Gwern — Economics: Tech↗

Brain emulation requires enormous computing power; enormous computing power requires further progression of Moore’s law ; further Moore’s law relies on large-scale production of cheap processors in...

A classic cognitive bias in technological forecasting is motivated-stopping and lack of imagination in considering possibilities for a steelman .

Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe. The enemy increaseth every day. We, at the height, are ready to decline.

The enduring phenomenon of holy wars in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, is not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are...

Review of DARPA history book, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983 – 10 1993 33ya , Roland & Shiman 2002 , which reviews a large-scale DARPA effort to jumpstart...

A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are...

For serious ideas, see my project wishlist ; and also my list of open research questions .

https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07258 : “On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models” , Rishi Bommasani, Drew A. Hudson, Ehsan Adeli , Russ Altman , Simran Arora, Sydney von Arx, Michael S.