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Boffins Fear We Might Be Running Out of Ideas (theregister.co.uk)
Innovation, fetishized by Silicon Valley companies and celebrated by business boosters, no longer provides the economic jolt it once did. From a report: In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago. On an annual basis, research productivity is declining at a rate of about 6.8 percent per year in the semiconductor industry. In other words, we're running out of ideas. That's the conclusion of economic researchers from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a paper published this week through the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?", economics professors Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, and John Van Reenen, and PhD candidate Michael Webb, defy Betteridge's Law of Headlines by concluding that an idea drought has indeed taken hold. "Across a broad range of case studies ... we find that ideas -- and in particular the exponential growth they imply -- are getting harder and harder to find," the authors declare in their paper.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented" -- Charles Holland Duell
(Quote debunked by Samuel Sass)
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
~ Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of US patent office (1899)
crazy dynamite monkey
Apple Announces iPhone X With Edge-To-Edge Display, Wireless Charging and No Home Button
Nah, see? We still have plenty of ideas. Oh, wait, you may have meant good ones... OK, that might be a problem. The low-hanging fruit has been already eaten.
Ezekiel 23:20
The low hanging fruit was easiest to pick? What a shocking new revelatory cliche that we've totally never seen before in any other aspect of life and therefore would have had no reason to believe would apply here!
I wonder whether it's really a lack of ideas, and or worse engineering staff. I think engineers are, on average, less passionate than they used to be. For many people in the industry it's just a career now, and not a passion. Especially in large companies like Intel.
We are running out of ideas because we stoped funding the sources of ideas like Xerox Park or Bell Labs. Innovation takes money and when all of the money chases development, not research, you run out of ideas to develop.
There's going to be a finite number of practical possibilities; we may actually be close to hitting a wall with regards to finding improved ways to push electrons through transistors. And then there's physics itself - there is an information processing limit based on the universe's physical laws.
That still leaves memristors, photonics, and quantum computing, and there's likely still a corner or two of under-understood physics to find and exploit.
I don't think we've reached the limits yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Programming is inherently self defeating, I live on Occam Razor's edge!
Maybe these scientists are trained using the same mold thus limiting unique idea generation (in the brain)? One truly needs to think outside the box to enable different viewing angles to problems, something one is less likely to have if he is taught like the average Joe besides you.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
We are not running out of ideas. That is nonsense. We are running out of EASY ideas. Before you could tell your supplier: Use this program to place an order directly to our factory. Then we will automatically send the orders for the required raw materials to our suppliers so that we can fill your order. Good idea! Big productivity jump!
Those easy gains are gone.
... unimaginative people find it hard to imagine.
We've invented everything there is to invent!
I think "boffins" said that in the past.
They were wrong then too.
Jeez! And we think Stanford and MIT are where the smart people are?!
Seriously? So a few researchers make the move from germanium to silicon that is (directly) used by approximately 2 people. 70 years later a team of researchers make a design change to reduce battery consumption 2% - for 100M iPhones. Which had more direct economic impact?
To measure by "economic impact" is complete blarney. You can claim it takes more people/time/money/resources, but to weigh it against the economic impact by saying "it takes 18 people to do [double density] where it used to take 1" is crap.
"We've tried nothin', and we're all out of ideas." -- Ned's Mom
That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago.
Assuming that the absolute number of transistors still matters, this math is ridiculous. A doubling of transistor count now means roughly 10 billion new transistors vs. a doubling in the 70s meaning maybe 10,000. So for 18x the headcount you get 1 MILLION times the transistors. A researcher is about 50,000 times more effective than he was in the 70s.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
We're not running out of ideas. What has happened in CPU development is that we have made all of the relatively easy advances in transistor miniaturization, and further advances are becoming incremental as progress runs up against the asymptotic curves imposed by the laws of physics. Further advances in processing power are therefore coming to rely upon increasingly multicore designs and sophisticated caches, mainly because that's a less risky business proposition than investigating architectures other than the von Neumann and (occasionally) Harvard architectures.
It's also worth noting that most of the several orders of magnitude increase in processing power over the last three decades has been consumed by increasingly inefficient software as a way of keeping software development costs down.
Nature only provides so many free rides, and humans have proven themselves very good at exhausting them quickly. Ideas, even good ones, are always cheap and plentiful. It's a willingness to do hard (and therefore expensive) work that is in short supply.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Make IOT secure... here a good idea. Make a virtual money that do not need a nuclear power plan to compute some transactions.
It's called information overload, and pre-conditioning.
Ever since computers have evolved to become the main device everyone has to know and work with, a huge percentage of the active population's creative ideas are now hovering around improving stuff that happens on a computer screen. This is a constrictive pattern, and it is limiting real innovation. Too much creativity is being wasted on programming. Back in the day before computers and mobile phones existed, people were really innovating in all the fields, driven by practicality or new scientific discoveries. Now it's all about improving something that exists (software, computing power, AI, etc).
In order to stay creative, people need to free their mind of previous patterns and start thinking new things that have little relation to what exists.
Think of all the brilliant software engineers locked today in writing software, and imagine what they could could innovate if they were not involved in working with computers at all.
First the headphone jack, now the home button. If Apple has enough courage, eventually they'll get rid of the whole damn phone.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life. We shall have found the basis of everything — of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small — except life.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago"
In 1970s, they used to make only few hundreds to few thousands of each high end chip. Today, Apple A11 or Qualcomm 835 or Intel x64 will get produced in hundreds of millions in quantities.
The real problem is that we've seen the rise of extreme leftism over the past 40 to 50 years. The seeds were planted in the late 1960s, but it wasn't until the last decade that it has really taken off and become entrenched throughout Western society, especially within the so-called "Millennial Generation".
Leftism abhors originality. It abhors creativity. It abhors free thinking. Why is that? Because individuals who engage in such activities quickly tear apart the intellectual "foundation" (or lack thereof) of leftist ideologies. Leftism collapses when confronted with any sort of intelligent analysis. That's why leftists try to hard to stamp out free thought in favor of people just mindlessly parroting leftist narratives.
Leftism is often wrongly described as "progressive", when it is actually an intense form of conservatism, even to the point of regression. Leftist ideologies revolve around fixed, unchanging narratives. There is no flexibility for these narratives to evolve. What's wrongly perceived as "progress" is actually a society regressing so as to conform to these fixed leftist narratives.
We shouldn't be surprised that we see stagnation within academia, within the various R&D fields, and within business. As more and more leftists have worked their way into academic, research and business organizations, the focus has been taken away from doing real work and coming up with real innovation.
Instead, the focus has been put on political "correctness", on faux "tolerance", and on artificial "equality". These constructs prevent real forward progress. They only allow for regression, which is exactly what we're seeing today.
Our reward system as a society is broken.
The problem, I believe, is this sort of iterative approach to development. The corporate world finds a formula that sells to consumers (smaller device, better camera, etc.) and simply iterates slightly on it because that gives the best surest ROI.
True revolutionary innovation requires entirely new approaches discovered through a lot of R&D and that investment is very risky. On top of that, new risky innovation, even when successful, has to immediately compete with existing technologies and has even less time to mature.
Take a notable transistor competitor: a qubit and quantum computing. Maybe it'll eventually work at scale or maybe it won't. If some approach does work and scales, a lot of revolutionary new technology will spin off that development. If it doesn't, well, what a waste of money and time.
Why should I, as an investor, inventor, etc. bother with quantum computing when the probability of success is so unknown and potentially low when I know I could build a trivial phone app that apps apps and make billions from consumers? The rewards are so skewed that true innovation, and especially failure seeking true innovation (which is a requirement), are 't rewarded the way they should be in our society... IMHO.
While I appreciate throwing dirt over the younger generations from time to time (a pastime of the not so young), let's admit science and technology have become too darned complex, requiring any person lot more time to become more-or-less proficient in a single topic,and as a consequence, it takes much longer to find the almost mythical "synergies" accelerating any field with the help of sideways/cross-pollinated knowledge.
Also, we may have started hitting some hard physical limits, not just a lack of better ideas. If silicon makers are finding so hard to improve their chips, it may be because electronics and digital systems as we known them break up when the gates' size is comparable to that of atoms.
The solutions may again come from other fields of knowledge. If quantum effects ruin your logic gates because they are too small, better start thinking on quantum computing approaches leveraging your knowledge to make small things on a waffer.
Easier said than done, though.
I'm stumped, too. If only there was a way to find out what words mean. Even better if you could use a computer to do it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Your doing a good job spouting out what Rush Limbaugh told you that liberals believe. Why don't you actually ask a liberal next time.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
... when First Contact happens and causes us to rethink everything and people will want a a less complex world.
There are so many new technologies that haven't been developed yet, let alone imagined, that we'll _never_ run out of ideas to try.
The fundamental problem today is that when your R&D is tied to an artificial monetary system then yeah, no one can afford to pay for R&D. But when money is no longer the sole focus then R&D will flourish.
Here is a preview of the two most exciting technologies coming:
* Teleportation -- possible because space is relative
* Time Travel -- possible because time is relative
As advanced as our computers are, they are still a joke compared to what is possible. Bio-organic computing will eventually replace electrical computing. Right now we are toying with 64+ cores / cpu. This is laughable when mammals are literally _millions_ of cores / cpu.
What passes for Artificial Ignorance (A.I.) is also a total joke -- calling a table look-up A.I. doesn't make it so. Compared to actual intelligence (a.i.) when consciousness can be measured, stored, replicated, etc.
We haven't even begin to scratch the surface of what is possible -- not from just a technological, but social, political, religious, and creative aspect.
I think they have to eventually accept that "Moore's Law" is no law at all. Eventually any technology matures and you then get very incremental improvements.
Take automobiles for example: While there have been a lot of efficiency improvements and such over the years, you could take a car from 1945 and while it will certainly look "retro", if it's in good condition it's still perfectly workable in a modern setting. On the flip side, you COULDN'T really do that with a Model T.
Computers, much like everything else, will eventually plateau and improvements will be of the slow and steady type, not the drastic "your gear will be obsolete in 5 years" pace that we had become accustomed to.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
This is apparent decline of productivity is typical of a mature science.
One day, for example, semiconductors will hit their physical limits and Moore's law will cease to apply. At that point, these "Boffins" will presumably conclude that productivity in that industry had ceased to grow, and that it could all be fixed if we just had more on the ball researchers. They presumably also think that we could have 500 MPH cars if only the automotive researchers weren't so lazy. .
Let me explain this in terms a child can understand.
Learning things gets exponentially harder. Think of it like climbing a cliff. When you move from a 10 ft cliff to a 20 ft cliff, and it takes you twice as long, it does NOT mean we are moving half as fast.
We are working on harder problems so it will take more work to figure them out. That does not mean we are running out of ideas, nor does it mean the ideas are smaller. It means we are applying the same size ideas to bigger problems.
Luckily for us, some of the ideas we have convert subsistence farmers into scientists. The number of scientists has grown at an exponential rate for hundreds of years ( look at this 1994 article, note the exponential y axis on the chart).,
For this reason, this article is entirely wrong. Our problems are increasing in size, but our problem solving resource (Scientists) are increasing at the same rate.
No problem.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Spellikans be deludin' that our common ling be driftin' up on a split. Satchel in sharp tip, "boffins" fur "enginkrafter". It squaks like a non-flying ave to some; but it's snot.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Instead, the focus has been put on political "correctness", on faux "tolerance", and on artificial "equality".
"All men are created equal." I read this somewhere once.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Good grief, don't you people ever get tired of listening to yourselves?
Maybe engage in some original thought yourself for once, and realize you can't neatly divide entire populations into left & right, and attribute everything that's wrong with the world to one or the other.
Fortunately in the United States we rely on scientists and engineers for doing scientific research and engineering!
love is just extroverted narcissism
In the early 1900s there was a scientist who believed we had already figured everything out, we just had to sort out the details now.
That sentiment was ridiculous then and it's ridiculous now. If the idea flow seems to be slowing, it's not because we're running out of them. Rather, it's because society's problems are maturing. I guarantee a brand new class of need shows up, the ideas will flow faster than ever before.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I just see it accumulating at the top. You make a good point, but don't forget all the gov't research we used to do and stopped (gotta cut all that pork, after all). Folks like to forget how much basic research was done on the public dime.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Another thing we can outsource to AI.
Possibly not if Moore's law fails. However, this study arguably just shows the failure of focussing entirely on applied research. For each of their case studies they focus on one thing, such as Moore's law, crop yields etc. and conclude that it gets harder each year to drive the increases. This is because each of these areas is sticking to one fundamental approach and refining and improving it more and more which is clearly going to get harder over time.
What keeps the ideas coming is fundamental research which opens up entirely new approaches to solving problems. As the quote says "No amount of continuous improvement of the candle would have lead to the electric light bulb". Indeed the entire IT revolution owes its existence to the discovery of quantum mechanics and its application to understanding condensed matter physics. Without this applied researchers would be still be working on improving the valve.
The problem is that governments love to focus less on helping companies develop better widgets. The economic returns are almost immediate - or at least immediately obvious - and so useful to a politician seeking re-election. What they need to do is to put more money into fundamental research so that as fields run out of ideas there are completely new areas full of potential ideas to improve our lives in ways we cannot yet imagine. The problem is that the return on this investment is both uncertain and likely 50+ years away and the average politician has trouble caring about anything further away than the next election.
to use on an American site. Let me guess...that's right! It's msmash. Copying and pasting from British sites since...
which is indistinguishable from pork projects since they're generally too complex to tell the difference between somebody playing around with physics puzzles and the next big leap. The best part is even the physicists don't know which is which.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
To bring us this information...
We can only make things so small.
There is still plenty of room at the bottom. Conventional transistors can't get much smaller, but that just means we need some unconventional innovation.
Anyone can make an idea, whether it's something like cheap space flight, teleportation, cure for the common cold, cold fusion, perpetual motion machines, and so on. Some of these may be impractical, but they still exist and are unclaimed.
Given that the article-linked paper is behind some paywall, this makes it hard to create questions, whether it's methodology or actual cause.
It could be that researching the new stuff takes extra time to verify, or that the newer stuff requires very delicate processes that slow things down. It could also be substandard education (e.g. giving Grade 7 word searches with only horizontal words), or general anti-intellectualism that saps the ability to work properly.
That's why this article feels like conclusion jumping.
Your doing a good job spouting out what Rush Limbaugh told you that liberals believe. Why don't you actually ask a liberal next time.
Been there, done that. It's even worse listening to an actual liberal.
You you are thinking of a puffin, a boffin is one of those guys who died trying to get the plans to the second death star.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
This gave me a good chuckle. It's always amusing when people from the left or right try and explain the other side and get it completely wrong.
Newsflash to every extremist on either side: no political ideology is completely wrong or completely right. They all get somethings right and somethings wrong, and the same ideology doesn't always work in every situation and every society.
Get over yourselves. As with most things, the best solution is often somewhere in the between what the extremists from either side espouse. Stop demonizing or regaling people based on their political preferences.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
We can only make things so small.
That's what Mr. Trojan told me too. :(
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Huh. A few seconds of a search and replace and peeling off the "progressive" bit makes your post actually reflect reality.
================
The real problem is that we've seen the rise of extreme rightism over the past 40 to 50 years. The seeds were planted in the late 1960s, but it wasn't until the last decade that it has really taken off and become entrenched throughout Western society, especially within the so-called "Baby Boomer Generation".
Rightism abhors originality. It abhors creativity. It abhors free thinking. Why is that? Because individuals who engage in such activities quickly tear apart the intellectual "foundation" (or lack thereof) of rightist ideologies. Rightism collapses when confronted with any sort of intelligent analysis. That's why rightists try to hard to stamp out free thought in favor of people just mindlessly parroting rightist narratives.
Rightism is actually an intense form of conservatism, even to the point of regression. Rightist ideologies revolve around fixed, unchanging narratives. There is no flexibility for these narratives to evolve. What's wrongly perceived as "progress" is actually a society regressing so as to conform to these fixed rightist narratives.
We shouldn't be surprised that we see stagnation within academia, within the various R&D fields, and within business. As more and more rightists have worked their way into academic, research and business organizations, the focus has been taken away from doing real work and coming up with real innovation.
=============
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
In many ways, the West held the lead in science and technology and the rest of the world more or less caught up with it, by and large copying Western science and technology.
Does this imitation help or hurt innovation? Is it possible that without globalism, Chinese or Indians would have developed ideas that are considered present-day innovations in the West?
Historically it sort of seemed to work like that -- technological development within a given cultural paradigm seems to stagnate and then some contact is made with another culture and some foreign idea gets incorporated and innovation takes off.
It's like in a vacuum, a culture is blind to some concepts or ideas that aren't really revolutionary in some other culture, but when combined with the first culture's knowledge become a kind of catalyst.
Anyway, I wonder if the homogenization of the world has made this lost to humanity now. Everybody's operating more or less on these Western concepts of science and technology and we no longer have the external influence available. Where we used to have the external influences, we now just have copies of our own ideas. Sometimes even better copies than we made the first time around, but still just copies.
Why? Just because they exist doesn't mean they're doing something, and just because they're doing something doesn't mean that thing is useful.
Most CPU power - at least on the desktop - is either drawing animated amimojomongs or whatever they're called, putting chrome like transparent shadows on menus, or just sitting around waiting for user input.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So, in short, you see yourself as superior?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You don't believe in the creator? Even if he says that you can say whatever you want and you're allowed to play at cowboys and Indians in real life?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm in the exact middle and everybody else is WRONG!
Not seeing the causal link there either.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Cretin. It has nothing to do with political fetishes about leftism or the stupidity of modern Americans because of the lack of investment in education. The reason for the reduced progress in semiconductor technology is because we are running out of physics. The physical dimensions are now so small that leakage currents and power dissipation are reaching the limits of what is possible with the available materials. Lots of clever and difficult manufacturing processes and material configurations have been developed to make today's silicon chips. The factories that make the latest and most powerful chips cost in the region of $10 Billion because it has become so hard to make them. The problem is not a shortage of ideas, the problem is that it has become 18 times more difficult to make advances in chip performance. Of course both a right wing political expert and a bunch of media reporters choose to misrepresent academic research that measures this slow down in progress as 'political defects in society' and a 'lack of creativity' because, hey screw facts, we have irrelevant opinions and random talking points to argue about. What this demonstrates in fact is that general society is almost completely ignorant about where its technological marvels come from.
I await with interest the response to CRISPR/Cas 9 and Genetic Medicine which will be a mainstream technology marvel of the coming 50 years. You folk are probably too dumb to know what to do with it let alone recognize its potential benefits. For goodness sake learn a bit more about how the science and the world works before ranting about your prejudices and politics.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
"In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s."
That doesn't mean that "each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago".
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
... reasonably implementing them is where the hard work is.
I've got 200+ ideas on stock. If somebody lacks any, they can ring me up.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Your rewrite makes no sense.
Aside from the Millennials/Hipsters, the Baby Boomers are well known for being the most left wing generation ever.
They were the hippies of the '60s, after all!
They also passed their left wing beliefs onto their children, the Millennials/Hipsters.
It isn't left wingers who are being censored and banned from the various social media sites.
It isn't left wingers who are having their domain name registrations and web hosting services cancelled unexpectedly.
It is right wingers who are being censored and banned.
It isn't right wingers who make up the teaching staff and administration of academic institutions.
It is left wingers who indoctrinate future generations.
It isn't left wingers who are banned from speaking on college campuses.
It is right wingers who are prevented from expressing themselves, often by left wingers using physical violence.
Your rewrite doesn't match reality at all.
Was it your intent to discredit the left wing?
Because that is all that you have managed to do!
The AI systems are "trained". They can only reproduce the expertise by someone who provides the training data sets. You can show the system pictures of cars, trains and bicycles, with the desired inputs and outputs, and it will reproduce that expertise. It won't know to create new categories for hovercraft and aircraft.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Original ideas are probably out there, but if its not a quick money making idea we just decide to bin it.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
... for good old fashoned WHALE OIL. Truly an abundant, superior fuel that was the first to be killed off by the Left.
New whales are born all the time, making whale oil an infinite resource.
I think you're right, and that's part of it, but I also think that the corporate drive for efficiency is contributing as well. In order to get approval to do anything in a modern corporation, you must first outline exactly what you're going to do, exactly how long it's going to take, and exactly how much it's going to cost. The irony is, faced with such an insurmountable obstacle, most of us are forced to just sit back and do essentially nothing (that is, find some busy-make-work to do) rather than actually try to produce some value in a creative way.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I'm stumped, too.
Right?! If only there were a way for the editors to know how commonly-understood a word is for its primary audience. It seems that the perceptions of our dear editors are coloured.
But y'know what really pisses me off about your snark?
The community (rightfully) gives a lot of shit to the editors when they don't expand little-known abbreviations, or reference little-known companies, or use words with not-widely-understood meanings without giving contextual clues. And the editors get that shit because it's their goddamn job to smooth-out those wrinkles.
But, if they use a word that's somewhat locale-centric THAT'S fine? THAT doesn't deserve criticism? THAT means you can post your haughtiest statement that, oh nonono, it is the READER that is at fault, and the veiled criticism towards the editors is unwarranted?
You know the editor screwed-up here, but you chose to nail someone for being critical of that.
In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago.
Firstly, no, it doesn't mean that.
Secondly, Moore's Law is not the sole benchmark by which to measure technological progress. Not by a long way.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Since it means our best physicists are basically doing two jobs. It also means less physicists at work, since they now have to fight for a teaching position to get funding for their research...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It seems on slow news days we tend to get these articles.
No hurricane to cover today? Write something about how history is ending. Say "we're running out of ideas" or some other blatant nonsense.
Maybe you'll get some annoyed but easily-manipulated idiot posting in reply, which is what we want. An annoyed click is still a click of revenue, right?
-Styopa
But has the entire species run out of ideas? Like fuck. People have been making that argument for centuries. They look at the world around them and don't have the imagination to think it could ever change.
I don't doubt that there's some truth in the article though. I don't have a link, but I remember reading an article suggesting a similar trend to semiconductor development occurring in medical R&D - the amount of money invested produces fewer finds year on year.
My personal opinion is that there's a few contributing factors to this too such as an obsession with next-quarter short termism in the corporate world and a chronic underfunding of public sector research in universities and at agencies like NASA.
Perhaps this is something wider. Every civilisation declines, and the western world will be no different. When it does, the malaise will be uniform. It might be that it can be restarted by a revolution of political or economic thought, or it might not. Perhaps we are living through such times, and we're hamstrung by simply being unable to imagine a radically different world.
* Teleportation -- possible because space is relative
* Time Travel -- possible because time is relative
That's gibberish.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Ideas are everywhere, hell I just came up with an idea for converting sound to electrical signals and back, I expect an IPO any day.
Al Gore is currently working on a way to link all computers together over an online network.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Never once have I had to do that for a project. Ballparks and estimates, sure, but *exactly*, never.
That also, I have never had to do. That you would speaks volumes to your post.
What great work they have done for mankind:
The Cultural Revolution
The Great Leap Forward
Russian political Gulags and forced relocations,
The Red Terror
The Great Purge
The Killing Fields
The Ethiopian Red Terror
To name just a few. I wont even begin to put numbers of the deaths, however its pretty obvious they are 'leading' in the last 100 years..
The thing to remember here is that left vs right is not actually that important or decisive.
Open versus Totalitarian is (I would have used the word Liberal there, but America has redefined that word, as they like to do)
Totalitarian is consistently bad - on the left AND the right - a direction that man western governments are racing towards.
Moore's Law says that transistor density doubles about every two years. It's been forty years since the late 1970's, so we've had about 20 iterations of Moore's Law. In that time transistor density has gone up exponentially from x to roughly x^20 . Meanwhile, the number of engineers necessary to continue the advancement has gone up linearly from y to 18y .
An exponential reward for a linear cost doesn't seem like a bad a trade-off.
Fuck off, msmash.
That's a neat idea, but it was the conservative Right who banned LSD and all the other psychedelic substances that enhance creativity.
Because... you can read masses of future hypothetical minds?
Neither of those suppositions of yours leads to the conclusions you draw.
So why do you remain in a country that was founded on "all men were created equal"?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Isn't 18 people going from 10,000,000,000 resistors to 20,000,000,000 resistors more efficient than 1 person going from 2000 resistors to 4000 resistors?
In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago
The leading edge in miniaturization now has transistors that are only 25 ATOMS across. An atom of Si being about 0.2nm.
As such the difficulty of the problem has increased hugely since the 1970s. This does seem to be an example of a problem that is nearing its fundamental, physical limits.
But that may be the issue. That the people writing about science, especially in the media, simply aren't qualified, don't have the talent to explain and are often writing to support a narrative rather than to enlighten their audience. Given that the report was written by economists, it is reasonable to assume they don't actually understand what they are talking about. That isn't really "running out of ideas" as not being educated enough to work at the sharp end.
And even if there is a shortage of ideas, might that be due to the fencing-off of vast tracts of the "ideascape" by the very poor patent laws we have at present?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The really sad thing is that both Parent and GP are correct. Who has time for original thought when everyone is so busy repeating the party lines?
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones- Donald Rumsfeld Works for most difficult questions.
The real problem is that people have gotten so lazy that they are fine just assuming that everyone on "the other side" fits into a single category and we are all in complete agreement with anything thats said or done by "our side."
That sort of mindless pigeonholing make it impossible to hold adult conversations.
On an annual basis, research productivity is declining at a rate of about 6.8 percent per year in the semiconductor industry. In other words, we're running out of ideas.
Actually, I think that implies we're running out of physics. Why equate the topic of "ideas" strictly with the semiconductor industry? Seems like it's not analogous.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
The full sentence is:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
If you are an educated English speaker, you will understand that this refers to "inalienable Rights", not fat and skinny people.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Today, the PhD is what a bachelors degree was 50 years ago. People who can't get jobs go back to school. Academia is also flooded with new applicants like it never was before. Peer review venues are also swamped with absurd numbers of papers submitted by students needing to graduate and faculty needing tenure, and the competition is absurd. It's very hard now for people to distinguish themselves.
It should come as no surprise that with increased numbers of scientists in completition with each other that the average scientific output per scientist would decline.
Some sort of flightless bird?
Definitely flightless. They can also be quite large, and often have unusual odours.
If leftists were liberals, that might be a good idea.They're more hidebound than rightists, and both are tedious.
Go back to your Physics class because obviously you failed to learn the first thing about Relativity:
* spacetime is linked
* space and time are relative
While you are there go read about the Absolute Space and Time and maybe you'll learn something:
What are your objections to the mirror test? Doesn't self-recognition inherently imply a concept of self? I suspect that you acquired that factoid without examining it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The other AC was not wrong. The left has been cannibalized and taken over by fanatics who espouse the most violent racism and sexism and call for the return of segregation, government promotion of Islam, the total extermination of all "white" people (especially Jews), and the state seizure of everyone else's private property but they would get to keep what they own. They hate the old left's principles of tolerance, equality, freedom, worker rights, science, rule of law, neutrality in government, etc. They're not called "regressives" for nothing, and "an intense form of conservatism" is a good description. "Fascist" is another good description. If you follow the money back to the billionaires financing them, you find that the rich people are even more insane than their pet nutters.
Some of the names to look into are Stephen Heintz, Julia Middleton, Muna AbuSulayman, Alwaleed bin Talal, Wadah Khanfar, George Soros, Carlos Slim, Farah Pandith, Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, Qatar Investment Authority, Arcus Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, that's just off the top of my head. I don't have access to my research at the moment. Look into how much money they control and then go laugh at anyone who complains about the Koch brothers, the Mercers, or Sheldon Adelson influencing politics.
You're not hearing about this in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, etc, because they run these outlets. All of the big social media, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc, are partnered with them to censor their content so no one will hear a bad word about them. Google and Microsoft are working on algorithms to do it automatically.
Ooh, ooh, what if you actually did some research instead of just making stuff up?
Energy payback for solar panels is 1-4 years: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04...
Energy payback for wind turbines is 5-8 months: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Electric vehicles (or hydrogen vehicles if you're into that) don't make much sense if you run them off of coal, but they make a lot of sense if you charge them with wind or solar power. There is no other way to drive a car without emitting lots of greenhouse gases, gobbling up lots of scarce farmland (i.e., chopping down forests), or using up the surprisingly scarce supply of uranium.
Ideas qua ideas are completely valueless, and thinking otherwise is the height of hubris. Someone else has already had your brilliant insight, and beyond that, execution is the only thing that matters. I am sure that the rejection of your ideas by all of these companies represents an accurate evaluation of their value.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
A bitgrid is a design I came up with in the 1980s for a new type of FPGA, it's all lookup tables, with no routing logic. There are several advantages that make up for the massive waste of transistors.
I could easily use 16 times the transistors of Intels biggest chip, and possibly get more than 16x performance out of them.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously--there is no AI. Everyone who thinks humans suck at everything because they themselves suck at everything can just get over it. You're not a representative sample of human capability and there is no such thing as AI. There are clever algorithms that make decidedly un-clever people think they're dealing with intelligence greater than themselves, but that's it. Now, for some people that would be a true statement, but for many of those people they're dealing with a greater intelligence when they're in the same room as a golden retriever or a clever 4 year old. That AI is routinely sold to people with the emotional intelligence of 2 year olds (most modern day CEOs) is a failure of our economy, not brilliance on the part of machines.
This gave me a good chuckle. It's always amusing when people from the left or right try and explain the other side and get it completely wrong.
Newsflash to every extremist on either side: no political ideology is completely wrong or completely right. They all get somethings right and somethings wrong, and the same ideology doesn't always work in every situation and every society.
Get over yourselves. As with most things, the best solution is often somewhere in the between what the extremists from either side espouse. Stop demonizing or regaling people based on their political preferences.
Hey, if I give up my extremist views then the middle will no longer be the middle, it will be somewhere on THEIR side of the line.... No way am I giving up ground to THEM....
At least, that's how I imagine the extremists view things. Being fiscally conservative and socially liberal, I'm fairly close to the center. My problem is that none of the political parties are fiscally conservative. They all want to spend money and are just arguing over the pile...
Relativity in fact prohibits time travel (except in the usual forward direction) and relativity prohibits what you're likely thinking of as 'teleportation' - instantaneous travel.
You're likely in need of years of education to understand why, so you shouldn't feel angry or ashamed of having that pointed out to you. But if you don't want to look like a blathering idiot, you're going to have to ACCEPT it unless and until you have sufficient education and reviewed research to your name to credibly claim otherwise.
... Hollywood and TV studios.
The solar would be on your roof whether it was economically feasible or not. The determining factor is whether it is affordable to you at a time when you are open to purchasing it. The cost of production can be artificially reduced for a short amount of time. Making things appear economically feasible when they are not. Efficiencies from mass production can reduce the cost, while mass production can spread the cost to make a thing economically feasible. The question is when or if the sustainability of "clean energy" sources begin to contribute back to the economy as a whole, and not just back to your wallet in an illusory manner. Ideally the economic role which solar panels play in your life should become the sustainable economic model once the cost balance tips in favor of that economic model.
Running electric vehicles off coal wouldn't result in less overall pollution? Sufficient coal to power said vehicles produces as much polution as petroleum fueled vehicles? There is perhaps an argument for shifting the air polution outside of densely populated areas reducing the amount of smog in cities.
The AI systems are "trained". They can only reproduce the expertise by someone who provides the training data sets.
And in many cases they are parasitic, as that "someone" is not being paid for the training or reimbursed for the use.
Well, I wouldn't say that slavery absolutely leaves the world less well off. The results are not cut and dried. There are some who benefit from others managing their money for them. Motivation can lead to greater "equity", even if it isn't reflected in an actual income. Such things can likely be achieved through other means. We are all individuals, and we react in a variety of ways to a variety of stimuli. But we are not omniscient, we cannot know what is best for the individual, which is why freedom of choice, freedom to make decisions for oneself, is the fair and just option.
I think you have it about right there. An EV has somewhat higher greenhouse gas emissions than a hybrid vehicle if the electricity comes from coal. But it could reduce in-city pollutants. On the other hand, coal plants have serious problems with mercury, NOx and SOx (less so for new plant designs, but those are also more expensive), and modern cars are pretty low-emitting (although they apparently remain the main source of smog in LA).
Moore's law is a stupid example of this, because obsolescence is physically built in to the "law", but the general idea that the economic output of science is decreasing is a real thing, and cuts across fields.
Most people won't notice this; most scientists don't notice this. It seems like the economy is ticking along, and things keep improving technically. If you dig into investing around science driven companies and look at the inflation adjusted spending required in R&D to produce a dollar of product sales, you'll see a general upward trend since the late 1970s.
This is most famous right now in pharmaceutical development. There have been papers published on this and talks at conferences on what has gone wrong for many years now.
There are a lot of theories flying around out there: that the easy projects have long been done, that businesses putting shareholder value above company vision has limited innovation, that government regulations have encouraged inefficiency, that replacing industrial R&D with university driven R&D was a mistake, that investors and grant managers are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its sense of purpose), that business leaders are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its courage), and that scientists and engineers are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its mind).
Take your pick, I think there's some truth in all of them.
the problem isn't governments per se, it's that the ruling class (the one we like to pretend doesn't exist) doesn't want to pay for basic research. And make no mistake, they're the ones that have to pay. The working class spends most of it's money either living or saving to live when they can't work anymore. You can't get much more out of them than what's needed to cover basic services (police, fire dept, roads, schools, etc). That leaves the idle rich on the hook for anything else.
They were paying those bills because we had two world wars and they were desperate to get enough tech built that the other side wouldn't come over and take their stuff. But the age of world war is over. The ruling class is global now and crosses national boundaries effortlessly. So with the threat of war gone they've lost the only reason they had to support basic research, and they've spent the last 40 years pushing tax cuts and taking back 'their' money.
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it's doing useless work. Science is either throwing a bunch of shit at a wall to see what sticks or waiting a thousand years for some genius freak of nature to advanced the species. The latter takes too long and the former means spending money on stuff that's probably worthless. Folks hate that. They give it names like 'pork barrel' and demand it stop right now. But you're gonna lose the good with the bad because if we could tell the difference we wouldn't need research in the first place.
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Skip the stupid adclick op-ed summary and go straight to the source,
https://web.stanford.edu/~chad...
While msmash did successfully pull three sentences out of the actual paper to make his sensationalist headline, he really glossed over the main point, which is that overall productivity gains are steadily getting harder to achieve across a broad range of industries, which seems to be in line with most of the comments I have read so far on /. The authors use the term "ideas" which is a bit confusing at first but is meant to share terminology with older studies. Later on they clarify that in modern parlance the term "research effort" is probably a more appropriate label.
why the random, seemingly unrelated dig against liberal arts majors? Anyway, they do serve a purpose. There's millions of people out there who aren't smart enough to do science and engineering but can get through a liberal arts degree. When they're done they're still better off intellectually than if they hadn't got the degree.
Now let me ask you this: Would you with your engineering degree rather have a country of 10 million like minded engineers, 10-20 thousand members of the ruling elite and 290+ million uneducated buffoons or at least get those 290+ million through a liberal arts degree? Do you have enough bullets to cut them all down when some Stalin style strong man comes along and mobilizes those uneducated buffoons against you? Wouldn't it have been better to head that off at the pass with education?
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They're assuming everyone with a degree has valuable input, even after the massive push to popularize STEM in an attempt to drive down labor costs therein. The fact is the number of intelligent people, rating intelligence as the peak of whatever is current (because tech gets more sophisticated all the time and you need more brainpower to tap it, even if the average intellect rises - which I tend to doubt is much more than an artifact of teaching things which fool the tests,) is relatively fixed.
You can't push everyone into STEM because it's hip and trendy and expect them to produce jack shit, what we have is the same rate of advance and more people in STEM, not more people in STEM who happen to be ineffective, those people were always destined to be ineffective.
So this is the Furmi Paradox Great Filter?
All civilisations rise to the point they run out of ideas, remain trapped on their own world failing to manage it until a climate event of their own making silences them.
Bummer. I had higher hopes.
It can be rendered less destructive.
We all have to create each other. My first creator was God, then my parents, then my friends.
It says Oxo on buses, but they don't go there.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The question is not "is it profitable on your roof" but "is it profitable on your roof without subsidies" including subsidies provided to the manufacturer and to the retailer, which you never see. The answer is "it depends on local conditions." Generally, we're getting there, but it's not a slam dunk yet.
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My side is the side of extreme good.
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Generating ideas or writing shite articles?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Leftism is the philosophy of consolation for a nation committing suicide. If we lose in fighting leftism, the country dies.
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That's known as a hand waving argument. "Somehow" is not a method, and it's not a demonstration that the desired thing is possible.
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It is much easier to scrub the exhaust from a stationary power plant, no matter the energy source, than it is to scrub the exhaust from a car engine.
Why? Because with the power plant, you don't really have to worry about weight and size, and to a certain degree vibration. So you can make the scrubbers a lot more effective.
Electric propulsion is the way forward, because it makes transportation energy-agnostic. Electricity is electricity, no matter where it comes from, so it becomes much easier to make the infrastructure more environmentally friendly.
Eat the rich.
Aside from the Millennials/Hipsters, the Baby Boomers are well known for being the most left wing generation ever.
Yup, that's why the ones in the US voted in Ronald Reagan and the ones in the UK voted for Margret Thatcher - because they're so left wing. Oh, wait.
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you might want to give some thought to what the word "Nazi" actually stands for
And you might want to go and look at why they chose that name and when they abandoned their pretence of any left-leaning ideas.
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The current problem is not making them smaller, it's making them cooler. Denard scaling ended a decade ago. Even while Moore's Law is giving us a lot more transistors on a chip, the number that we can keep powered at the same time is going up a lot more slowly. This means it's actually the first time in a few decades that it's actually been fun to do computer architecture research: in the '80s and '90s, if you came up with something clever to do with transistors, someone like DEC or Intel just throwing a bunch more ALUs on their next generation processor would let software emulate whatever you were trying to do, faster. Now, you can actually make a difference. Take a look at the number of specialised cores in a cheap SoC and you'll see where this has started going.
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Solution: Stop hiring people with no Ideas. =p
That is about as ridiculous as when Bavarians would demand the news written in their dialect instead of standard German.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the ideology of slavery is always wrong. I realize this doesn't fit your worldview. I don't care, and don't plan to get over myself. Too bad.
What is slavery? Being forced to work without compensation or rights.
Current laws here in the US allow prisons to force prisoners to work without pay. One could make the case that giving inmates work and keeping their minds active could help reform them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Technology is at a point where the entry price is so high for a new development it is very largely driven by Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Data. Where all ideas come from the Big Ideas factories, all the ideas guys have been tamed, and work within the boundaries of the Big Ideas factory. Only the super-rich (Elon, we love you) have the capability to invest.
What is this? Some crappy tabloid site?
Go tell some neo-Nazis that they're lefty socialists and see how well they take it.
I know a great deal about spacetime, thanks. I know space is relative, and I know time is relative.
The issue I have with your statement is the conclusion you've leapt to. Why should teleportation be possible because space is relative? It makes no sense. There's no link there. You may as well have said that telepathy is possible because we have dreams.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
They had many leftist ideals.
They were a party set up explicitly to try to prevent working class people from joining the various communist parties in Germany at the time. They had some anti-capitalism rhetoric early on, but that was entirely gone by the mid '30s.
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Baby boomers were born in the post-war years, mostly in the '50s. They became able to vote in the '70s and became the group with the highest voting turnout in the '80s.
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Chess AI players are able to consider the game any number of levels (or plays) ahead, even 20+, simply from a hash of the code values of each piece and it's location. That includes everything from aggressive to defensive moves. If there is one move that risks a loss ten moves ahead, while another doesn't, then it is obvious which move to make.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Optical computing with individual photons, multi-frequency transistor gates seem the way forward.
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This idea of eternal exponential growth of things, it's just ridiculous. It's just not sustainable. It's literally impossible to sustain.
Some common arguments:
"We will build space-ships and start colonizing space"
Nuh-uh, after approximately 1000 years the whole galaxy is colonized, even with a habitable star around every star in the galaxy. After 2000 years it's the entire observable universe.
"The growth will continue in intangible services"
So you're saying actual physical objects will comprise tiny fractions of a percent of the economy?
It's just silly.
My processors are offended by this. And they are black processors, so there offendedness is more important than your offendedness! (times twenty, in increasing loudness, until even the nicest component is no longer free of extremely politically incorrect thoughts.)
which one ? ... theres probably about a billion hindus and other kinds of asians who have their own too, so which one ?
/. discussion spin into racial or left/right wingnut slurs in five .. i'm almost considering putting up a vote to be able to "ignore" anonymous coward so the posts dont show up b/c i'm really, REALLY opposed to censoring and goodspeak, but the choice to filter starts looking like a good idea
... you see baby jesus send him over too, i got that bitch to slap, see if he turns the other cheek or is just another hippiecrite
"the" one ? cos there's at least three of those if you dont count the fringe movements
why does every fucking
if you meet your creator send him over, i got a few issues to discuss
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?