i'm realizing that a major reason lots of technically savvy people believe weird things about the future is that they have accepted an idea, over the last ~10 years of software trying to eat the world: that anything computable is inevitably, nay soon, going to become practical to compute, at scale, everywhere, for everyone.
i think this is why lots of techies are still generally optimistic about AVs in the face of ever more embarrassing fuckups. they assert that because "the correct + safest set of driver inputs for a given moment of a given driving situation" is computable - and hey, it is; humans compute it by the billions, every day, using our fallible leaky meat brains - then eventually we'll be able to build a computer that can do the same, except more accurate, more responsive, ever-vigilant, less error-prone, and this wondrous computer program will run in every car on the planet, and demand entirely reasonable amounts of electricity.
and that's a hard assertion to talk yourself all the way down to 0% likelihood on, because we all know driving a car isn't rocket science. and in that vague space between "impossible" and "imminent" lots of nerds settle on, "well it may not happen soon but surely computers will get Fast Enough, and probably sooner than we expect right? the computer i'm carrying in my pocket is 100000x faster than my old blah blah blah". and it all feels very reasonable and bets-hedgy, especially when the Smartest *cough*richest*cough* People In The World are leaning hard on the "imminent" end of the scale in their mass-message-making.
i think this deductive slippage gets a little more obvious and psychologically textured when you look at the much wilder things people have convinced themselves about computation. here's something a legendarily unhinged borderline cult leader said:
so this is basically a nerd dreaming up their very own custom god, right? just kinda putting god together by picking out parts on newegg. and it all depends on that notion of computability. it is theoretically possible that humans could build a computer that could do what is being described here, and hook it up to a $20 logitech webcam and have it figure out Life the Universe and Everything. but there is a kind of abstraction-hiding happening in that thought process, where the computer becomes infinitely capable, effectively a genie's magic lamp. surely, smart people in a room somewhere will figure out some new wonder of the world, and then before long it'll be in our pockets.
and the more i try to model the thinking of these people that, even if they're not horrible gone-forever creeps like yud, believe that all possible computable challenges will eventually fall, the more i realize that this is a kind of mass dereliction of intellectual rigor, a blackout in many an otherwise rational thought process, a mass delusion essentially, that feels somewhat new and novel to the 2010s and 20s. and i feel pretty crazy, in my own head, for standing (reasonably-)confidently outside of that, looking inward, while the revelers circle their golden statue.
