Today is, appropriately enough, Steve Jobs’ birthday. And so it is a fine day to talk about the long arc of technological causality.
Jobs would have appreciated how long the journey has been from my first shaders back in 1984 to Nvidia’s ever faster line of graphics processors to the use of those processors to train AI models — an exciting development which probably won’t reach maturity until at least 2034.
Which leads to an interesting question: What algorithms might somebody be developing right now, in 2024, which could eventually lead to a new kind of computer processor, which in turn could lead to a surprising and world-changing new use case? I wonder whether we would recognize the significance of such an algorithm if we were to see it today.