this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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Buy any bubble memory lately?
I have a book from the early 90s which goes over some emerging technologies at the time. One of them was bubble memory. It was supposed to have the cost per MB of a hard drive and the speed of RAM.
Of course, that didn't materialize. Flash memory outpaced its development, and it's still not quite as cheap as hard drives or as fast as RAM. Bubble memory had a few niche uses, but it never hit the point of being a mass market product.
Point is that you can't assume any singular technology will advance. Things do hit dead ends. There's a kind of survivorship bias in thinking otherwise.
AI is not a technology, it's just a name for things that were hard to do. It used to be playing chess better than a human was considered AI, but when it turned out you can brute force it, it wasn't considered AI anymore.
A lot of people don't consider AlphaGo to be AI, even though neural networks are the kind of technique that's considered as AI.
AI is a moving target so when we get better at something we don't consider it true AI
I'm quite aware of the history of the field, thanks. It's had a lot of cycles of fast movement followed by a brick wall. You can't assume it'll have a nice, smooth upward trajectory.