🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (9 tweets)
Some people find air travel unpleasant, but every time I visit an airport, I feel like I’m witnessing an intricate worldwide logistical ballet which somehow functions absurdly well despite all the challenges of the world. Also beating gravity, as sort of a dessert.
I suppose the optimistic part of me thinks “Since we can accomplish *gestures* we should be able to do a lot of simpler things” and the pessimistic side thinks “I hope the factors that make simple things hard to impossible don’t notice air travel exists.”
Aside: we sometimes underrate the importance of apps/etc relative to Real Technology (TM) like airplanes. I got called to a meeting in Iceland, a country I’ve never been to which does not share a language with me. I got all logistics done in five minutes flat, on a phone.
Can you imagine sending that anecdote back to the 1970s? “Literal children will possess a mainframe in their pocket that will be capable of impersonating a travel agent and arranging international travel, at a fraction of current cost, in about five minutes total time required.”
“Oh in addition to impersonating a travel agent the mainframe can now literally speak to you and answer complicated questions like ‘Does an American require a visa to visit Iceland?’ without any human specifically anticipating that question being asked of that program.”
“We are quite taken with the computers talking now. Previously we had to instruct literal children on how to use the database that holds substantially all human knowledge. Can you imagine how barbaric that was? Boolean operators and everything. It was a terrible time.”
“Oh sometimes the computer just makes things up so you want to check what it tells you against the database with all human knowledge in it. We aren’t sure why, because we didn’t design that computer so much as we discovered it. No, it’s not alien technology, well, not *that* way”
“Did it require billions of dollars of special hardware to create this computer? Yes but happily it is dual use with the extremely powerful hardware which we use to run accurate simulations of physics, which we mostly use to play games and so had a shedload lying around.”
“How powerful is this? Uh, how much computer do you need to make a nuclear bomb again? OK, a loooooooooot more that that. Yes we put it in every living room and many pockets. To play video games with. No we do not put nuclear weapons in the video games.”