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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. However:

That's a factor of 3 to 5 improvement reported on here. If you keep stacking these kinds of improvements, you end up at month to minutes pretty quickly.

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That doesn't take into account dependencies between tasks, where bottlenecks can happen. In any case, Amdahl's law applies regarding what kind of speedup you can get in such a case.

Compounding like this ignores fundamental friction. You can attempt a huge document processing factory but quality will go into the toilet.

10 women can't make a baby in a month

Throughput-wise, they can. Latency-wise, you are right.

Sorry for being so detached from the discussion and your actual point but if someone had made a dystopian sci-fi novel with the tagline following your sentence with "...or can they?", and made it all cheesy, I'd read it in one sitting.

You mean each women all producing parts of the baby one then one women/machine putting all the parts together?

In the future, because of bad things we did to the atmosphere and stuff, miscarriages are the common ending of a pregnancy, instead of being the exception. One evil company finds a way to accelerate the process by using 10 women, lowering the chances of miscarriage simply by reducing the time in womb.

I thought, something like a medication helping the women develop the baby in 30 days, but seriously damages the host in a couple of days, so the fetus gets transferred from host to host. Some die, but the evil rich don't care. Your idea could also work though.

I realize that this is totally the wrong corner of the internet to post this but I guess today I'll just go with it.

Yeah, that plot might actually work and is more believable than mine. (some women actually do feel like a baby is a parasite growing inside them - this would be a extreme version of it)

As a prediction, it doesn't sound particularly likely.

As a premise for science fiction, it sounds like it might be interesting.

I'm too bad of a writer to be scared of giving my ideas away, but I'd explore a pupae stage, where (layman disclaimer, if it isn't abundantly clear from my incoming butchering of the science) the butterfly is basically melted down into a goop with no "brain part" or "feet part" of the goop existing until reformed, yet retain their memories. If you divided that goop up and imagined there was a gestation time reduction, before combining it for the final stage of formation, you'd have some "plausible" (loose definition here) venue for it.

Interestingly, real butterflies don't turn into goop, that's more of an 'urban legend'. Nature's more interesting than that.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm very happy with my disclaimer then.

Don't leave it on a cliffhanger, what really happens?

It is a goop. They basically eat themself, except for some predefined core parts, which will then use the rest to grow and connect.

Eh, once you have the pointer, you can just Google for the details (or ask Claude, if you ain't so old old school.)

Dont say this too loud... :-X

If humanity lives long enough, someonen will came up with this idea and implement it?

Brave New World (and probably many other sci-fi) basically skips this problem entirely by having babies be mass-produced in bottles.

Since we are already on a tangent:

In one part of Brave New World they bring up that they tried to do more automation, but people got restless without the drudgery. In another part, they bring up that they tried to have a society with only Alphas, but they didn't want to do the drudgery.

I wonder why they never tried combining both?

You want to read a novel about ten women making cheese in one month?

That wasn't what I was going for but, why not?

The AI can't make a reliable judgement, so now you have to hire 3x to 5x more to make those judgements if you have the documents coming in at 3x to 5x faster. Or you'll have one severely overworked lawyer. It's the same problem developers have with thousands of AI generated PRs. Just because you speed up one thing doesn't mean the whole system works faster, and yes a human really does need to be in the loop or you end up with even bigger problems, and lawsuits.

No, that'd only be true the judgement was the full work. If the judgement was 33% of the work and the rest was just old plain e.g. typing, that is now fully automated and instantaneous, then you automate 2/3 of the work, getting 3x in productivity.

Why can't it make a judgement grounded in real data points - then the human can accept / deny that proof much quicker?

Surely there's a middle ground / this is faster than reading all papers front to back.

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