I didn't understand how crucial chip manufacturing is until reading the book "Chip War".. What an amazing book. This is probably one of the greatest, if not the greatest invention in the human history.
I don’t think there is quite another product made by humankind that matches the sheer number of humans/sqinch - even including rockets, space ships, and some hospital clean room equipment.
Truly a golden era to be alive as a civilization to appreciate the height of human potential.
Prior to the great acceleration changes were slow enough that the world seemed static over a lifetime. If it wasn't, the changes were almost as likely to be negative as positive.
It's also entirely possible that we are in a transitional period. That in hindsight the great acceleration will be the first half of a sigmoid function.
Maybe we're transitioning between stages of a sigmoid. Or maybe we're still on an exponential trajectory, but on a timescale of one lifespan, the change still looks linear (if very fast).
plagues (black death, plague of justinian, many more)?
conquered by mongols?
targeted by crusades over centuries?
Do you think the Natives in North America, South America, or Australia saw it as golden?
... oh god what if we collapse again like Atlantis?!!
Chips are really great of course but at the same time its completely magic in a bad way. It haven't clicked for me how it all works until I watched videos of people building CPU analogs in Minecraft or something. Just don't like the feeling of not having an idea of how this thing works just by looking at it.
I find it pretty funny that, since we're no equipped to sens electrical flows just by looking at it, it's more the visual / sensorial support for you mental model that helps you. E.g. you don't really have more information by seeing the circuit physically than looking at plans, it just that your brain finds it easier.
But it's also pretty clear that having physical objects in the loop actually changes the brain thought process, so it's not just an affair of having the information at hand, how it's presented to our senses must imply changes.
It’s simply more enjoyable to look at, like looking at mechanical watches or industrial machinery. Chips are kind of dull. Not to take anything away from their enormous utility and impact of course.
It's like the difference between a game whose logic is 90% Lua or Python scripts, included plaintext in the game directory, vs. one that's 100% compiled C++. One is susceptible to modding by a 12 year old kid armed with a notepad, or a 22 year old kid trying to make a flashy visualization of finite state machines to get a good grade on CS labs for little work[0]. The other is... still mutable, if you get into reverse engineering, and probably pay for (or pirate) SoftICE[1]. More importantly, one lets you learn how to make similar things, through looking and experimenting; the other doesn't[2].
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[0] - Well, that involved Processing to show an animated diagram of a simple FSM, and Colobot with a flying Moon robot programmed with that FSM for the flashy vis, plus some half-assed IPC using text files...
[1] - Ghirda wasn't a thing back then.
[2] - See also "Show source" in browsers - used to be a great on-ramp to webdev and programming, back when JS was just a toy language.
Now sure, I know now I can do digital electronics with the right tools. But the tools I can use, that most hobbyists and professionals can access, allow only limited control. You can't just fab yourself an alternate chip to do something, you have to buy the very specific one that happens to do what you want, or a more general one that can be reprogrammed. And you rarely can reprogram existing chips on a board you modify, because the vendors don't want to see the magic.
Yes, I too, as a kid, was pissed off about digital electronics, and regularly remarked to a friend that soon we'll have light switches and fridges implemented using microcontrollers. If I only knew how true that prediction would turn out...
Now the irony is, at that same time I was making those complains, I was also studying X86 assembly and C++, trying to learn how to make video games. Turns out, the common thread that connects programming computers and analog electronics is accessibility. I could do both for almost free, while gradually learning through experimentation. I couldn't do that with digital electronics - the cost and educational barrier was just too great.