
Taking Issue with Paul Graham’s Premises - alanfranzoni
https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/01/premises.html
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flubert
The author disingenuously wants you to believe that he's never heard of
Moore's law.

~~~
geofft
Hm, can you explain how you see Moore's Law as relevant? It talks about the
number of transistors on a chip, or at least most generally about the
technical performance of a computer system; it does not address the actual
contribution to the economy / to productivity / to society by transistors.

In fact, by the markets-are-generally-good-at-things hypothesis, and the
generalization of Moore's Law that computing power _that can be obtained at
equal price_ is growing exponentially, we have a good reason to believe that
the exponential growth of technical performance is not contributing at all to
productivity.

An uncharitable interpretation would be that most of the gains in technical
progress have been lost to rent-seeking by the developers of ever-more-
complicated frameworks and operating systems and UIs; while the ability to be
productive on Google Docs today is higher than the ability to be productive on
Office 95, it does not seem to be 2^(20 years/18 months) = 10,000 times
higher. But nobody would put up with Office 95 today, for entirely artificial
reasons.

~~~
flubert
>can you explain how you see Moore's Law as relevant?

The author explicitly asks: "In what sense does technology grow
“exponentially”?" If the author wants to claim that the results of Moore's law
hasn't trickled down to the common man, then he should do that. Pretending to
not know about Moore's law just fails for me as a rhetorical device. The wheat
example seems weak as well (not to say that there aren't many other weak point
in the article). To make it stronger, he should create a plot of the number of
human hours involved in harvesting a bushel of wheat vs. the calendar year,
for say the last 2,000 years.

>In fact, by the markets-are-generally-good-at-things hypothesis, and the
generalization of Moore's Law that computing power that can be obtained at
equal price is growing exponentially, we have a good reason to believe that
the exponential growth of technical performance is not contributing at all to
productivity.

On a totally unrelated note, proponents of "Basic Income" seem to also be
relying on ever increasing technology productivity to replace human jobs,
paying their dividends to all. I wonder how those ideas square with each
other, and how many of basic income advocates hold a technology-
doesn't-produce-productivity (I'm not saying you or the original author are
proponents of basic income guarantees).

~~~
geofft
But the number of bushels of wheat that the world needs harvested has been
approximately constant per person for the last 2,000 years. If it took many
humans' work days to harvest enough wheat for a community, and now it takes
very few work days for the same size community, that's progress. But cutting
it down past about one person-day isn't particularly more progress. Society is
not particularly better for having one person per nation oversee the wheatbots
instead of one person per city, in the way that it is better for having one
person per city oversee the wheatbots instead of half the city be laborers.

That is the author's claim: whether or not the technical capabilities improve
exponentially, the actual value to society quickly tapers off. The fact that
the author is claiming that seems obvious enough to me from reading the
article, and from reading pg's original essay, which is entirely about the
market value of technology (not about technology itself).

