Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part (a16z.news)

37 pointsby gmays3 days ago20 comments

PowerElectronix 2 hours ago

I have to disagree here. While it's been proven that a lot of things can be done by just searching a very big solution space very fast (either by brute compute or by a sophisticated algo or both), hardware solution spaces are not that easily searched.

For a lot of applications where signal integrity is not critical, high frequency switching is not required and power density is moderate, yeah. Anyone can do that, even an AI. But you don't even need to make a pcb for those cases, just throw the components in a protoboard and fire away.

When you start adding variables to the search space (emi interference, matching routing impedances, heat management, mechanical integrity, etc) the search space grows so big that any non-expert will become lost in it.

Will future cheap compute power be able to overcome this? I'm not betting on it.

andy_ppp an hour ago

We can probably find people saying the search space for Go is too large and that we'll never be able to do protein folding and if we can we'll never manage protein interactions and then well never manage to simulate a whole cell (tbc). I just think at some point these machines become smarter than us, if it's 2 years or 20 years the self improvement part will happen on both the hardware and software side. Judgement day is inevitable.

throwawayffffas an hour ago

> Will future cheap compute power be able to overcome this? I'm not betting on it.

Famous last words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

Also did you not see the quoted post at the end, they are already training ai on running material science labs so we are quickly moving away from the non-expert.

tjoff an hour ago

I'd say that balancing those aspects are exactly what an AI excels at. And an AI can iterate in a way a human wont. Completely redesign something because an edge-case could be slightly better.

AI isn't brute-forcing, or it would have been completely unusable for code.

xnorswap 2 hours ago

It struck me as anachronistic that the 1915 worlds fair would demonstrate the steam locomotive, a technology that had been around for decades.

Reality turns out to be more interesting, it was an exhibit of Southern Pacific's first steam locomotive, the CP Huntington, built in 1863.

So while it's true to say that the 1915 worlds' fair exhibited Southern Pacific's first steam locomotive, it's also very misleading to suggest it was new technology of the time.

officialchicken an hour ago

~85 years prior to the 1915 fair, Stephenson's Planet 2-2-0 steam loco was operating commercially between Manchester and Liverpool (5 built in 1830). The planet was a version 2 of his earlier Rocket already operating between the cities since 1829/30 - utilizing a very design with the boiler between the wheels layout that almost all steam locomotives eventually adopted.

num42 3 hours ago

Hardware is Hard! - Popular quote

There are so many processes involved in making a high-precision bolt that goes into an F1 racing car. Well, hardware is always limited by laws of physics, it's hard to accelerate. Maybe in the future, AI will do this too, through robotics. I am still waiting for the robotics ChatGPT moment.

Life of Bolt(2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iptAkpqjtMQ

Dan Gelbart recently appeared on a podcast where he shared valuable insights into precision engineering. It was really great!

Title: Solving Impossible Problems for Fun and Profit - Dan Gelbart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTgrWmOk4q8

t9ejrmdkdldk 3 hours ago

> lit the drone on fire in July, re-assembled and crashed it into my neighbor’s roof in August,

Drones should be handled the same way as weapons! Strict licenses and mandatory insurance!

mrob 2 hours ago

Agreed. Anybody who thinks this is overreach should read this article:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bGoo3NWzMAzsLQceJ/drone-wmds...

hansvm an hour ago

I've been a bit surprised this hasn't been happening already. I don't know if the eventual trigger is going to be ICE murders or what, but with as accessible as the tech is, as much unrest as currently exists, and no shortage of people willing to inflict lethal violence via other mechanisms, I would've thought we'd have had at least a little drone violence by now.

nonameiguess 23 minutes ago

People are better than we give ourselves credit for. I remember working at Disneyland during 9/11, the FBI told us we were considered the 4th most likely target in the United States, and mandatory bag checks at the gates made the lines longer and slower than they'd ever been, so enormous crowds, thousands of people, were gathered and effectively trapped between Harbor Blvd and the actual gates. I couldn't help but think how easy it would be for a few guys or even just one to gun down hundreds with a couple of uzis or throw a few pipe bombs into the crowd. Nobody ever did. That Las Vegas concert shooting was the closest anyone has ever come. There are probably many vulnerabilities like that. Poison the water supply to a hospital. Close off a mine on purpose. My girlfriend's brother back in 2004 managed to drive his speedboat with me in it through the LA harbor, right alongside container ships, and succeeded in evading the Coast Guard. It was just a joyride to him, but someone more malicious could probably sink a container ship or even an oil tanker.

These things almost never happen because people just aren't that evil, at least most of the time. When it happens, it's an extraordinary event.

newsclues 2 hours ago

"Drones should be handled the same way as weapons!" Strict rules for law abiding citizens while the criminals are totally unencumbered by the law?

You know it's easy to get illegal guns right?

mrob an hour ago

Guns don't scale like drones. No matter how many guns you own, you can only shoot two at a time, and only one if you care about aim.

Building an autonomous drone swarm capable of nuclear-weapon-tier kill count is far easier than building a nuclear weapon. We already know how dangerous military drones are, and those are still mostly bottlenecked by relying on human-powered target identification. Building drones to indiscriminately kill unarmored civilians is an easier task.

w4der an hour ago

But the tooling required for guns and rifling in particular is pretty hard to come by, whereas the tooling required to assemble a DIY drone is basically indistinguishable from R/C hobby equipment. You can (try) to regulate where/who/how/when can fly a drone, but regulating drone building seems almost impossible to me.

trollbridge 19 minutes ago

The tooling for guns and rifles is not hard to come by. The most difficult part of making firearms from scratch is the primer in the ammunition.

newsclues 28 minutes ago

You can setup a machine gun on a Remote Weapon Station and control it via the internet. You could have agents as machine gunners. Same with rocket launchers.

We are literally seeing the large scale use of robotic weapons platforms AT SCALE.

Machine guns create a storm of ballistic objects, and have been doing so for over 100 years. Large scale murder isn't new. We just have systems that have cameras that make it easy to put the footage online now.

embedding-shape 30 minutes ago

> You know it's easy to get illegal guns right?

Where though? It's certainly easier in some parts of the worlds than others, and surely something in the environment makes this easier/harder, I wonder if we could identify what exactly?

newsclues 27 minutes ago

In your basement with simple tools. 3D printers made it a lot easier and better. You can make a pipegun with very little skill.

Ammunition is a bit harder, but again, there is criminal markets that fill the needs.

embedding-shape 6 minutes ago

You make the action and the barrel in PLA or ABS I suppose? Sounds reliable :)

> but again, there is criminal markets that fill the needs.

Again, those are bigger in some places in the world, and almost non-existing in most parts of the world, even though it's possible to obtain in the right circles.

If we stop assuming the US's "everyone should have a gun at home" mentality is how it goes everywhere, it's still not "easy to get illegal guns" in most parts of the world.

Aerroon 7 minutes ago

Why do people always demand strict licenses and mandatory insurance for everything? Scooters, bicycles, small drones. What's next? Need a license for the paper airplane you made because it might poke out someone's eye? Human bodies are big and heavy - they can do a lot of damage if "used improperly" - should we require a license and mandatory insurance to go outside into public spaces too?

A license requirement for a car makes sense - you're dealing with forces well beyond the norm for what a human body has. Small drones though? I just don't see it.