mean.
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