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0 pointsjasode5mo ago0 comments

>Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law.

There is an underlying natural law to IC's being cheap without any government involvement because printing out circuits with chemicals and light like a photocopier is inherently cheaper than the alternatives of vacuum tubes or discrete components mounted on a board. (For non-trivial circuits where the count/complexity of components exceed the capital cost of lithography etc equipment.)

The privately funded researchers of Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor already knew integrated circuits would be more cost-effective before the inventions were finally solved. Eliminating the rising labor costs of wiring up old-style discrete components was the motivation to invent integrated circuits.

Therefore, it's not realistic to ponder an alternate history where a government bureaucrat in charge of military spending would have ignored the intrinsic physical properties of ICs and kept choosing vacuum tubes for 1970s F-15 and F-16 fighter jets because he believed "ICs are not inevitable because I have agency to make them not inevitable". Every other rational military on the globe would have chosen ICs which would make American equipment uncompetitive.

What government military contracts did was take intrinsically cheaper technology and fund more iterations to help make it even cheaper.

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top2565mo ago

I agree that physical and economic constraints matter, but the point I’m making is that cost curves themselves are contingent on human choices. ICs didn’t suddenly become cheap on their own; they became cheap because governments and corporations poured billions into scaling them. That’s not denying the underlying advantage, but showing how rhetoric of inevitability erases the political and economic decisions that actually drive those curves.

Nevermark5mo ago

> ICs didn’t suddenly become cheap on their own; they became cheap because governments and corporations poured billions into scaling them.

That isn't insightful at all.

High returns on high scales of investment are MORE attractive. More "inevitable", even for mundane technologies.

The unbound economics of returns on intelligence without human limitations, and the downsides of being left behind (everything from lost employment to existential military threats), are the most convincing argument for technological investment ever.

The only thing not "inevitable" is how the returns will be distributed. With no end to the competition needed to stay relevant.

"Intelligence" is quite literally "THE" technology of technologies.

This is the most massive step in the form and capabilities of life on Earth, happening in real time, not a marginal improvement in user interfaces. Nothing living will be able to sit this out.

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