rwallace comments on The Curve of Capability - Less Wrong
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Mind you, I don't think we, in isolation, are close to fully balanced; we are still quite deficient in areas like accurate data storage and arithmetic. Fortunately we have computers to fill those gaps for us. Your question is then essentially, are there big gaps in the combined system of humans plus computers -- in other words, are there big opportunities we're overlooking, important application domains within the reach of present-day technology, not yet exploited? I think the answer is no; of course outside pure mathematics, it's not possible to prove a negative, only to keep accumulating absence of evidence to the point where it becomes evidence of absence. But I would certainly be interested in any ideas for such gaps.
No indeed! I should clarify that exponential inputs to certain to produce exponential outputs -- an example I gave is chip design, where the outputs feed back into the inputs, getting us fairly smooth exponential growth. Put another way, the curve of capability is a straight line on a log-log graph; I'm merely arguing against the existence of steeper growth than that.
QFT. Necessary conditions are not, unfortunately, sufficient conditions :P