N3tt's Thoughts #1 - Technology

Preface

I figured out I should post here more often. And lately, I wanted to create a podcast, where me alone, or with a host, would discuss some random topics, thoughts and whatnot. Since it’s early 2021, COVID is still around and it’s not really possible to do anything like that, I figured out this. Every once in a while, I’ll post a blog post about anyting that comes to my mind.

This one should be about how we as humanity evolved. How all of us has literally all the knowledge of a humankind at nonstop disposal, and what have we created.

How we evolved

It’s crazy to think that something little over 300 years ago, people did not have any electric light. In late 1700s, some cool dude found out, that wire can glow up when you pass electricity through it. And few years later, another cool dude called Edison started to sell bulbs. People were excited about it, lots of light from only a piece of wire smaller than telegraph lines. Crazy, I know. And here we are now, 300 years later, staring almost every day at milions of those lights, creating pictures that one could not even imagine before. We perfected this little light thing so much, that we can create illusion of entirely different world. Space stations, exoplanets or even different universes, or just places on Earth you’ve never been to before (or didn’t even knew existed).

What’s even crazier. 70 years ago, first transistor was made. It was huge, you could see every part of it with naked eye no problem. Few years and brilliant people later, transistors have gotten so small, they outscaled vacuum tubes. This led many scientists to realize “shit, they don’t warm up so much, they have a lot better characteristics, and they are a lot easier to produce”. One thing led to another, and first entirely transistor based computer was made - being a lot smaller a A LOT faster than any computer before. 30 years after the transistor was discovered, thousands of them were packed into small, few centimeters long chips that were thousands fold more powerful, than computers from before, taking up whole buildings. You could do amazing things, not just compute virtually any number you could imagine, but also create entirely new images, text, and even synthesize human voice. This was the first time that something other could speak human. 20 years later, it was common to have few millions transistors on a chip not bigger than your pinky nail. They could switch on and off so fast, it’s really hard to even imagine. And as years went by, transistors got smaller, faster and better. And here we are, in an age, where your cheapest pocket calculator is more powerful than comptuers that took humanity to a fucking moon. We can create perfect human voice that is almost unrecognizeable from real human, scenery that looks like photos, entire new worlds, simulations of one of the most complex things in the universe, and of course, Minecraft.

Speaking of transistors, did you knew that when Bell invented a phone, he found one missed call - by Chuck Norris. Funny. Anyways, we are used to just open up Facebook or Twitter, and see what is happening in different parts of the world. Someone drowned in USA, a man won prize for biggest pumpkin in Europe, a woman tried to tank gasoline into Tesla in Asia and a penguin slipped and fell in Antarctica. This was unheard of even hundred years ago. Who would care about a god damn penguin in the middle of snowy buttfuck nowhere? Apparently, we would. But back then, it would be very hard and impractical to have a dude writing down how the penguin fell, then sailing for a few months back to mainland and delivering this message. Now we can switch bilions of messages per second, and read absolutely whatever (un)interesting happened.

Are we using technology to do the right thing?

While it is really cool to look back just a few years back, and see the tremendous progress we made, we also have to look at today’s state of shit. Here I am, waking up on Wednesday morning, sitting on toilet and getting tilted before breakfast, because someone is posting about some random hoax bullshit. “Earth is flat, COVID is to control us, 5G will kill us, vaccines cause autism, they spray chemicals on our heads“ jesus fucking christ. I cannot even imagine how people from past would look at those. Like, haven’t you got ANYTHING better to do? Spreading misinformation, hoax and bullshit like this should be illegal. But we’re getting political here. Although there are a lot of cool projects and ways to spread the word of science, more and more people just doesn’t care. Why? Because we’re used to get any information we need in few seconds. And we got so used to it, that we believe anything. I am very technical person, I love technology, computers, machines. I know how 4-stroke diesel engine works, or how is possible (from start to end) that you can read this very text. But someone may not. They might think that this very exact text is being curated by some goverment agency, like all of the internet. Or that transmitting a signal at a slightly higher frequency will fry your brain, because someone wasn’t paying attention at school, misread something or just had malicious intentions, told you that 60GHz signal will kill you because it acts like microwave. They don’t know that those 5G towers has extremely limited power output, that microwave is enclosed space designed to fry shit. They don’t know that you would need much higher frequency AND power output in order to heat something just walking by it. Why? At first, I thought “well shit, let’s just find a way to educate everybody so they won’t be so stupid.“ Then I realized there already IS a way, and it exists for a long time. They’re called schools. But, for whatever reason, we decided NOT to learn as much as we can about shit we use, and instead focus on making as much pretty green paper pieces as we can. When I realized this, things started to piece together. It is the society, the humankind itself, that is on decline. Because we got so lazy, that most of people won’t even look up the source of the information, and it’s legitimacy. They just “read it on the internet“, and internet is the well of knowledge. Henceforth, it must be true. On the other side, I would not be able to write this blogpost if there was no internet. I would not know when the lightbulb nor transistor was invented, or in the broader spectrum, most of the things I’m talking about. I’m not saying I’m some sort of hyperintelectual person or whatever. I’m just willing to spend a few more minutes to check, if the information I just received is factual, correct and not some kind of bullshit someone made up while taking shit.

Ah, it’s the humans again

We have created a world of dreams - where machines work instead of you, where you can find any piece of information about anything in mere seconds, where there is enough of (mostly) everything, where everybody is should be happy. Why isn’t everybody happy? What would people from hundred years ago do to have Wikipedia? Or to see movie in 8K HDR? Or to be able to literally sleep while driving? Yet here we are, doing very little to appreciate these things. We want more and more and more and more, and we won’t stop until science stops. In recent years, there has been decline in Moore’s Law because current technology just cannot keep up. And in few years, we should hit a pretty big barrier in world of transistor manufacturing. One transistor gate would get as big as an electron, thus the electron would just “go by”, as if it wasn’t even there. But that will not be the peak computer performance. We will just stop continuing making transistors smaller. They will get faster, but that will stop eventually too, because of chemical properties of silicon and whatever other substances used. Instead of focusing on quantum physics, getting these computers ready, we’re spreading shit about how vaccines are injecting nanochips inside your body and enabling goverments to control you. WHY THE FUCK WOULD THEY. You literally work for them. You are giving them money. That’s all there is to it. They, nor the operators have absolutely no reason to kill you, or control. They already do control you. And you are giving them money. You are giving them power.

In the end…

Yep, it’s the end. This episode is called “Technology”, but I just touched the topic. And most of upcoming episodes will probably be like this - touch some topic and then rant about how humankind is shit etc. It essentially all boils down to it, and as I’m going down my thought river, my hands are just capturing whatever there currently is on the surface. And as any river, it will essentially just flow into another one. So this is very random, but I wanted to spread a word on this topic (or rather hide “I need to talk to someone” behind that idea). Peace out, don’t be a dick, learn to do shit, invent, be creative, appreciate what you have, smile and be nice :)