Boffins Fear We Might Be Running Out of Ideas (theregister.co.uk) 356
Innovation, fetishized by Silicon Valley companies and celebrated by business boosters, no longer provides the economic jolt it once did. From a report: In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago. On an annual basis, research productivity is declining at a rate of about 6.8 percent per year in the semiconductor industry. In other words, we're running out of ideas. That's the conclusion of economic researchers from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a paper published this week through the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?", economics professors Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, and John Van Reenen, and PhD candidate Michael Webb, defy Betteridge's Law of Headlines by concluding that an idea drought has indeed taken hold. "Across a broad range of case studies ... we find that ideas -- and in particular the exponential growth they imply -- are getting harder and harder to find," the authors declare in their paper.
Visionary (Score:2, Informative)
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
~ Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of US patent office (1899)
ernst rutherford (Score:2)
When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life. We shall have found the basis of everything — of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small — except life.
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I think self-consciousness is even more mysterious than life. It will take a while before we understand how that comes about.
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I think self-consciousness is even more mysterious than life.
"Self-consciousness" is not a scientific concept. There is no falsifiable test. You may "feel" that you are self-conscious, but there is no objective reason for me to believe that you are.
Re:Visionary (Score:5, Informative)
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
~ Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of US patent office (1899)
Not true. Commissioner Duell never said that, and what he actually said was pretty much the exact opposite:
In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold. -- Charles H. Duell 1902
Nah... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple Announces iPhone X With Edge-To-Edge Display, Wireless Charging and No Home Button
Nah, see? We still have plenty of ideas. Oh, wait, you may have meant good ones... OK, that might be a problem. The low-hanging fruit has been already eaten.
Oh no! (Score:3)
The low hanging fruit was easiest to pick? What a shocking new revelatory cliche that we've totally never seen before in any other aspect of life and therefore would have had no reason to believe would apply here!
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Insightful)
History of progress within any given industry has always been boom then trickle, boom then trickle.
When the Microprocessor first was made it was boom then slowed. We came out with multi-cores, it was boom then slowed.
Look at manufacturing. Boom during industrial revolution then growth slowed. Boom with the assembly line then it slowed. Boom after robotics then growth slowed.
Look at agriculture. Boom when farming first developed then slowed. Boomed when automation was pioneered then slowed. Boomed again with modern chemistry then slowed.
The boom normally happens when a new technology or idea is pioneered, and then, you're right, the low hanging fruit associated with that technology is picked first and growth slows.
The next boom in computer chips might come with economic quantum computing is developed, and then people will pick up the low hanging fruit until progress is a trickle again.
Just because innovation may be slow now, the next boom could happen at any time.
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At which time, the new processors are likely to be a quantum leap ahead.
Worse engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Some of my ideas have made large sums of money for others, but not for me. I suspect many engineers are pissed at having been ripped off - p
Re:Worse engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
Ideas are easy. The hard work is implementing them.
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On average, I'll believe that, simply because the profession is more prolific.
The curse of a career path becoming more prolific is that only the most passionate would previously be in the field now has money seekers.
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Ideas and good engineers are not appreciated like they used to be. CEO pay has exploded, engineer pay has mostly plateaued. Many of the better minds have followed the money to software and to Wall Street. Why work harder for relatively much less pay?
Open offices combined with onerous approval/funding models also create stifling work places with high barriers for new ideas. You can't get any real funding without months of proposals, meetings, etc. It is far easier to sit back and turn the crank rather o
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I wonder whether it's really a lack of ideas, and or worse engineering staff. I think engineers are, on average, less passionate than they used to be. For many people in the industry it's just a career now, and not a passion. Especially in large companies like Intel.
Perhaps not *worse* engineering staff, just human? It would seem that the more knowledge we create, the more someone has to learn about the state of their art before they can start making useful contributions. At some point, we'll run into the problem that humans only live so long.
Re:Worse engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when I worked at university, people were already on average not competent and not particularly passionate about changing that already.
Freshman courses are predominately that, sophomore level is barely better, but by Junior year most of the most egregious folks have moved on to something else.
Of course the .com bubble caused the soul crushing people who don't care to really dig in and try to power through to get to that sweet sweet paycheck. Maybe that's what you are seeing, the current tech bubble driving 'pot of gold' syndrome so the less enthusiastic don't get filtered out..
Re:Worse engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
i work at university, and the general competency of the students gets lower every couple years.
No i'm not a grumpy old man, just a really depressed educator who looks at his class and asks "whats the point none of them will ever go anywhere"
Once upon a time only certain jobs needed a degree. Now you almost need a college degree for everything. Once upon a time only smart people went to university, now everyone does.
It's not that people are getting stupider, it's just you're seeing a more even cross-section of humanity now, not just the smart people.
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But after 5 years you become unemployable anywhere else, so there's that.
*stop eating the seed corn* (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see money chasing anything (Score:5, Insightful)
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A lot of physics and math programs are publicly funded or receive grant monies from government agencies. Government research just got pushed further into academia rather than pulling academia into "think tanks".
That's problematic (Score:2)
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The ideas are certainly out there, they just aren't here.
Toy with this alternate history for a moment. How would life be different if we had finished the superconducting supercollider in Texas, instead of scrapping it and ceding a big chunk of a generation's brightest physicists and engineers to CERN? Would it have made an appreciable difference in the US National Debt? National Pride? Hope?
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You mean they're egostistical assholes?
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Zuckerberg, Musk, Jobs, and Edison are (or were) great business men with some technical understanding that had scientists create things for them.
Tesla is different than the rest in that he was primarily a scientist not a business man.
In a finite universe (Score:4, Interesting)
There's going to be a finite number of practical possibilities; we may actually be close to hitting a wall with regards to finding improved ways to push electrons through transistors. And then there's physics itself - there is an information processing limit based on the universe's physical laws.
That still leaves memristors, photonics, and quantum computing, and there's likely still a corner or two of under-understood physics to find and exploit.
I don't think we've reached the limits yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The only limit is limited understanding
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Well, that's simply bullshit; the laws of physics don't care about your opinion, and will continue to restrict us regardless.
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I am reminded of Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants" [baen.com] (Hugo winner in 1983 for best short story), wherein a woman confronts a Congressman, trying to get him to throw his influence against a bill that would extend the term of copyright to perpetuity, arguing that with the increased longevity of humanity it would cause irreparable harm to the human race. The link is to the story in the Baen Free Library; read it.
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An inciteful comment, there are further directions to explore in semiconductor chip technology and circuit topology but the easy wins are in the past. Progress will continue but it is becoming exponentially more difficult to increase the compute power of individual chips. It is arguably true that the internet has provided a considerable boost to human capability on a par with the increasing power of individual devices. I would expect further boosts from things like Big Data, the Internet of Things, Intellig
I have an idea (Score:2)
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The problem if there is a problem with "creativity" is not so much the training. The problem is monopoly paradigm. There is only one way of doing a thing because of the enormous vested interest in the current way of doing it. (See gasoline and electric vehicles.) There may well be a fantastic future in biological computation for example but no one is going to spend $100 Million on exploring it because we already spent $10 Billion on a chip factory and have to make the money back.
Not ideas. Easy ideas. (Score:2)
We are not running out of ideas. That is nonsense. We are running out of EASY ideas. Before you could tell your supplier: Use this program to place an order directly to our factory. Then we will automatically send the orders for the required raw materials to our suppliers so that we can fill your order. Good idea! Big productivity jump!
Those easy gains are gone.
Oh No!!!! (Score:2)
We've invented everything there is to invent!
I think "boffins" said that in the past.
They were wrong then too.
Jeez! And we think Stanford and MIT are where the smart people are?!
Re:Oh No!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, what?! (Score:3)
Seriously? So a few researchers make the move from germanium to silicon that is (directly) used by approximately 2 people. 70 years later a team of researchers make a design change to reduce battery consumption 2% - for 100M iPhones. Which had more direct economic impact?
To measure by "economic impact" is complete blarney. You can claim it takes more people/time/money/resources, but to weigh it against the economic impact by saying "it takes 18 people to do [double density] where it used to take 1" is crap.
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Yes, a massive logarithm comprehension fail on the part of TFA.
If you are going to equate moore's law with progress, fine, let's stipulate that... but moore's law is that progress doubles every 2 years so a fair comparison is how many years is it taking the number of scientists needed to maintain it to double. 18x over 40 years puts us significantly below 2 years.
Asinine fucking math (Score:5, Interesting)
That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago.
Assuming that the absolute number of transistors still matters, this math is ridiculous. A doubling of transistor count now means roughly 10 billion new transistors vs. a doubling in the 70s meaning maybe 10,000. So for 18x the headcount you get 1 MILLION times the transistors. A researcher is about 50,000 times more effective than he was in the 70s.
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OK? Is the GPU 50,000 times less valuable than the i7?
Let's put it another way - Moore's law roughly doubles transistor count every 2 years. The article says that research spending has needed to double every decade. So transistor count is obeying pow(2,t/2) and research is obeying pow(2,t/10). For t=40 years, that means the score is transistor: 1,048,576, research: 16. That's a factor of 65,536. There is no way to do this math without exposing the idiocy of the argument.
This is disturbingly clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not running out of ideas. What has happened in CPU development is that we have made all of the relatively easy advances in transistor miniaturization, and further advances are becoming incremental as progress runs up against the asymptotic curves imposed by the laws of physics. Further advances in processing power are therefore coming to rely upon increasingly multicore designs and sophisticated caches, mainly because that's a less risky business proposition than investigating architectures other than the von Neumann and (occasionally) Harvard architectures.
It's also worth noting that most of the several orders of magnitude increase in processing power over the last three decades has been consumed by increasingly inefficient software as a way of keeping software development costs down.
Nature only provides so many free rides, and humans have proven themselves very good at exhausting them quickly. Ideas, even good ones, are always cheap and plentiful. It's a willingness to do hard (and therefore expensive) work that is in short supply.
check the math (Score:5, Insightful)
"it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago"
In 1970s, they used to make only few hundreds to few thousands of each high end chip. Today, Apple A11 or Qualcomm 835 or Intel x64 will get produced in hundreds of millions in quantities.
Low hanging fruit is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, we may have started hitting some hard physical limits, not just a lack of better ideas. If silicon makers are finding so hard to improve their chips, it may be because electronics and digital systems as we known them break up when the gates' size is comparable to that of atoms.
The solutions may again come from other fields of knowledge. If quantum effects ruin your logic gates because they are too small, better start thinking on quantum computing approaches leveraging your knowledge to make small things on a waffer.
Easier said than done, though.
Yeah but that means funding basic science (Score:2)
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Sorry, could you say that again? My stupid neighbor is performing percussive maintenance on his quantum computer and I couldn't hear you. :D
Liberal arts majors should just STFU (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Liberal arts majors (e.g. you) should just STFU (Score:2)
Why? Just because they exist doesn't mean they're doing something, and just because they're doing something doesn't mean that thing is useful.
Most CPU power - at least on the desktop - is either drawing animated amimojomongs or whatever they're called, putting chrome like transparent shadows on menus, or just sitting around waiting for user input.
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You're conflating "how much information a researcher generates" with "the percentage change in ability to crunch that information." By the same logic, agriculture had 0 productivity for centuries, as farmers remained unable to improve their yield per effort.
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2) Just FYI: agricultural yield per farmer has been steadily improving since its first invention. Cultivar selections, irrigation techniques, co-planting, crop rotation, plow methods, etc.
And yet in10 years will be complete opposite ... (Score:2)
... when First Contact happens and causes us to rethink everything and people will want a a less complex world.
There are so many new technologies that haven't been developed yet, let alone imagined, that we'll _never_ run out of ideas to try.
The fundamental problem today is that when your R&D is tied to an artificial monetary system then yeah, no one can afford to pay for R&D. But when money is no longer the sole focus then R&D will flourish.
Here is a preview of the two most exciting technologi
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* Teleportation -- possible because space is relative
* Time Travel -- possible because time is relative
That's gibberish.
Mature technology (Score:2)
I think they have to eventually accept that "Moore's Law" is no law at all. Eventually any technology matures and you then get very incremental improvements.
Take automobiles for example: While there have been a lot of efficiency improvements and such over the years, you could take a car from 1945 and while it will certainly look "retro", if it's in good condition it's still perfectly workable in a modern setting. On the flip side, you COULDN'T really do that with a Model T.
Computers, much like everything
What BS. (Score:2)
This is apparent decline of productivity is typical of a mature science.
One day, for example, semiconductors will hit their physical limits and Moore's law will cease to apply. At that point, these "Boffins" will presumably conclude that productivity in that industry had ceased to grow, and that it could all be fixed if we just had more on the ball researchers. They presumably also think that we could have 500 MPH cars if only the automotive researchers weren't so lazy. .
idiot confuses math for logic (Score:2)
Let me explain this in terms a child can understand.
Learning things gets exponentially harder. Think of it like climbing a cliff. When you move from a 10 ft cliff to a 20 ft cliff, and it takes you twice as long, it does NOT mean we are moving half as fast.
We are working on harder problems so it will take more work to figure them out. That does not mean we are running out of ideas, nor does it mean the ideas are smaller. It means we are applying the same size ideas to bigger problems.
Luckily for us,
Spellikans vexed on lingo drift (Score:2)
Spellikans be deludin' that our common ling be driftin' up on a split. Satchel in sharp tip, "boffins" fur "enginkrafter". It squaks like a non-flying ave to some; but it's snot.
Boffins? (Score:2)
Nonsense (Score:2)
In the early 1900s there was a scientist who believed we had already figured everything out, we just had to sort out the details now.
That sentiment was ridiculous then and it's ridiculous now. If the idea flow seems to be slowing, it's not because we're running out of them. Rather, it's because society's problems are maturing. I guarantee a brand new class of need shows up, the ideas will flow faster than ever before.
"Boffin" is not a valid word (Score:2)
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What a horrible, xenophobic attitude you have.
Many Boffins died (Score:5, Funny)
To bring us this information...
Ideas are cheap (Score:2)
Anyone can make an idea, whether it's something like cheap space flight, teleportation, cure for the common cold, cold fusion, perpetual motion machines, and so on. Some of these may be impractical, but they still exist and are unclaimed.
Given that the article-linked paper is behind some paywall, this makes it hard to create questions, whether it's methodology or actual cause.
It could
Does globalism hurt or help? (Score:2)
In many ways, the West held the lead in science and technology and the rest of the world more or less caught up with it, by and large copying Western science and technology.
Does this imitation help or hurt innovation? Is it possible that without globalism, Chinese or Indians would have developed ideas that are considered present-day innovations in the West?
Historically it sort of seemed to work like that -- technological development within a given cultural paradigm seems to stagnate and then some contact i
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While improved communication has promoted some degree of homogenization, I think there's still plenty of culture variation. Some cultures promote development and some don't, so even if cultures do homogenize (i.e. we reach some Fukuyamian end-of-history) it depends on what type of culture results and whether it remains stable.
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I'm sure my idea is as fuzzy as its communication, but it's not the cultural homogenization per se, but the technological homogenization.
The Chinese or the Indians or the Arabs won't develop those catalyst technologies because technologically they've totally adopted our technological paradigm. It's like a disease, once they've experienced it, there's no going back.
And of course it's impossible to imagine a world where major cultures were both living so isolated and developing in parallel enough to contribu
I'm guessing these are *social* scientists (Score:3)
Not seeing the causal link there either.
Faulty Conclusion (Score:3)
"In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s."
That doesn't mean that "each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago".
Ideas are a dime a dozen .... (Score:2)
... reasonably implementing them is where the hard work is.
I've got 200+ ideas on stock. If somebody lacks any, they can ring me up.
Many Boffins died bringing us these ideas... (Score:2)
Moore's Law is not the be-all and end-all (Score:2)
In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago.
Firstly, no, it doesn't mean that.
Secondly, Moore's Law is not the sole benchmark by which to measure technological progress. Not by a long way.
Sigh, diminishing returns isn't a new thing... (Score:2)
It seems on slow news days we tend to get these articles.
No hurricane to cover today? Write something about how history is ending. Say "we're running out of ideas" or some other blatant nonsense.
Maybe you'll get some annoyed but easily-manipulated idiot posting in reply, which is what we want. An annoyed click is still a click of revenue, right?
Perhaps for now. (Score:2)
But has the entire species run out of ideas? Like fuck. People have been making that argument for centuries. They look at the world around them and don't have the imagination to think it could ever change.
I don't doubt that there's some truth in the article though. I don't have a link, but I remember reading an article suggesting a similar trend to semiconductor development occurring in medical R&D - the amount of money invested produces fewer finds year on year.
My personal opinion is that there's a few
Boffins!?!? (Score:2)
Courage! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Courage! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Be careful what you wish for. 2037 headline: "Apple introduces the new iPlant X: A device no larger than a grain of rice, implanted by trained technician at any Apple store, gives you 24/7 connection to those you love."
Provided, of course, that you didn't sell them to the Soylent corporation, just so you could afford the iPlant X...
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First the headphone jack, now the home button. If Apple has enough courage, eventually they'll get rid of the whole damn phone.
They could do that today, but they'd have to charge you twice as much.
Rise of leftism has suppressed original thought. (Score:2, Insightful)
The real problem is that we've seen the rise of extreme leftism over the past 40 to 50 years. The seeds were planted in the late 1960s, but it wasn't until the last decade that it has really taken off and become entrenched throughout Western society, especially within the so-called "Millennial Generation".
Leftism abhors originality. It abhors creativity. It abhors free thinking. Why is that? Because individuals who engage in such activities quickly tear apart the intellectual "foundation" (or lack thereof)
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Your doing a good job spouting out what Rush Limbaugh told you that liberals believe. Why don't you actually ask a liberal next time.
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Ooh, ooh, what if you actually did some research instead of just making stuff up?
Energy payback for solar panels is 1-4 years: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04... [nrel.gov]
Energy payback for wind turbines is 5-8 months: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
Electric vehicles (or hydrogen vehicles if you're into that) don't make much sense if you run them off of coal, but they make a lot of sense if you charge them with wind or solar power. There is no other way to drive a car without emitting lots of greenhouse gases, gobbl
Re:Rise of leftism has suppressed original thought (Score:5, Insightful)
This gave me a good chuckle. It's always amusing when people from the left or right try and explain the other side and get it completely wrong.
Newsflash to every extremist on either side: no political ideology is completely wrong or completely right. They all get somethings right and somethings wrong, and the same ideology doesn't always work in every situation and every society.
Get over yourselves. As with most things, the best solution is often somewhere in the between what the extremists from either side espouse. Stop demonizing or regaling people based on their political preferences.
Re:Rise of leftism has suppressed original thought (Score:5, Interesting)
This gave me a good chuckle. It's always amusing when people from the left or right try and explain the other side and get it completely wrong.
Newsflash to every extremist on either side: no political ideology is completely wrong or completely right. They all get somethings right and somethings wrong, and the same ideology doesn't always work in every situation and every society.
Get over yourselves. As with most things, the best solution is often somewhere in the between what the extremists from either side espouse. Stop demonizing or regaling people based on their political preferences.
Hey, if I give up my extremist views then the middle will no longer be the middle, it will be somewhere on THEIR side of the line.... No way am I giving up ground to THEM....
At least, that's how I imagine the extremists view things. Being fiscally conservative and socially liberal, I'm fairly close to the center. My problem is that none of the political parties are fiscally conservative. They all want to spend money and are just arguing over the pile...
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================
The real problem is that we've seen the rise of extreme rightism over the past 40 to 50 years. The seeds were planted in the late 1960s, but it wasn't until the last decade that it has really taken off and become entrenched throughout Western society, especially within the so-called "Baby Boomer Generation".
Rightism abhors originality. It abhors creativity. It abho
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Ignorance suppresses constructive debate. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cretin. It has nothing to do with political fetishes about leftism or the stupidity of modern Americans because of the lack of investment in education. The reason for the reduced progress in semiconductor technology is because we are running out of physics. The physical dimensions are now so small that leakage currents and power dissipation are reaching the limits of what is possible with the available materials. Lots of clever and difficult manufacturing processes and material configurations have been developed to make today's silicon chips. The factories that make the latest and most powerful chips cost in the region of $10 Billion because it has become so hard to make them. The problem is not a shortage of ideas, the problem is that it has become 18 times more difficult to make advances in chip performance. Of course both a right wing political expert and a bunch of media reporters choose to misrepresent academic research that measures this slow down in progress as 'political defects in society' and a 'lack of creativity' because, hey screw facts, we have irrelevant opinions and random talking points to argue about. What this demonstrates in fact is that general society is almost completely ignorant about where its technological marvels come from.
I await with interest the response to CRISPR/Cas 9 and Genetic Medicine which will be a mainstream technology marvel of the coming 50 years. You folk are probably too dumb to know what to do with it let alone recognize its potential benefits. For goodness sake learn a bit more about how the science and the world works before ranting about your prejudices and politics.
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Never once have I had to do that for a project. Ballparks and estimates, sure, but *exactly*, never.
That also, I have never had to do. That you would speaks volumes to your post.
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That sort of mindless pigeonholing make it impossible to hold adult conversations.
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You don't believe in the creator? Even if he says that you can say whatever you want and you're allowed to play at cowboys and Indians in real life?
More enlightened examples of the left (Score:3, Insightful)
What great work they have done for mankind:
The Cultural Revolution
The Great Leap Forward
Russian political Gulags and forced relocations,
The Red Terror
The Great Purge
The Killing Fields
The Ethiopian Red Terror
To name just a few. I wont even begin to put numbers of the deaths, however its pretty obvious they are 'leading' in the last 100 years..
The thing to remember here is that left vs right is not actually that important or decisive.
Open versus Totalitarian is (I would have used the word Liberal there, but A
Failure of too much Applied Research (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing we can outsource to AI.
Possibly not if Moore's law fails. However, this study arguably just shows the failure of focussing entirely on applied research. For each of their case studies they focus on one thing, such as Moore's law, crop yields etc. and conclude that it gets harder each year to drive the increases. This is because each of these areas is sticking to one fundamental approach and refining and improving it more and more which is clearly going to get harder over time.
What keeps the ideas coming is fundamental research which opens up entirely new approaches to solving problems. As the quote says "No amount of continuous improvement of the candle would have lead to the electric light bulb". Indeed the entire IT revolution owes its existence to the discovery of quantum mechanics and its application to understanding condensed matter physics. Without this applied researchers would be still be working on improving the valve.
The problem is that governments love to focus less on helping companies develop better widgets. The economic returns are almost immediate - or at least immediately obvious - and so useful to a politician seeking re-election. What they need to do is to put more money into fundamental research so that as fields run out of ideas there are completely new areas full of potential ideas to improve our lives in ways we cannot yet imagine. The problem is that the return on this investment is both uncertain and likely 50+ years away and the average politician has trouble caring about anything further away than the next election.
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Re:Failure of too much Applied Research (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. One of the "challenges" that *democratic* governments have is anything longer than the political cycle. Large infrastructure projects, long term economic plans, and long term priorities such as things like Climate Change are very difficult for the political structure to handle. It is also compounded by the fact that political parties actively WANT the initiatives of the other parties to fail is also very counter productive. Particularly so when most elections seem to more less mirror a "tick-tock" sort of pattern of one party in power until the public grows weary of them, then another (or other), and so on and so forth. Additionally compounded by political contributions by special interest groups trying to sway the direction into whatever it is that is most favorable to them.
Outside of governments, you can see this perhaps even more pronounced in recent times with publicly traded companies with shareholders and investments etc... There used to be a day when companies took a longer view and did a lot more R&D, and didn't just see it as a line item on a ledger that reduces their profits that particular quarter. There seems to be more emphasis on maximizing sort term profits over long term profitability, in part because of the aforementioned reasons, but also likely due to the revolving door of CEO's meeting their bonus obligations prior to GTFO and leaving the mess for the next guy to deal with (which is pretty analogous to the political issues mentioned previously as well). The method du jour of progressing technology seems to be through acquisition of other companies (which is further consolidation), or just licensing someone else's ideas, or just using them anyway, then having long drawn out court battles over who is owed however many millions/billions after the fact.
I think this is something that both are going to struggle with in the future (and now) when competing with more *ahem* consolidated powers such as China and Nationalized companies in the longer term. Their goals and time horizons are just so much greater. Don't really have any answers, but just pointing out the challenges.
In the more (pardon pun) specific case of this article, which specifically has to do with the semiconductor industry it isn't helped by the amount of consolidation in the industry and lack of competition. I can count on my hand the number of chip designers and fabricators, and even those are segmented into pretty unique niches meaning that there is very little overlap or competition diving innovation right now. That said, this is prevalent in a lot of related sectors for example, memory, storage, etc... Even on the more mundane hardware suppliers for things like PSU, etc...
One last note on the topic is that the trend of companies business models towards anti-consumer practices isn't exactly helping innovation at all. Innovation occurs when Product A has some feature than Product B doesn't have which is desirable by the consumer, so the consumer goes with Product B, thus generating profit and further incentive to innovate new and interesting features or faster processors etc... However when the business models seem less concerned with keeping consumers happy, or engaging them with innovative products and more about locking them into a particular product, making any sort of movement to another more difficult really disincentives innovation. As why bother making something faster, or integrating something better, when you know your customers have to buy whatever it is you're selling pretty much no matter what. Again compounded by instances where the primary product isn't something that actually produces the profit by itself, but is rather a conduit for other revenue streams, printer ink, music, or apps for example.
Anyway occasionally there is some government/consumer/industry push back on all the above, however there is just as much pushing the other direction for the status quo, and typically a lot of inertia to try and overcome for any real change. Just take a look a media for example and how much they have fought tooth and nail against any sort of technical innovation within their sector in favor of trying to get the old business model going. Who knows where we would be today if they had decided to take a more proactive approach.
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The AI systems are "trained". They can only reproduce the expertise by someone who provides the training data sets. You can show the system pictures of cars, trains and bicycles, with the desired inputs and outputs, and it will reproduce that expertise. It won't know to create new categories for hovercraft and aircraft.
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I'm stumped, too. If only there was a way to find out what words mean. Even better if you could use a computer to do it.
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You you are thinking of a puffin, a boffin is one of those guys who died trying to get the plans to the second death star.
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We can only make things so small.
There is still plenty of room at the bottom [wikipedia.org]. Conventional transistors can't get much smaller, but that just means we need some unconventional innovation.
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We can only make things so small.
That's what Mr. Trojan told me too. :(
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Ideas are everywhere, hell I just came up with an idea for converting sound to electrical signals and back, I expect an IPO any day.
Al Gore is currently working on a way to link all computers together over an online network.
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I believe that you are wrong. The world made do with the spoken word before it invented writing. No one seriously suggests that we throw away all the books and go back to the spoken word. Writing opened up new possibilities such as amassing bodies of knowledge in library's and passing ever more complex ideas down the generations - not just science but things like Art History. Computers have similarly made available the internet and the ability such as this - for people from all around the world to discuss w