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Comment by jayw_lead | Hacker News Reader

Most of modern history has been defined by our ability to outpace our problems through technological acceleration. This essay argues that, rather than an uncontrollable AI takeoff, we may be approaching physical, economic, and regulatory limits — a long plateau where progress slows.

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I was thinking about this the other day; and realized this would probably end the tech industry as we know it.

No new unicorns, no new kernel designs, no need for new engineered software that often. With the industry in stasis, the industry is finally able to be regulated to the same degree as plumbing, haircutting, or other licensed fields. An industry no longer any more exceptional than any other. The gold rush is over, the boring process of subjecting it to the will of the people and politicians begins.

I think we're also getting to the limits, across the board, soon. Consider AWS S3, infrastructure for society. 2021 - 100 trillion objects. 2025 - 350 trillion objects. Objects that need new hard drives every 3-5 years to store, replenished on a constant cycle. How soon until we reach the point even a minor prolonged disruption to hard drives, or GPUs, or DRAM, forces hard choices?

> Objects that need new hard drives every 3-5 years to store, replenished on a constant cycle

The replenishment of these hard drives is baked into the cost of S3. If there is a major disruption of hard drive supply then S3 prices will definitely rise, and enterprises that currently store lots of garbage that they don't need, will be priced out of storing this data on hard drives, into Glacier or at worst full deletion of old junk data. That's not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion.

There is lots of junk data in S3 that should probably be in cold storage rather than spinning metal, if merely for environmental reasons.

The golden age of software may indeed come to an end some day.

But I don't think the market is saturated just yet.

Even when we stop having unicorns, SWE salaries may go down, but that'll also open new opportunities.

I think there is still a lot we can do within the current paradigm - most software, especially for enterprise, is still quite bad. And that will continue to drive employment and growth.

But w may one day have to contend with expecting fewer "new" paradigms and the ultra rapid industry growth that accompanies them (dotcom, SaaS, ML, etc). Will "software eating the world" be enough to counteract this long term? Hard to say

If the clock speed improvements had happened over a much longer stretch of time then we probably would have seen much earlier multi-core capable tooling. We are still mostly optimized for single threaded applications, extracting the maximum from a CPU is really hard work. So also consider the backlog in tooling, there is so much work that still needs to be done there.

And so much of our tech stack runs on old abstractions.

Do you even need an MMU, if you have memory safe languages?

Honestly, maybe semi scaling is a problem for AI, but for most other software today, the problem is bugs, bloat, latency.

MMUs allow for overcommit and make it possible to dynamically allocate memory to applications that need it.

This is all very locally constrained.

The entire scope of human storage or memory is not a constraint, but comes bottlenecked before constraints at arbitrary symbols, images and metaphors. The data even though it's analog, is still bottlenecked. Nothing specific even embedded or parameterized geometrically solves the bottleneck (AI can't do it, that's it's Achilles Heel, as it is ours). Think of language as a virus or parasite here, add symbols and logic, all a rendered from the arbitrary. How come nobody talks about this? We're mediocre thinkers using largely folk science in lieu of very evidently absent direct perception. In other words: we bought the sensation of language without ever verifying it, or correlating it to brain events or real events. The slow down to extinction was inevitable across all these mediums, technologies, preproductions, databases. Nothing solves it.

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