you might propose a (novel?) law of diminishing returns, in the spirit of goodhart: beyond a certain point, the closer a computing apparatus comes to a perfectly erasable palimpsest, the more rapidly it permits symbols to be manipulated and transmitted, the more aggressively it outcompetes alternative methods, the better it gets at record-keeping, the worse it becomes as a vehicle for thought
‘universal control mechanism for other machines’ is not something you can do with faster paper and that’s the job of a gigantic pile of computers.
Re:Artificial Intelligence and Peace
by itishappy on Thursday February 01, 2024 @04:00PM
(#39221401)
Isn't it? The universal control mechanism for other machines used to be punchcards.
a mechanical mechanism which isn’t and wasn’t particularly universal and where the use of paper is incidental and often limiting. the point is that just making computation faster (what gp was talking about) is not why computers are everywhere.
computer technology since the 70s is really just "faster paper"
Huh... "paper" is just storage, the whole point of "computer technology" is to have a tool to do computation not just storage. So no, computers are not just faster paper.
which means that computer technology since the 70s is really just "faster paper", faster by more then a single order of magnitue... but ultimately paper-equivalent to this day
maybe LLMs, once their computational characteristics are better understood, will finally move computing beyond paper so fast it can write on itself over 2,000,000,000 times per second