4 essays

Computing

How thinking became machinery, what it costs to run, and what changes when it gets cheap.

Ester Gerston and Gloria Gordon Bolotsky reprogramming ENIAC, 1946. U.S. Army photo, ARL Technical Library Source

How Arithmetic Became Machinery Before the computer became a machine, it was a person with a pencil, a mechanical calculator, several… How Arithmetic Became Machinery

How Arithmetic Became Machinery Supplied with the article How Arithmetic Became Machinery Supplied with the article How Arithmetic Became Machinery Supplied with the article How Arithmetic Became Machinery Supplied with the article FeatureComputing · 18 min read How Arithmetic Became Machinery In the Second World War a computer was a job title. Tracing the path from human calculators and firing tables through punched cards, relays and ENIAC to the transistor, as calculation became the bottleneck and then stopped being one.Modern Engineer · 18 min read Tap to preview Read

When Thinking Gets Cheap AI is beginning to discover an old lesson from human organizations: difficult problems are often easier… When Thinking Gets Cheap

Apollo 10 Mission Control in Houston. The room was not filled with hundreds of copies of one all-purpose expert. Different controllers watched different pieces of the spacecraft and mission, while flight directors coordinated the whole operation. Credit: NASA/JSC. NASA/JSC Public domain SourceComputing · 19 min read When Thinking Gets Cheap Apollo Mission Control worked by dividing the problem, not by hiring one expert who understood everything. AI is rediscovering that lesson now that a fixed level of capability has become 280 times cheaper to run.Modern Engineer · 19 min read Tap to preview Read

Sacrifice Rational The army that assembled itself out of filenames Sacrifice Rational Tap to preview Read

Machine Intelligence and the Human Constraint on Civilizational Scale Information is about to stop being scarce. Machine Intelligence and the Human Constraint on Civilizational Scale

Machine Intelligence and the Human Constraint on Civilizational Scale Supplied with the article Computing · 2 min read Machine Intelligence and the Human Constraint on Civilizational Scale For most of history the constraint was too little information. As that reverses, the limit moves to comprehension: progress may depend less on generating answers than on making them understandable.Modern Engineer · 2 min read Tap to preview Read