The discussion of Moore’s law, faster engineers, hyperbolic growth, etc., seems to me to come close to an important point but not actually engage with it.
As the paper observes, a substantial part of the work of modern CPU design is already done by computers. So why don’t we see hyperbolic rather than merely Moorean growth? One reason would be that as long as some fraction of the work, bounded away from zero, is done by human beings, you don’t get the superexponential speedup, for obvious Amdahl-ish reasons. The human beings end up being the rate-limiting factor.
Now suppose we take human beings out of the loop entirely. Is the whole thing now in the hands of the ever-speeding-up computers? Alas, no. When some new technology is developed that enables denser circuitry, Intel and their rivals have to actually build the fabs before reaping the benefits by making faster CPUs. And that building activity doesn’t speed up exponentially, and indeed its cost increases rapidly from one generation to the next.
There are things that are purely a matter of clever design. For instance, some of the increase in speed of computer programs over the years has come not from the CPUs but from the compilers. But they improve really slowly; hence “Proebsting’s Law”, coined tongue-in-cheek by Todd Proebsting, that compiler improvements give you a doubling in speed every 18 years. (It’s obvious that even if this were meant seriously it couldn’t continue at that rate for very long.)
This doesn’t refute any claim made in the paper (since it doesn’t, e.g., say that actual literal hyperbolic growth is to be expected) but I think it does suggest some downward adjustment in how rapid we should expect self-improvement to be.
Perhaps this sort of thing is discussed later in the paper—I’ve only read about the first 1⁄4. If so, I’ll edit or retract this as appropriate when I find it.
[EDITED to add: there is indeed some discussion of this, in section 3.3, around page 48. The arguments there against sensorimotor bottlenecks greatly reducing foominess seem handwavy to me.]
The discussion of Moore’s law, faster engineers, hyperbolic growth, etc., seems to me to come close to an important point but not actually engage with it.
As the paper observes, a substantial part of the work of modern CPU design is already done by computers. So why don’t we see hyperbolic rather than merely Moorean growth? One reason would be that as long as some fraction of the work, bounded away from zero, is done by human beings, you don’t get the superexponential speedup, for obvious Amdahl-ish reasons. The human beings end up being the rate-limiting factor.
Now suppose we take human beings out of the loop entirely. Is the whole thing now in the hands of the ever-speeding-up computers? Alas, no. When some new technology is developed that enables denser circuitry, Intel and their rivals have to actually build the fabs before reaping the benefits by making faster CPUs. And that building activity doesn’t speed up exponentially, and indeed its cost increases rapidly from one generation to the next.
There are things that are purely a matter of clever design. For instance, some of the increase in speed of computer programs over the years has come not from the CPUs but from the compilers. But they improve really slowly; hence “Proebsting’s Law”, coined tongue-in-cheek by Todd Proebsting, that compiler improvements give you a doubling in speed every 18 years. (It’s obvious that even if this were meant seriously it couldn’t continue at that rate for very long.)
This doesn’t refute any claim made in the paper (since it doesn’t, e.g., say that actual literal hyperbolic growth is to be expected) but I think it does suggest some downward adjustment in how rapid we should expect self-improvement to be.
Perhaps this sort of thing is discussed later in the paper—I’ve only read about the first 1⁄4. If so, I’ll edit or retract this as appropriate when I find it.
[EDITED to add: there is indeed some discussion of this, in section 3.3, around page 48. The arguments there against sensorimotor bottlenecks greatly reducing foominess seem handwavy to me.]