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Comment by informatimago | Hacker News Reader

And that's nothing. Wait for AI in power sockets! For now, they only have simple processors in USB-C charger, but soon there will be more intelligence in there, than you can imagine! :-)

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I think this is the thing we'll be looking back on like this.

AI in EVERYTHING. because it'll be so cheap in 20 years.

Like maybe those useless automatic taps or hand dryers will finally actually know if hands are under them properly because they'll have the equivalent of a modern day supercomputer of AI power trying to figure it out.

Maybe. 20 years ago Moore's Law was in effect. We've become accustomed to "it'll be so cheap in 20 years" because, from 1947 to 2010, transistors dropped in price by a factor of two every 2 years, while getting faster starting in 1975 due to Dennard scaling. Roughly, for ten thousand transistors or so, the prices (in inflation-adjusted US dollars) and response times varied very roughly as follows:

1950: $1'048'576 (1 μs)

1960: $32'768 (100 ns)

1970: $1024 (100 ns)

1980: $32 (20 ns)

1990: $1 (3 ns)

2000: $0.033 (0.5 ns)

2010: $0.001 (0.2 ns)

2020: $0.0005 (0.1 ns)

This is pretty inaccurate, but close enough to explain my point, which is that most of the humans have lived their entire lives and their parents' entire lives in this Moore's-Law regime, and it's coming to an end. But their cultural expectations, formed by three human generations of Moore's Law, have not yet adjusted; that will take another generation.

But who knows? Maybe some other similar exponential economic trend will come along and make AI cheap. But it isn't going to happen just by virtue of Moore's Law the way it would have in the 1980s or 1990s.

20 years is a long time to work some stuff out though.

I think it’s a bill gates quote (badly paraphrased probably) - “people overestimate what can be achieved in a year and underestimate why can be done in a decade.”

So 2 decades ought to be something well outside our current expectations.

I hope it will be at least!

Imagine being in 1925 and predicting what the future would be like in 1945, now that the Great War was over so that nobody would even think of starting another major war. You might predict cities built almost entirely underground with kilometer-high skyscrapers http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=YScDAAAAMBAJ&pg=40 https://futurelapse.blogspot.com/2015/05/underground-living-... since skyscrapers had been rising dramatically in height. Pneumatic tube systems would probably make most deliveries https://www.fastcompany.com/3049647/what-the-city-of-the-fut... since they were already in service in large cities, and it was clear that cities would get denser and denser. Since Television was already being demonstrated, you might imagine doctors diagnosing patients over the radio waves https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/telemedicine-predicte... using Vidicon tubes that made the house calls for them, along with a Teledactyl that transmitted haptic information to allow doctors to feel the patients; moreover, you could watch theatrical performances from far away. Maybe you'd predict that in 20 years abstract art would be even more influential than it was in 1925, and that the US might institute some kind of social security scheme, and perhaps many more cities would have subways, and maybe more utilities would be publicly owned rather than operated for profit. Given the growth of Communist movements in the 1920s, you might predict they would expand further. Maybe you'd predict that future musical instruments would be electric.

Some of that sort of happened, though mostly later (the electric guitar dates from 1932). But think about what you'd be missing: atomic energy (the Cockcroft–Walton generator wouldn't split the lithium atom until 1932(?)). Manchukuo and the rest of World War II. Alcoholics Anonymous. Mechanical refrigerators. Widespread washing machines and consequently women's liberation. The Little Prince. The jake walk. The Long March and Communist China. Looney Tunes. Airlines. Mass nonviolent civil disobedience. Independent India. The end of the British Empire. Comic books (outside Japan). Neoprene and nylon. The end of dirigibles. Vaginoplasty. The Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Bugs Bunny. Computers and the theory of computable functions, and the death of Hilbert's decidability program. Universal censorship of mass-market films in the US under the Hays Code. Liquid-fueled rockets and ballistic and cruise missiles. The discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings. The discovery that the universe was less than 20 billion years old. The Moonies. The Great Depression. Perón. Merchandising agreements for children's characters such as Pooh. Radar. Antibiotics. Nineteen Eighty-Four. The end of the gold standard after 2500 years. Pluto. Maybe even talkies — you might have predicted in 1925 that talkies would become a mass phenomenon, but it might have been unimaginable that they would entirely displace silent film.

Maybe you would have predicted one or two of these. But nobody imagined very many of them.

So, what are the major developments you're missing over the next 20 years, which will change the world into which AI-powered hand dryers could potentially be born?

GPUs, FPGAs, TPUs, etc.--combined with open source and public clouds that abstract a lot of the complexity--have helped mitigate the impact of the slowdown of CMOS process scaling especially for the workloads that really need the performance. But it's reasonable to wonder what happens when we start to run out of various "hacks" and performance stops getting cheaper and more power efficient.

Big implications that I'm not sure the tech industry fully appreciates.

A brain the size of the universe and it's there, negotiating voltages with some savage hardware! I sure hope it likes a 10kV surge!

When your charger becomes self-aware because someone put a TPU in it by accident...

While I highly doubt it will become self-aware, but I almost surely expect it to send metric of power usage to Google.

Perhaps connect to your wireless network and snoop traffic.

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