41–50 of 157 posts
In a world where computers are some ancient artifact, they would still have significant value as calculators and accounting tools. It's likely some scribe class would emerge around using them to manage the day-to-day of whatever social hierarchy is present.
Visicalc will never die!
You eliminate most of mundane uses of computers (such as Whatsapp, buying stuff and getting news) since you can almost immediately do this person to person.
To use computers, you need to learn to read (most people can't), which is esoteric by itself. Computers are used to store knowledge too fragile to be transferred via pollination, and for computations. Obviously, you need a lot of concentration to use a computer in such a world, and will be considered loony.
> Solid-state computer components, on the other hand, have no mechanical decay, so they are practically eternal. I wish. Electrolytic capacitors seem to have a functional lifespan of about 10-20 years, transistors do wear out, electromigration is a problem in chips in the "hundreds of years" span discussed, and there are all sorts of other interesting failure modes of "solid state" electronics that mean they're not g…
> Solid-state computer components, on the other hand, have no mechanical decay, so they are practically eternal. I wish. Electrolytic capacitors seem to have a functional lifespan of about 10-20 years, transistors do wear out, electromigration is a problem in chips in the "hundreds of years" span discussed, and there are all sorts of other interesting failure modes of "solid state" electronics that mean they're not g…
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> Nope.
> None of these things "wear out".
Would you perhaps like to present any evidence or even argument whatsoever?
I am not sure when it happened but I discovered that every game I played over the last twenty years, reduced to it's bare minimum functional components, was aligning a pointer on an X/Y axis and pressing the correct button within a time window. The goal of computers, reduction or multiplication of work, is often lost because the output does not last longer that the work required to generate. Computers are tools. They…
Heroes of Might and Magic III are somewhat older than 20 years but they are super different than that.
This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…
The nitty gritty punch card programming was something stereotypically done by middle aged/older women. Many early computers were massive and housed in what could be considered temples in big universities surrounded by gothic architecture. They were expensive to replace and kept around for long periods of time because of how difficult it was to upgrade (some large mainframe systems still exist today for that reason). Mechanical computers like the Babbage difference engine would last a lifetime. The idea of an average Joe spending all day using expensive compute time was insane. Those who focused on them did so for academic reasons, and spent most of their time meditating on computation, math, and the structure of language and meaning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist Step 2: 100 years pass Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines. Was that so hard?
Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.
Expert prompt crafting!
> The science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld has been forced to stop accepting any new submissions from writers after it was bombarded with what it says were AI-generated stories.
> The magazine officially shut off submissions on February 20 after a surge in stories that publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke says were clearly machine-written.