Whenever you have a process that requires multiple steps to complete, you can’t go any faster than the slowest step. Unless Intel’s R&D department actually does nothing but press the “make a new CPU design” button every few months, I think the limiting factor is still the step that involves unimproved human brains.
Elsewhere in this thread you talk about other bottlenecks, but as far as I know FOOM was never meant to imply unbounded speed of progress, only fast enough that humans have no hope of keeping up.
I saw a discussion somewhere with a link to a CPU design researcher discussing the level of innovation required to press that “make a new CPU design” button, and how much of the time is spent waiting for compiler results and bug testing new designs.
I’m getting confused trying to remember it off the top of my head, but here are some links to what I could dig up with a quick search.
Anyway I haven’t reread the whole discussion but the weak inside view seems to be that speeding up humans would not be quite as big of a gap as the outside view predicts—of course with a half dozen caveats that mean a FOOM could still happen. soreff’s comment below also seems related.
As long as nontrivial human reasoning is a necessary part of the process, even if it’s a small part, the process as a whole will stay at least somewhat “anchored” to a human-tractable time scale. Progress can’t speed up past human comprehension as long as human comprehension is required for progress. If the human bottleneck goes away there’s no guarantee that other bottlenecks will always conveniently appear in the right places to have the same effect.
I agree, but that is a factual and falsifiable claim that can be tested (albeit only in very weak ways) by looking at where current research is most bottlenecked by human comprehension.
Whenever you have a process that requires multiple steps to complete, you can’t go any faster than the slowest step. Unless Intel’s R&D department actually does nothing but press the “make a new CPU design” button every few months, I think the limiting factor is still the step that involves unimproved human brains.
Elsewhere in this thread you talk about other bottlenecks, but as far as I know FOOM was never meant to imply unbounded speed of progress, only fast enough that humans have no hope of keeping up.
I saw a discussion somewhere with a link to a CPU design researcher discussing the level of innovation required to press that “make a new CPU design” button, and how much of the time is spent waiting for compiler results and bug testing new designs.
I’m getting confused trying to remember it off the top of my head, but here are some links to what I could dig up with a quick search.
Anyway I haven’t reread the whole discussion but the weak inside view seems to be that speeding up humans would not be quite as big of a gap as the outside view predicts—of course with a half dozen caveats that mean a FOOM could still happen. soreff’s comment below also seems related.
As long as nontrivial human reasoning is a necessary part of the process, even if it’s a small part, the process as a whole will stay at least somewhat “anchored” to a human-tractable time scale. Progress can’t speed up past human comprehension as long as human comprehension is required for progress. If the human bottleneck goes away there’s no guarantee that other bottlenecks will always conveniently appear in the right places to have the same effect.
I agree, but that is a factual and falsifiable claim that can be tested (albeit only in very weak ways) by looking at where current research is most bottlenecked by human comprehension.