>> Is there some pathway that makes quantum computers useful this century?

> This century has 75 years left in it, and that is an eternity in tech-time.

As a comparison, we went from first heavier than air flight to man walking on the moon in only 66 years.

> walking on the moon in only 66 years.

Yet it has been 53 years since we have been able to send a manned mission to the moon . No other program has or likely to come close in the next 13 years including the current US one. By 2038 the moon landings would be closer to Wright brothers than future us.

The curve of progress is only smooth and exponential when you squint hard .

It is a narrow few decades of exponential growth hardly can reasonably be expected to last for 100+ years .

It is for the same reason you cannot keep doubling grains on a chess board just because you did it 10-20 steps quickly.

Fusion power, quantum computing are all always two decades away for a reason despite the money being spent . AI has gone through 3-4 golden ages in living memory and yet too many keep believing this one would last.

Reality is when the conditions are right, I.e. all the ground work has been done for decades or centuries before there can be rapid innovation for a short(few decades at best) time

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decimalenough 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> No other program has or likely to come close in the next 13 years including the current US one.

The Chinese are planning manned lunar landings in 2029-2030, and this is not a pipe dream, they've been systematically working at this for several decades now. They have already completed 6 out of 8 preparatory missions plus placed comms satellites in lunar orbit, and the final two are scheduled for 2026 and 2028.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...

	▲	manquer 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It does not look like CMSA is planning any human orbital missions or a human lander(lanyue) return flight test before attempting to land with humans in 2030 just two missions from now, that is very ambitious. Perhaps milestones are being set to be competing with Artemis. When NASA gets delayed or reduced in scope, CNSA might reset to more achievable date. That is just engineering risk on dates, there are other class of risks in geopolitics or economics etc. Bottom line I am skeptical that a successful landing and return can be attempted in 2030. 2035 is a more realistic target I think.

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Nevermark 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Yet it has been 53 years since we have been able to send a manned mission to the moon

A near total lack of demand explains that impressive stall.

Even if the shuttle had worked out as well as its designers hoped, was envisioned as a major retreat, while sucking all the dollars out of the room.

And today, the market for lunar landings is still very small.

I think what it shows is that many technologies might have come earlier from a research and development standpoint, if we had enough money to burn. But that was an unusual situation.

	▲	manquer 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, Economics is a key factor for innovation. However it alone is not sufficient. At times you simply need other foundational breakthroughs to happen and they will have to be in sequence, i.e. one breakthrough has to happen and become widespread before work on next one can progress, before you can achieve meaningful progress on the end goal. It is not like Fusion or Quantum Computing has lacked serious or continuous funding over the last 20-30 years. Foundational model development is a classic current example. The returns are diminishing significantly, despite the tens of billions each quarter being thrown at the problem. No other R&D effort in our history has this much resources being allocated to it, perhaps including even the Moon landings. However the ability to allocate resources has limits. Big tech can spend few hundred billion a year a number that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago, but even they cannot spend few trillion dollars a year.

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thechao 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My great grandmother, who was born in 1891, asserted ca. 1990 that her favorite invention was large print novels. More importantly: the social right to read trashy novels. But, yeah, computers, planes, starships, nuclear power, etc etc.

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sokoloff 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Amara’s Law – “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Related to your observation: A piece of the original Wright Flyer was landed on Mars just a bit over 117 years after the first flight.

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Ekaros 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On other hand from first rocket to be used it took 729 years for Soviets to win true space race of first person orbiting the earth.

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6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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saati 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's only true if you totally ignore hot air balloons, the actual first manned flight was in 1783.

	▲	lisper 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		The comment you're responding to specified heaver-than-air. (And it should have been even more constrained: the real milestone was heavier-than-air powered flight.)

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hangonhn 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We went from neutron being discovered to nuclear weapons in just over a decade.

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eastbound 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> to man walking on the moon in only 66 years

And that was before Epoch (1969, unix time started in 1970). We went from calculator to AI in 55 years, which is, actually, extremely long. It took exactly the time to miniaturize CPUs enough that you would hold as many gates in a GPU as neurones in a human’s brain. The moment we could give enough transistors to a single program, AI appeared. It’s like it’s just an emergent behavior.

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jacquesm 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> We went from calculator to AI in 55 years, which is, actually, extremely long.

I think it is insanely fast.

Think about it: that planet has been here for billions of years. Modern humanity has been here for 200,000 years, give or take. It took 199700 years and change to get to a working steam engine. 266 years later men were walking on the moon and another 55 years and we had a good facsimile of what an AI looks like in practice. That's insane progress. The next 75 years are going to be very interesting, assuming we don't fuck it all up, the chances of which are right now probably 50/50 or so.

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lttlrck 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

If this is what AI is going to look like in practice it's a big letdown.

Science fiction has been predicting what an AI would be like for over a hundred years, there was even one in a movie in 1927. We're so far from what we dream that, to me, it feels like a mere leaf blowing in the wind compared to the Wright Flyer.

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jacquesm 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not what it can do today (which is already pretty impressive) it is what it can do in another century, which too is a relatively short time.

The Wright Flyer was a complete aircraft but small, awkward and not very practical. But it had all of the parts and that was the bit that mattered.

LLMs are not a 'complete AI' at all, they are just a very slick imitation of one through a completely different pathway. Useful, but not AI (at least, not to me). Meanwhile, a very large fraction of the users of OpenAI, Claude etc all think that AI has arrived and from that perspective it is mostly the tech crowd that is disappointed. For the rest of the people the thing is nothing short of magic compared to what they were able to do with a computer not so long ago. And for people like translators it is a massive threat to their jobs, assuming they still have one.

It is both revolutionary and a letdown, depending on your viewpoint and expectations.

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thephyber 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This rhymes with “we were promised The Jetsons and all we got was Facebook.”

Sci-fi is fanciful and doesn’t take into account psychology. What we got is the local maxima of what entrepreneurs think they can build and what people are willing to pay for.

Sci-fi is not a prediction. It is a hypothetical vision for what humanity could be in a distant future. The writer doesn’t have to grapple with limitations of physics (note FTL travel is frequently a plot device, not a plausible technology) or limitations about what product-market-fit the market will adopt.

And, of course, sci-fi dates are rarely close or accurate. That’s probably by design (most Star Trek space technologies would be unbelievable if the timeline was 2030, but more easily believable if you add a few thousand years for innovation).

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jacquesm 6 days ago | parent [-]

And yet, a mobile phone is quite close to a Star Trek communicator and in many ways already much more powerful. Ok, you can ask to be beamed up by your friend Scotty and it likely won't happen (call me if it does) but other than that it is an impressive feat of engineering.

	▲	sugarkjube 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Star Trek communicator As a trekkie this was a dream come true. Unfortunately we still don't have a tricorder yet (despite Elisabeth Holmes' promise). But we do have the apps and the games, they didn't have these in star trek. My phone is loaded with these (apps, not games)
	▲	ykonstant 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>(call me if it does) They can just tell you in person!

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billforsternz 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree with everything you say but I'm still exceptionally triggered by you going 2x10^5 - 300 = 199700 and change.

	▲	jacquesm 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well... the 200K is so loosely defined that it could well be 210000 or 190000 (or even further out) so I figured it would be funny to be exact. But you're right that that doesn't carry well online.

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galangalalgol 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It just seems that way because people had been researching neural networks from before the time they had floating point units in processors. So there were all these ideas people were waiting tp try when we finally had the speed. Then it was a matter of trying them all to see which worked the best. But yes, there is the point that even a bad ai model can learn most anything if you give it enough parameters. So the emergent property isn't far off either.