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Comment by bharam | Hacker News Reader

Analogy: "In the past, a well-meaning body of public servants decided there was a need to slow down microprocessors to protect jobs threatened by automation, reduce resource consumption and benefit the climate. CPU frequency was capped at 25MHz and instruction length was limited to 8 bits. The move was hailed as a great victory for humans, nature and the climate"

As a nation, where would we be today (compared to where we are) if a policy like that had actually been adopted?

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This analogy is completely broken, obviously.

But off-topic: I wonder what computers would look like if there _were_ arbitrary restrictions like that. What directions would we have pursued in microarchitecture, distributed systems, etc etc if there was a regulation capping clock speed or number of transistors, or a rule that made it illegal to have asymmetric network connections?

Enlighten me. How is the analogy broken?

Electronic devices != giant diesel engines with very very specific use cases.

A faster computer can shutdown or enter a lower power mode earlier. The base power draw of a computer hardly changes if you replace just the processor with a faster clocked one.

Look at mobile CPUs? What limits them might have arised naturally, but it's still quite arbitrary (battery life, cooling capacity).

There's no Moore's law for ship speeds. If there were, then in the century since tea clippers we'd have ships somehow zipping across the sea at a decent fraction of the speed of light, somehow using less power than the baseline.

In fact that probably would have already made the case for speed restrictions, as every multi-thousand-knot container ship created its own tsunami. There have long been speed restrictions on canals at a few miles an hour to avoid erosion.

We would have adapted to the situation we found ourselves in. Some of the most creative solutions can come from constrained environments.

So you compare automation with pollution? Really?

Nope. Automation is technology and so is transportation. Both can cause pollution but that's besides the point.

We'd be dying on the roads in droves because faster is always better ?

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