Terminal technophilia

I feel the need to comment on Lee Gutkind's interview with Jon Stewart, partly because people obsessed with visions of technological utopias annoy me. Gutkind and his kind have been watching way too many Jetsons reruns.

Basically, here's what happened: Gutkind spent some time with the guys (and gals) at CMU who work on the RoboCup team. RoboCup is cool. Don't get me wrong. But he concluded from his experience that by 2050 we'll all have robot helpers, robot athletes, robot...well, everything. We will no longer have any reason to move.

Now, here's the thing, and Jon Stewart kind of touched on it: we don't need those robots. We just don't. The things we could use a robot for, we have much more efficient machines already doing the work, and they're called people. They are energy-efficient, self-sustaining, self-repairing, learning, and adaptive. And since the human race is incapable of collectively buying into the notion of and using birth control, babies are popping out left and right. So, there's a vast supply of these workers. A hell of a lot more of them than robots.

We have the technology to build all kind of space-age shit. We could build cars that drive themselves. We could. The problem is:

1. people would rather drive themselves,
2. it would be incredibly expensive to build the technology, and
3. it's inefficient, in terms of energy as well as money

...and, indeed, this turns out to be true of all kinds of shit. Have you noticed that Intel stopped running ads for processors with higher and higher frequencies? No more "750 Mhz! 900 Mhz! 1 GIGAhertz!!!..." Ever wonder why? Well, it turns out that people who run giant data centers (like Google) that are running hundreds upon thousands of machines were running into a problem. They wanted their software to run faster, which you would think would mean they would want processors with the highest clock speed (frequency) possible. But they found themselves in an interesting predicament: all of a sudden, when they looked at their bills at the end of the year, the cost of cooling their data centers was starting to outstrip the cost of the computers themselves. That's right: they were spending more on _air conditioning_ than they were on computers. Why? Well, roughly, more hertz means more heat. Put enough of those little buggers in the same room and it gets real hot, real fast.

So, people like Google said, "You know what? We don't care about performance per cost any more. Our energy bills are too goddamn big. Now we care about performance per watt." At which point, AMD and Intel said, "Fuck. We'll get back to you in about 6 months." And thus was the birth of the dual core processor.

What's my point? Efficiency always wins. If you can do what you want to do with a low-tech solution in a way that's cheaper than a high-tech solution, the low-tech solution will always win. That's why we don't have self-driving cars. It's why we don't have conveyor belts to take us everywhere. And it's why you're not going to have a robot serving you fucking tea in 2050.