Logic gates are the fundamental building blocks of computers, and researchers at the University of Rochester have now developed the fastest ones ever created. By zapping graphene and gold with laser pulses, the new logic gates are a million times faster than those in existing computers,…
I’m gonna go full ludite here but I don’t see the point of having faster computer.
Servers. There’s going to be more people, more people that have access to technology and internet and a lot of services are online.
Not only that, but look at how big data centers, how much cooling they need (They need a LOT of water), it could make it more efficient.
But to be fair this article writes very little about something that is just a proof of concept.
For personal computing, sure. That’s not full ludite, we’ve basically reached a point where most things a person does on their computer can be done well with a $500 laptop or phone.
For servers, media rendering, hash cracking, prime searching, machine-learning training, video and image enhancement, medical simulations and other applications, we still love more power.
And it’s not just having more powerful hardware available. It can also mean producing less hardware in the first place. Or in the case of a phone, maybe more and more people can just hook it up to a USB-C dock when they need the form factor of a laptop, but otherwise carry around phone.
Most of ML industrial application are just fluff, I don’t need my bank, my social network and my governement to profile me nor predict my behavior… And entertainment industry can tell beautiful stories with or without computers.
The only legit application imo is medical research which has positive outcome on people lives but then I’m sure that if the gafam repurposed their massive tracking infrastructure we’re good for a while.
Those applications you listed are fluff, but there are a significant amount of others (‘most’ or not, I don’t know) that aren’t fluff. Medical research, other engineering research, accessibility tools. I appreciate GAN content upscaling and de-noising for older art, but that’s a more personal case.
I do think it’s unfortunate that we live in a system that encourages powerful tools to be absolutely wasted on fluff.
Couldn’t have put it better than your last sentence.
Have a nice day :)
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How about solving protein folding problems to develop new medical treatments, or running chemical simulations to come up with more climate-friendly industrial processes?
Honestly? I don’t think tech’s gonna save us from climate changes.
I agree with the medical treatment point.