/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.14644000]

Are computers / CS / IT overrated?

In the first half of the XXth we didn't need them for advanced physics, chemistry, rocket science, complex mass-production factories and logistics, medical advances, etc, and productivity gains after capital investment in IT stayed just in paper and didn't show up in the real world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox).).

It seems to me that even the supposed current reliance of civilization on IT and the Internet is way overstated, we could have similar living standards without using computers.

What do you think?

[Anonymous No.14644005]

"You watched animation"

- Buzz Aldrin

[Anonymous No.14644023]

>>14644005
well: poisoned

[Anonymous No.14644080]

>>14644000
>we could have similar living standards without using computers.
>
>What do you think?
I think you're out of your goddamned mind

[Anonymous No.14644086]

>>14644080
strongly seconded

[Anonymous No.14644087]

>>14644080

Could you then give an example of why it isn't the case?

[Anonymous No.14644144]

>>14644087
Consider the humble spreadsheet. It wiped out clerk jobs. There used to be floors and floors of people manually doing this work which this one tool replaced. And in doing that it allowed for the creation of new jobs which didn't exist before. It's actually a counter argument I use for automation scare mongers.
Today managers can manage entire companies worth of data in excel and chart and pivot those tables like no tomorrow. Its almost become a bullshit job for its own sake.
And that's just one kind of software.

[Anonymous No.14644158]

>>14644144

But think for a moment we returned to those "floors and floors" of clerks and lose all that new jobs created.

It wouldn't be nearly as bad as if there were no combustion engine tractors and we had to work the soil with animal power, for example.

[Anonymous No.14644159]

>>14644000
Its a shame Buzz is the most high profile Apollo astronaut.

If i was exposed only to his books and interviews I wouldn't believe in the Moon landings either. Mike Collins dedicates more words to their Jungle survival training alone than Buzz writes about his entire time at Nasa. A subject I'm pretty sure he writes less about than his rambling about his time on some Ballroom Dancing show.

[Anonymous No.14644164]

>>14644144
True but I still ency my Dads youth as a Architectural draftsman drawing and making model trees all day. It's all digital now.

[Anonymous No.14644165]

When you use computers to poison youths with vapid tiktokers and gaypansexualtransdemi propaganda you end up destroying people and it seems like a net negative, but computation is not intrinsically bad

[Anonymous No.14644168]

>>14644158
There's nowhere near enough people to do all that work manually now.

[Anonymous No.14644220]

>>14644000
Kill yourself

[Anonymous No.14644237]

A renown navy engineer explained it to me like that: Designing a new aircraft was a lifetime’s work 50 years ago. Thanks to computer simulations, you can test the flight dynamics of a new aircraft design within 24 hours without the need to actually build that craft.

I think this should be a compelling argument for the use of IT.

[Anonymous No.14644240]

>>14644000
Diversity and multiculturalism destroys the social cohesion required for the cooperation and shared vision required to take on large complex endeavors that benefit society in general but does very little to benefit the individual.

[Anonymous No.14644258]

>>14644144
On the other hand, the ease with which these calculations can be performed can lead to very poor design and bad inputs. That in turn can lead to inaccurate results that are blindly accepted. When the costs of the calculations were higher, much more thought and analysis were put into what was actually being calculated and what were the proper inputs.
Beside pic related, there was the wave of austerity that flooded over western government policies a decade ago. These policies were based on an Excel spreadsheet with a simple error in it that showed the opposite of what it would have if the formulas were correct. Hundreds of billions in public money was misdirected and entire economies steered in a bad direction because of this error that would have quickly been caught using a more manual process involving large numbers of people.

[Anonymous No.14644262]

Computers have increased productivity in most but not all industries. Notably an industry where little has changed in a century is restaurants, electric and gas stoves may be about the only real innovation in the past 100 years.
Surely you can prepare fancy meals in an assembly with machinery more serious than some buggy humanoid robot that chops onions with a knife (instead of using a normal food processor) but people want their chef and waiter experience.

[Anonymous No.14644263]

>>14644000
>overrated
Yes and no

In every day use by non-professionals, I think the world would unironically be better off without social media and media in general. The average person also knows nothing about computerization, which is a double edged sword.

From a professional standpoint, computers are under utilitized and we are still far away from extracting maximum value through digital technology.

[Anonymous No.14644605]

>>14644087
>>14644000
Oh look it's another anti-science poltard who is convinced that computers and modern technology are somehow the root of all the worlds problems.
Let me guess, you're also an anti-vaxxer?

[Anonymous No.14644615]

>>14644240
>Diversity and multiculturalism destroys the social cohesion required for the cooperation and shared vision required to take on large complex endeavors that benefit society in general but does very little to benefit the individual.
>i-it's brown peoples fault the white race isn't exploring the frontiers of space
Or maybe it's just rich and influential people decided it was a waste of time and there was no rival superpower compelling a competitive mindset of societal achievement to prove your ideology was better than theirs.

Nope, it's brown people holding you back.

[Anonymous No.14644687]

>>14644615
>holding you back
Bad take. You made it about anon but anon was talking about humanity as a whole.

[Anonymous No.14644694]

>>14644687
Brown people didn't create social media.
If non-whites didn't exist there's no reason to believe humanity wouldn't still be on this mud ball shitposting because they'd rather consoom capeflix than do something stupid like go through a lot of economic suffering just so some cunts can die on mars.

[Anonymous No.14648587]

>>14644000
Computers, CS, and IT are all three different fields that are only incidentally connected because normies still don't have any idea what the fuck software engineers do in current year.
Computer Scientists are an amalgamation of various mathematicians and engineers working on problems across science.
You have the mathematician-CS people working on things like this:
Approximate Carathéodory bounds via Discrepancy Theory
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03614
The engineer-CS people are working on things like this:
Exploring Implicit Spaces for
Constrained Sampling-Based Planning
https://www.kavrakilab.org/publications/kingston2019exploring-implicit-spaces-for-constrained.pdf
>>14644237
This is important too. People really underestimate the ability of the computer to not just automate, but to solve human-intractable problems with sophisticated algorithms. Though this is more the use of computational science and not IT.

[Anonymous No.14648608]

>>14644258
You only need one manual process to fix that: punch scientists who try to publish code without software engineering review in the kidneys. If they try to make policy recommendations based on software that hasn't been engineering reviewed, fire them.

[Anonymous No.14648611]

>>14644000
MIT seething that they haven't had a breakthrough since the turn of the fucking millennium

[Anonymous No.14648615]

>>14644000

We were on the cusp of exploring the space, instead we decided to 'fix racism'.
Racism is still here, and we are not in space.

[Anonymous No.14649298]

>>14644159
I think it's simply because he's still alive. Neil Armstrong used to be the man who walked on the Moon.

[Anonymous No.14649320]

>>14644158
We can solve that problem by introducing UBI.
>but we can't give people money for doing nothing
UBI is cheaper than ludditism.

[Anonymous No.14649329]

>>14644144
There are two problems with this, I think:
1. I supoose these people were not a major fraction of the workforce.
2. Making and programming and looking after all these computers is not necessarily less labor intensive than the jobs they replaced.
>>14644237
This is very interesting. I never thought that computers could be the reason why we see all these innovative hypermodern airplanes, and not something like 747 from 50+ years ago.

[Anonymous No.14651314]

>>14649329
>I never thought that computers could be the reason why we see all these innovative hypermodern airplanes
why the fuck not? computers have literally revolutionized every aspect of engineering.
people with no imagination think of the computer as a spreadsheet automator and large bank of working memory. A computer is a machine that makes theory that is intractable to implement actually possible to use. Case in point:
http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/Publications/2015/PZMPCZ15/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yMOpDN4Guw
Or this:
https://lgg.epfl.ch/publications/2021/Metamaterial/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHJuVoH6Ro

This stuff was literal science fiction without computers. As much as people hate to admit that computers are actually essential to science and engineering, it's true. We are tackling problems where the solutions are intractable for people to implement. Algorithm and computation are unironically one of the most important, powerful, and interesting objects of study in STEM, and I'm tired of seeing /sci/ brainlets seethe over computers and computer science simply because some undergrads are fucking stupid.

[Anonymous No.14651408]

>>14651314
The post was ironic I mean we still use 747s that were around 50 years ago. Where are the newly designed airplanes? There doesn't seem to have been any dramatic development caused by computers.

[Anonymous No.14651914]

>>14651408
I mean, computers were a huge part of airfoil design since the late 70s and early 80s. XFOIL has been pretty standard forever, and there's been further integration into popular CAD tools.
But just to use your example, there are a fuckton of 747 models with lots of iteration, but the model also gained a lot of competition in the late aughts - early 2010s. I mean, there was already talk of the 747's EOP in 2015, and production is finished this year as well. Computational advances in both simulation for physical design as well as cyber physical systems like avionics are obvious in the sphere of aircraft.

[Anonymous No.14651949]

>>14651914
Which is exactly the paradox that this thread is about. It seems like a lot of work is being done, but where are all the results?

[Anonymous No.14651967]

>>14651949
what are you talking about? I just told you the results. the 747 has literally ended production and has had competition (as well as commercial successors) for a while. Computational methods have been part of aircraft design for like 40+ years. The 747 wasn't the only aircraft out there, especially in the military context. What part of this isn't "results?"

[Anonymous No.14652085]

>>14651967
The 747 is closer in time to Zeppelins than it us to the 787. That's what I'm talking about. Computers didn't speed up progress in any observable way.
It isn't just aircraft either - I read the city ran into a problem with a historic tram service, as most models are either so old that they should be kept in a museum, or too similar to modern trams.

[Anonymous No.14652152]

>>14652085
>Computers didn't speed up progress in any observable way.
What makes you think that progress would have been treaded without computers? If you're trying to respond to the original "24 hours" claim, that's all about testing dynamics computationally. The problems have become hard enough that iteration would have taken much longer than without computers - that's my point. You may point and say "well, I don't feel like there's much progress," but that definitely comes from not appreciating just how much more difficult it is to iterate on a standard design, much less how difficult it is to solve new and relevant engineering problems.

Here's another area: genome sequencing. We always appreciate the heavy machines in the lab, but a lot of the heavy lifting about understanding the content of genes is due to algorithms. While the we have to make tradeoffs among lookups, space, and time efficiencies, algorithms in things as mundane as text strings like suffix tree construction make understanding the gene possible. I don't think there's anyone qualified who would ever claim that you could have gotten anywhere NEAR the same amount of progress in genetics without advances in algorithms. Regardless, it's taken a while, and it seems to match the pace at which biology has marched for a century. Why? The problems are getting way harder. Without a computer, we are largely stranded among problems whose difficulty has outpaced the old ways.

[Anonymous No.14652273]

>>14652152
>You may point and say "well, I don't feel like there's much progress,"
Which is, unless I somehow misunderstand it, the core of the productivity paradox.
>appreciating just how much more difficult it is to iterate on a standard design,

This could actually be part of the problem, as all progress appears to fall into two categories: Gradual iteration over a standard design.
Sticking computer technogy onto a standard design.

But hardly any radical new improvements that do something in a radically different, more advanced way.

[Anonymous No.14652293]

>>14652152
I can think of LED lights and new kinds of screens I admit, but that doesn't seem like that much.

[Anonymous No.14652480]

>>14652273
The human genome project, online streaming, explosions in real time graphics computing, optics, etc., are all explosions of technology.
People are quick to talk about older technology as revolutionary while sneering at the progress of today because they have a skewed perspective. The late 90s - now have been an explosion of progress in both theory and practice
>sticking computer technology onto a standard design
this is no longer an extraneous or extant thing to standard designs. It's not that computers are just iterating on designs that exist - a lot of problems inherent to the standard designs or the field at large are solved by computers. A good example of this is accelerators in SoC and processors. We have tiny ML-trained programs to help with scheduling that work way better than any classical heuristic we have. Computers themselves craft hardware designs that are not only incredibly different than what you would get by hand but are way better. You cannot design competitive hardware without having a combinatorial search algorithm do the physical design for you in VLSI.

I legitimately don't think you understand the scope and importance of computers in solving problems you take for granted. These things aren't just solved by a computer tacked onto a classic design - a lot of these designs only work because we have computers in the first place.

[Anonymous No.14652806]

>>14648615
I would rather burn the money than give it to "the needy"

[Anonymous No.14653028]

>>14644168
Exactly this. The scale and speed at which all industries function now is unattainable without computers and the internet. If there was a widespread internet infrastructure failure the results would be catastrophic.

[Anonymous No.14653132]

>>14649329
>1. I supoose these people were not a major fraction of the workforce.
>2. Making and programming and looking after all these computers is not necessarily less labor intensive than the jobs they replaced.
We have prices in a free market that measures these. Companies wouldn't adopt computers if they were more labor intensive than before. Nobody forced them to.

[Anonymous No.14653143]

>>14653028
Absolutely. And that's one of the early signs of civilizational collapse I'm watching out for. If the theory that we're in for a collapse is true then the people would just "forget" how the internet worked one day. And to get there from here would need more and more internet outages.

[Anonymous No.14653151]

>>14644000
>we could have similar living standards without using computers.
true we could you would have a car a house,food ,place to party .Not being under survailence 24/7 etc.Simple Automation could be done with relays or in mehanical ways.And you could fix everything yourself.Phones existed radios existed so information while less attainable wasnt totaly out of your reach.

[Anonymous No.14653177]

>>14652152
>You cannot design competitive hardware without having a combinatorial search algorithm do the physical design for you in VLSI.
great so now you will never understand the hardware you use.One more step to dystopia.

[Anonymous No.14653716]

>>14653177
>great so now you will never understand the hardware you use.
what the fuck are you on about. The combinatorial search algorithms are not only well known, they're detailed in every fucking book ever. Of all the hardware advances, this is the most transparent.
You do not understand what you are talking about.

[Anonymous No.14653997]

>>14652480
>People are quick to talk about older technology as revolutionary while sneering at the progress of today because they have a skewed perspective.
No they don't. The world didn't change nearly as fast as before.
>The late 90s - now have been an explosion of progress in both theory and practice
Little changed aside from computers.
>this is no longer an extraneous or extant thing to standard designs.
Not sure what this sentence means.
>A good example of this is accelerators in SoC and processors.
Computers design computers, yes. But what changed that much aside from the computers? Almost nothing did. No explosion in tech happened because of computers.
>>14653132
No this is clearly not true, there has been massive overinvestment in computers. See dot com bubble for example. Many (if not most) companies are overvalued in a way that is unrealistic to ever get repaid.
>>14653716
You may understand the algorithm, but not what the algorithm designed.

[Anonymous No.14654029]

Which I suppose might be it. Computers resulted in the creation of massively overpaid jobs, so everyone smart enough to work with computers went into IT, and virtually everything else suffers a total brain drain as the result.

[Anonymous No.14654734]

>>14653997
>See dot com bubble for example
That only bolsters my argument. Computers survived dotcom bubble then housing bubble then they will survive the everything bubble that we're in right now.
A mere fad wouldnt do that.

[Anonymous No.14654760]

>>14654734
>A mere fad wouldnt do that.
tulips survived the tulip mania.
The whole investment process of big tech doesnt make sense.Dividents never exist its all just growth growth.Companies with a bunch of users and 0 profit made or 0 plans to implement profit are valued at bilions.

[Anonymous No.14654840]

>>14654760
>tulips survived the tulip mania
Exactly. I agree with you on tech industry but the thread is about computers themselves. They'd be the tulips.

[Anonymous No.14654874]

>>14654840
>They'd be the tulips.
agreed tech industry would be all the coorporations contracts and varios financial instruments that were centered around tulips.

[Anonymous No.14654880]

>>14644080
This.
Everything that increases production can improve quality of life, the only reason that isn't always the case is when that extra production lines the pockets of a few.

[Anonymous No.14654902]

>>14654880
>Everything that increases production can improve quality of life
can but doesn't have to cars are the best example.Instead of super cheap basic cars you have expensive cars full of microcontrollers and electronics.
Average small car accounted for inflation is 2 times more expensive than it was in the 90s.So if you are a student or young person eho just started working it is twice as hard ro afford transport vehicle.

[Anonymous No.14654913]

>>14654902
If wages kept pace with production people would be earning twice as much, that's why I said it.

[Anonymous No.14654950]

>>14654902
This one's easy. It's literally illegal to make cars without all that shit now. It's not a free market out there. Look at thridie cars in russia india and china They're still okay with some of the stuff that's flat out not allowed anymore like no seat belts, air bags.

[Anonymous No.14654981]

>>14654913
>If wages kept pace with production
this cannot happen if I invent a robot that does everything fast and automates the whole factory that I only need 5 maintenance guys instead of 100 workers.Productivity rose wages have no reason to rise .Still goods should be cheaper to average worker.Also inflation hurts workers not productivity.Productivity would make everything dirt cheap in theory.

[Anonymous No.14654985]

>>14654950
>This one's easy. It's literally illegal to make cars without all that shit now
yes due to coorporate lobbying especially germans in the eu.

[Anonymous No.14655005]

>>14654950
Yep. In the US even the least expensive new car must have a video screen because it is required by law now. There are lots of these legal requirements heaped on year after year that make cars more expensive than they used to be. Then there's the removal of a huge portion of the used car market by Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" program. Add on ever increasingly tight emissions standards that push older cars into the crusher instead of on the market for low income buyers.

[Anonymous No.14655096]

>>14655005
>must have a video screen
what a retarded law this is the reason I am for direct democracy there is no way poeple would vote for that shit.
Co2 is pure bulshit cars are basically irelevant.If they cared about co2 they would block all trade with china and make cars as repairable snd reusable as possible.
And question for us anon isnt there a state omaha I think that alows you to register anything as long as it has lights can break and can steer.

[Anonymous No.14655211]

>>14654734
The point was that far more money gets spent on making computers than would actually make sense
>>14654880
>when that extra production lines the pockets of a few.
That just shouldn't be possible though. The products would have to end up being sold to someone. It looks like someone must be cooking the books.

[Anonymous No.14655268]

>>14644615
>brown people are holding you back
Yes but more importantly they are holding White civilizations back. They have a lower IQ and a disproportionate propensity for violent crimes. If you want science and civilization, you want Whites. Blacks would have never given us the Constitution. Blacks would have never put men on the moon. Some races are just better than others objectively.

[Anonymous No.14655307]

>>14655268
Blacks are incapable of making huge centralised dystopian societies.So its not their fault .Jews and leftists also the Chinese are the ones destroying freedom.Blacks are just useful idiots.

[Anonymous No.14655328]

I think you're underestimating the incredibly massive amount of stuff that used to be routine work done by paper pushers that software handles now, or calculations and trials that computers can do at 100000x pace a human could.

Right now, our biggest issue isn't an overreliance on computers or tech, it's a culture that caters to the bottom feeders, lowest common denominator, demoralizes and attacks the successful and ambitious, and promotes general degeneracy.

Universities 100 years ago were places where a small collection of highly ambitious, intelligent men argued and debated and fought for degrees and achievements and great things resulted from that competition. Now they are diploma mills and farms for every mediocre retard in the world.

[Anonymous No.14655334]

>>14655328

And yes to put it bluntly: we let women vote, our culture became highly feminized, they basically dictate the normal now, and the normal has become precisely what they want: anti-competitive, mediocre, petty, non objective assmilk that produces no new accomplishments. If someone unveiled a $100B plan to get a colony on Mars it would be shot down because that money needs to go to the welfare plantation instead.

[Anonymous No.14656134]

>>14655334
>women vote
its funny poeple like you think everything happens naturally and you blame women,city poeple and whatever .And not the elite that runs society media etc and aims to enslave you in any way possible.

[Anonymous No.14656169]

>>14655328
>Right now, our biggest issue isn't an overreliance on computers or tech
try talking to a zoomer girl and you will see.Poeple incapable of holding conversation meeting anyone if its not online.Reliant on tech to the point they kill themselves if they are atacked online or banned from a platform.

[Anonymous No.14656565]

>>14653997
>You may understand the algorithm, but not what the algorithm designed.
You, my friend, do not understand the algorithm or what the algorithm "designs." The output is the solution to a constraint satisfaction problem with a lot of parameters and tweaks on industry standard, typically free software. This is tantamount to saying
>hurr you might be able to use the manpages, but you don't reeally understand what these functions in glibc do!
But I do, and the source code is freely available. The obfuscated parts of hardware are not the parts related to what the computer does. Anyway
>hurr i will repeat that nothing much changed despite the large amount of evidence stated ITT
>no explosion in tech happened because of computers
this is very low quality bait

[Anonymous No.14656580]

>>14644000
>In the first half of the XXth we didn't need them for advanced physics
physicists were among the very first to jump onto computers because they recognized just how much they accelerated progress. It is inconceivable to do the overwhelming majority of applied (or even large amounts of theoretical) physics without computers. The LHC and similar centers around the world all do cutting edge work in and heavily employ computational techniques, all for fundamental particle physics.
We would be nowhere near where we are in physics without the digital computer.

[Anonymous No.14656754]

>>14644258
holy shit, reading that was a ride. Never knew there were programmers out there that incompetent.

That being said this is more of a good example of why you shouldn't trust data science (or data scientists) implicitly without corroborative evidence to back up their claims. Unfortunately most politicians aren't qualified to understand basic mathematics let alone any statistics or data science so they take so called "expert" opinion at face value. But if we were really following the empirical method there would be no such thing as an "expert", just "scientists" who make (sometimes conflicting) claims through which you can filter the truth out of the noise. The issue here is our society's and in particular our elite's worship of "experts". The model did exactly what it was designed to do, the problem comes down to human error.

[Anonymous No.14656779]

>>14649329

>2. Making and programming and looking after all these computers is not necessarily less labor intensive than the jobs they replaced.

they actually are because a crew of ~50 people can manage a computer that preforms the job of 5,000+

[Anonymous No.14656784]

>>14644000
Thanks I’ll kill myself tonight :)

[Anonymous No.14657005]

>>14644000
>What do you think?
Today i finished 4 different 3d prints for several projects. All put in the manufacturer online basket order tomorrow. Production usually needs 2-3 days. Meanwhile i made support for a construction machine on the Cap Verdes, they send me a video the day before. Yesterday i started firmware changes to an sport training device currently under development. PCB arrived last week from Shenzen per air freight.
For other production i ordered some parts in Texas (i live in north Germany) usually arrives in 2 days.

Questions?

[Anonymous No.14657835]

>>14656565
>The output is the solution to a constraint satisfaction problem with a lot of parameters and tweaks on industry standard, typically free software.
The algorithm only gives you something that works, itwon't teach you how it works.
>>no explosion in tech happened because of computers
You keep arguing that computers do a lot of stuff, which nobody denies, it's one part of the paradox. The other part of the paradox is that it observably didn't result in any major technological change in everyday life. In other words , move someone between today and 1972, and most likely they will have little trouble adapting, especially if they adults who grew up without smartphones, as mostpy everything is exactly the same. But between 1972 and 1922 the world was completely different. Most people didn't have electricity, and radio was younger than Covid.
>>14656779
Not sure how you got these numbers.

[Anonymous No.14657877]

>>14644000
>What do you think?

I think that (You)

Should return to highschool

Because your grasp of how to properly

Write English is severely lacking

[Anonymous No.14658090]

>>14656784
Just fap and go to sleep idot

[Anonymous No.14660352]

>>14657835
>The algorithm only gives you something that works, itwon't teach you how it works.
Why are you lying?

[Anonymous No.14660650]

>>14644000
>Are computers / CS / IT overrated?
Yes.
Most of it could be automated if the resources were allocated properly, but it's purposefully not done to inflate employment numbers - the more people are invested in the industry - the more money is poured into it - the more you can profit.

[Anonymous No.14662067]

>>14660352
How is it a lie? The algorithm only gives you a solution.
>>14660650
The problem is that IT may have huge opportunity costs. If there was no overinvestment into it, we would have a lot of other new techology that the people who worked on computers would create instead. Even computers could be better in the end, as more work would be done on integrating them with other technology, and lot more would be known about the drawbacks of the past models and work would be done on specific bottlenecks, instead of increasing brute force calculation.