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Profound Technological Advancements: Beyond Smartphones

Technological Innovation
Written by Andy

We are living in a fast-changing financial environment where technological discoveries, geopolitical events, and economic trends change rapidly.

For example, who would have thought that NVIDIA, just a few months ago at $120 per share, would quadruple in value?

The iPhone’s Impact: Optimization vs. Innovation

This may sound controversial just for the sake of it, but the iPhone did not introduce much new; it simply made existing tasks a lot easier and less restrictive. The major influence of smartphones on the world is that they are optimization devices. When I started flying, it still required physical tickets and calling up to confirm travel plans. Then, those parts became integrated with the internet, and I could check-in online first and then print my own ticket. The smartphone just provided a computer on the go, so I no longer need a static one to check-in, and I no longer need paper in many cases. There are no new services delivered, just a slicker service.

We far too often conflate new with easier. Smartphones have continuously improved our lives, not necessarily brought innovation. I’m not belittling their impact, as they have facilitated a step change in some behaviors that give the impression of novelty. However, they are far less consequential than, for example, the internet itself.

For instance, various Ethernet standards have been more significant. TCP, UDP, IPv4, and so on have had much more impact. I am not arguing that there hasn’t been change. I am arguing that when people tout cloud computing as something revolutionary about to unleash a new world, they are about 10 years late in terms of how it changed startups and virtualized their data center needs. This was the true new world. Secondly, they are deluded if they think that private and university compute farms wouldn’t achieve much the same without the existence of public clouds. Computation has changed our world and will continue to change our world, but to see cloud itself as an accelerator is, in my opinion, pointless cheerleading nonsense.

Visionary Technologies: Potential Transformations Ahead

There are real, genuine, and astonishingly profound technologies that may occur in the next few years or decades. The synthesis of animal proteins and products could upend 10,000 years of pastoralism. An animatronic lifelike sex doll could end the oldest profession of all. Gene editing could put an end to cancer. A method to regenerate telomeres could extend human life by decades. Low-cost fusion would end the need for wood burning to cook food after 50,000 years or whatever.

Lastly, I would argue that all the developments in 2D silicon chips are complete. Once a 64-bit address space was reached, development in that direction ceased—16 exabytes is sufficient. Transistor sizes are down to a few atoms wide, and there are physical limits. The 2nm process is all that exists on roadmaps, and TSMC is, I think, a bit behind in shipping 3nm process chips. What is happening now, or has been for a while, is that general-purpose computer chips are being broken down and recombined into specialist units, for example, GPUs. This is how we’ll have to get our compute gains for a good while yet.”

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Andy

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