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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> I use TensorFlow, but looking at the concept and implementation, I don't think I could conceive of and write TensorFlow in 10 years of work.

And this is exactly why software is eating the world. Once written it stays written and all those people that could not write something like TensorFlow if their life depended on it are able to use it as if they could.

Abstraction is a super powerful thing, all this building on the knowledge and capability of those that came before is what makes the whole thing possible in the first place. Probably the people that wrote TensorFlow would not be able to design (each of them individually) the computers that it runs on, or the operating system that allows them to run TensorFlow in the first place.

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I agree very much. Just came to say that this has always been the case with the know-how of starting fires, metal molding, forging tools and weapons, inventing microscopy, large scale industrial processes, computers... software is the extension of the exponential acceleration of abstraction and reuse that our society was built on.

Metal molding seems to be eating the world better than software.

I feel like there's a difference with software though. Maybe not in degree, but in the constant factor.

With e.g. metalworking, you can transfer the knowledge but training takes time. And building a new implementation of that knowledge takes time too.

But in software the knowledge and implementation is transferred effectively instantly. You can nab software off the internet (transfer knowledge) and start running it locally right now (implementation).

Software changes the complexity from O(2^N / T) to O(2^N).

Sure, but is this not the same as buying a hammer/fertilizer/metal press and using it for your own means? That's a quasi-instantaneous acquisition of the result of hundreds of thousands of years of innovation.

Electrons move a lot faster than molecules, you could invent X in the United States and a person in China could be using it tomorrow without any cumbersome shipping or cultural barriers to adaptation.

The hammer, fertilizer and the metal press are all part of our tool-making culture, ways to adopt nature to do our bidding and in the case of the hammer and the metal press to shape it by brute force. In contrast, something like TensorFlow is a tool of the mind which means you can encode it as bits and those will travel the world a lot faster than your average bulk goods or container ship every will.

So they are comparable at some level and totally incomparable at others.

Even if software didn't have tremendously higher cultural barriers for usage than manual equipment, the rapidity of exchange is a very small component of the exchange value for the means of software production (which is primarily hardware anyway). The value of both hardware and software is measurable by the amount of labor needed to produce them, so it's not even comparable--it's identical.

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