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.
Part of this is that we now live in a world where there are large numbers of software people with no hardware knowledge, and they greatly outnumber hardware people.
And even the software people are often what I'd call API-pushers – people who fancy themselves Programmers but who really only know how to hook up preexisting systems together to make things go. Their contact with computers is through many layers of abstraction, and they believe largely in making the machine do things through the manipulation of symbols.
So if you point out to them that there are physical limits to transistor density – that you eventually start hitting up against hard rules about how matter behaves as you try to slap more transistors on a wafer – their brains shut down. Moore's Law failed well over a decade ago but these people still believe it.
I think it is also incredibly important to consider that they are not doing anything that has not seemingly worked up until now.
The entire post-internet economy has been built on a philosophy of "we do it half-assed as quick as possible and hope our funding catches up or we get bought out before we have to make it work at scale."
Of course people think like this about technology, because it's how everything else has seemingly worked thus far, to the tune of billions of dollars for some of the richest companies on the planet.
The reality of course is a combination of luck, human meatgrinders, and collective delusion, as well as the massive gulf in what it takes to make "a blog but everyone's on it" vs. "a machine capable of artistic reasoning".
But it doesn't matter what's possible, as long as you can convince enough rich people to fund it anyway. Remember investor storytime? If you search for that talk on Kagi, the second result after is just restating the talk but as serious fundraising advice.
And now we're multi-generational: the rich people are themselves the people who got rich from dumb half-assed ideas, so they assume they must be the best ideas ... and next thing you know we have cryptocurrency, in which an entire financial system has been built on a virtual machine more underpowered than a Z80.
We've left the reality zone a long time ago. Now it's just the grift, forever. Cons conning cons conning cons.
