It was only a matter of time that we saw a TechTake from this guy. I’m sorry to inflict Peterson on y’all, but this was too funny not to post.
JFC what did I just read
Reading was the first mistake.
Moore’s Three Laws:
- That thing about ICs
- The thing he said about ICs is just about ICs and maybe transistors. Also it’s a pattern observation and not a rule, why do you keep saying it’s a law?
- People will invoke Moore’s first law to say the dumbest shit ever and people will fucking eat it up. Nothing gets capitalists in a fervour like the promise of exponential growth.
I’m not going to inflict a JP video on myself, so maybe someone else can help me with the math. Moore’s law says the number of transistors in an IC doubles every 2 years. Earth is roughly 5 billion years old, so there have been roughly 5 billion doublings since his proposed time that life emerged. 2^5,000,000,000 is an absolutely unfathomable number compared to… anything really! So what am I missing here?
And looking at it the other way, if a “law” that has existed for only a matter of decades is being extrapolated back for billions of years, and is only off by a factor of 3-ish… that’s pretty fucking solid endorsement of said law!
The authors did not use Moore’s law or transistors at all. They just thought it was a nifty idea so mentioned it bunches when talking about exponential growth or something.
Also I’m not sure I totally trust these authors after glancing over the paper, they seem a little too enthralled with the idea of alien DNA versus other possibilities like “Moore’s law” not applying in the first place.
Also the paper is a decade old.
Also the paper is a decade old.
And redolent of ‘emerita disease’ although I don’t think the authors have technically achieved that honor.
Does he think neurons are just squishy transistors or…?
It’s hilarious to me how unnecessarily complicated invoking moore’s law is to say anything…
With Moore’s Law: “Ok ok ok, so like, imagine that this highly abstract, broad process over huge time period, is actually the same as manufacturing this very specific thing over a small time period. Hmm, it doesn’t fit. ok, let’s normalize the timelines with this number. Why? Uhhh because you know, this metric doubles as well. Ok. Now let’s just put these things together into our machine and LOOK it doesn’t match our empirical observations, obviously I’ve discovered something!”
Without Moore’s Law: “When you reduce the dimensions of any system in nature, flattening their interactions, you find exponential processes everywhere. QED.”
it’s like being surprised at finding S-curves
(e.g. Moore’s Law)
The abstract from the actual article sounds like SEO speech at times, what is this mess
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a nucleotide. The genetic complexity, roughly measured by the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides, is expected to have grown exponentially due to several positive feedback factors: gene cooperation, duplication of genes with their subsequent specialization, and emergence of novel functional niches associated with existing genes. Linear regression of genetic complexity on a log scale extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life 9.7 billion years ago. This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: life took ca. 5 billion years to reach the complexity of bacteria; the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth; there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens; Earth was seeded by panspermia; experimental replication of the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare events; and the Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe. Evolution of advanced organisms has accelerated via development of additional information-processing systems: epigenetic memory, primitive mind, multicellular brain, language, books, computers, and Internet. As a result the doubling time of complexity has reached ca. 20 years. Finally, we discuss the issue of the predicted technological singularity and give a biosemiotics perspective on the increase of complexity.
even ChatGPT writes better than that
