The oil industry has a half dozen or so new technologies for extracting oil from the ground that wouldn't be otherwise accessible. They aren't using them because it costs a lot to ramp up manufacturing and deployment of new gear, and training people to use it. Fracking and traditional pumping work fine for now. Once what's available gets harder to extract using those methods, prices will go up and they'll switch to a different technology.
Many couples don’t believe they can afford to start a family. As the cost of living continues to balloon, this affects a couple’s ability to raise children comfortably. For those contemplating whether to have children, the mere cost of child care, which is an average of $15,600 per year, provokes questions of whether it is even feasible.
This is not just future generation's problem. Catastrophic lack of affordability for housing, healthcare, and childcare results in fewer kids, this in turn means that in 20 years there will be less adults working and paying taxes, in turn bankrupting social nets. So today's childlessness crisis will translate to tomorrow destitute seniors crisis.
One of my tenants gave notice on the house he was renting from me because he was fired from his job the day after the Brexit vote.
The laws of physics prevent many people from driving a vehicle with a sub 5 second 0-60 time. It takes a lot of ponies to get a bro-dozer up to speed that quickly.
I think a lot of EVs can do this. My very early Model 3 (not 4WD or Performance model) could do 0-60 in 4.5 seconds for a while (before Tesla nerfed the acceleration).
I'm going to make some rough approximations here.
There are difficulties in dissipating power in high speed processors. Assume that the power that can be dissipated is proportional to the area of the chip. Relative to a single active layer chip, the power that can be dissipated per layer is 1/(number_of_layers * thermal_conduction_to_coolant). Thermal conduction to coolant is dominated by copper in the heatsink and SiO2 in the chip. Copper is at least 200 times more thermally conductive than SiO2. Assume that the maximum acceptable temperature rise is 50 Kelvin across a 1 cubic centimeter copper cube; that corresponds to 200 Watts. Assume that diminishing returns occurs when the thermal drop across SiO2 equals the drop across the copper. Since they add, if we keep the limit at 50 K the limiting power is 100 Watts. The implied thickness of SiO2 is (1 cm)/200 = 50 microns. How many layers can be squeezed into 50 microns?
A brief internet search seems to yield a minimum layer thickness of 100 nm (0.1 micron) for gate logic -- (1 active layer plus many interconnect layers.) Thus 500 active layers can be squeezed into 50 microns. What happens then?
Power dissipation in CMOS logic, ignoring leakage, is proportional to freq * V^2. Let our single layer CPU performance be 1 unit, limited by 1 cm copper and running at 1.2 volts (There's very little SiO2 for the heat to pass through.) At first glance, our 500 layer CPU with same voltage limited by 1 cm copper plus 50 micron SiO2 is 1 * (500 layers) * (1/500 heat per layer) * (1/2 thermal conductivity) = 1/2 unit. Layering loses. However, that is not the whole truth. Layering allows many more transistors, thus more clever circuitry, which might be enough to improve the performance some. 3D means shorter interconnects, shorter interconnects means less capacitance, less capacitance means less power dissipation. (The other major contributor to capacitance is the FET's gate.) I can only guess how much lower heat (more speed) that allows. Maybe 1.5X? speed is then 3/4 unit. That (1/500 heat per layer) is (1/500 speed) and with CMOS reduced speed allows reduced voltage.
Over a limited range, CMOS speed is proportional to voltage. By lowering voltage, heating is reduced. Thus reducing voltage means speed does not have to be reduced to 1/500 of the single layer CPU. With a supply voltage of 1.2 x 1/10 = 0.12, speed reduced to 1/10, power per layer is reduced to 1/1000 compared to the single layer CPU. 500 layers operating at 1/10 the speed is a 50x performance improvement.
Alas, we can't do that. Huge CMOS CPUs can't be made to operate at 0.12 V, and I don't know if it will ever be possible. I'll guess and say that somewhere in the range of 0.3 V and 0.6 V will some day be practical. If it's 0.6 V, speed could be 1/250, times 500 layers = 2 units. If it's 0.3 V, speed could be 1/62.5, times 500 layers = 8 units.
The above is too optimistic, because of difficulties in controlling threshold voltage and leakage, and the difficulties in massive parallelism and massive multi-threading.
I'd like to repeat the calculations for 10 layers and 50 layers. I'd like to check my work. I've already spent about 2 hours on this reply, so I'm giving up. Have fun.
In my estimate, the speed improvement in AI chips is going to see the same slowdown we've already seen in CPUs: single threaded performance is almost at a standstill and multi-threaded performance is increasing much less rapidly than it used to. If this slowdown occurs, there will be less pressure to replace existing AI machines with faster AI machines. This means a longer life cycle for existing machines.
Whether new facilities continue to be built will depend upon the degree to which AI is useful, and whether AI's usefulness requires more hardware. Nobody really knows.
The historical success rate of students from various schools and their GPAs is available to the colleges. Colleges that act wisely can adjust the GPAs reported by various grade schools by the school's historical reputation.
Do colleges still require a pre-acceptance interview? That should weed out many dullards and ignoramuses.
Some grade schools, even public schools, teach and test in a manner consistent with SAT preparation. No special paid SAT prep classes required.
Intelligence helps a person be financially successful. Successful people can provide at least two advantages for their children: better genes for intelligence and money for SAT prep classes. Without lots of data and good statistical analysis, the relative influence of those two (and other) factors cannot be stated with certainty. (Other factors include tendencies toward good study habits, good manners, and good nutrition.)
It's also worth noting that there's some similarity between SAT tests and tests in college, so SAT results correlate with college success. Thus SAT tests are partially predictive of college success.
If you have to bribe....err...I mean 'reward' people to use your product....your product probably isn't good.
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
