so, thinking about global pandemics, I wonder how resilient US first world economy is. We lost a bit under 1% of the population in the Spanish Flu c. 1918, and it didn't much hurt us. Lincoln killed off 3% of the US population, and while it quite hurt the economy in CSA >
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10/ Software sector probably shrinks ... but maybe not? with labor scarce, perhaps returns to automation CLIMB ? Fewer coders working on websites, more on robots ?
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11/ This is all at some number - I'm saying 40% death rate, world wide. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these effects are at 25-30%, and 40-50% is actually a whole new level / type of reaction Instead of falling back to ~ 2005 tech, maybe the next level causes us to fall back to 1960?
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12/ One thing to think about is that technology level in 1960 wasn't merely defined by "what we've discovered / invented by 1960", but also "what the economies of scale of the 1960 customer base allowed". Look at action movies or video games. US population in 1960 was 180 M.
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13/ So a movie would have to cover its budget by selling tickets to ~ 180 M people, max. Today an action movie sells to US, EU, China, India. So the same movie can sell tickets to ~1.5 B people. 7x the market means 7x the budget.
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14/ and at that budget you can afford things that you couldn't afford at all at the smaller budget. So one tool (among many) to think about such things is to look at what tech level we supported at various population levels. We would, I think, partially retract that path.
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One of the terrifying potential problems is not merely economies of scale, but how certain ideas require a certain level of mental manpower. You could imagine the price of RAM doubling, and the economies of scale surviving(ish), even if they might not.
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What happens to work dependent on the proverbial one-in-a-million mind? If it takes ten specialist geniuses to figure out a cpu improvement worth its salt, that's 3% of the set with today's American population -- and it's not like there's a shortage of other tasks for 'em.
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That’s probably ok. The software stack running on current hardware is stupidly inefficient. The remaining brains have plenty to do to improve performance thru software alone, without needing new hardware and hyper complex manufacturing. I’m running fine on 6yo tech; >SW please.
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