your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.
What would be the point of that? A Magic iPhone Box, one that coughed out new designs so quickly that humans couldn't keep up, would be throttled back. What's the point of filling up warehouse after warehouse with beautiful new iPhones -- each unique and special -- that we don't even have time to try out? It's a waste of material resources. Why even bother building the Magic Box in the first place? Or should we build another Box that can appreciate the iPhones for us, faster than the eye can see? Who's going to pay the fuel bill for all that?
In manufacturing theory there's a concept of balancing the line: the slowest step in the manufacturing process serves as the bottleneck, and the secret to maximizing efficiency is to let that bottleneck control the speed of everything else. It doesn't pay to produce a million nuts and bolts per hour if you're only using ten thousand per hour: You just pile up expensive excess inventory -- and if the inventory rusts, or the designers eliminate nuts and bolts in the next version of your product, you lose all that inventory.
Similarly, the pace of technological change is ultimately constrained by human timescales. We're the technologists. We're the ones who control the knobs. We now have machines that can play master-level chess faster than the eye can follow, but we don't let them do that -- we don't let them run day and night, filling up our hard drives with recordings of dazzling strategic moves that we'll never have time to see. Instead, we turn the machines down to our speed, and use the leftover processing cycles for something else. Or turn them off and save some precious energy.
If you've lost the distinction between the Terminator films and real life, or have watched too many episodes of Pinky and the Brain, you might believe that a smart machine could somehow take control of the knobs from the humans. But, really, it's hard to sneak up on seven billion people, no matter how smart a toaster you are. Particularly when those people control your supply chain.
Comments
your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.
What would be the point of that? A Magic iPhone Box, one that coughed out new designs so quickly that humans couldn't keep up, would be throttled back. What's the point of filling up warehouse after warehouse with beautiful new iPhones -- each unique and special -- that we don't even have time to try out? It's a waste of material resources. Why even bother building the Magic Box in the first place? Or should we build another Box that can appreciate the iPhones for us, faster than the eye can see? Who's going to pay the fuel bill for all that?
In manufacturing theory there's a concept of balancing the line: the slowest step in the manufacturing process serves as the bottleneck, and the secret to maximizing efficiency is to let that bottleneck control the speed of everything else. It doesn't pay to produce a million nuts and bolts per hour if you're only using ten thousand per hour: You just pile up expensive excess inventory -- and if the inventory rusts, or the designers eliminate nuts and bolts in the next version of your product, you lose all that inventory.
Similarly, the pace of technological change is ultimately constrained by human timescales. We're the technologists. We're the ones who control the knobs. We now have machines that can play master-level chess faster than the eye can follow, but we don't let them do that -- we don't let them run day and night, filling up our hard drives with recordings of dazzling strategic moves that we'll never have time to see. Instead, we turn the machines down to our speed, and use the leftover processing cycles for something else. Or turn them off and save some precious energy.
If you've lost the distinction between the Terminator films and real life, or have watched too many episodes of Pinky and the Brain, you might believe that a smart machine could somehow take control of the knobs from the humans. But, really, it's hard to sneak up on seven billion people, no matter how smart a toaster you are. Particularly when those people control your supply chain.