It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist
oh yeah and we use this primarily for email
Oct 26, 2026 · 2:19 PM UTC
Kinda crazy that we dig copper out of rock and aluminum out of bauxite, melt the copper and plate it pure, dissolve the aluminum in molten cryolite and run so much damn current through it that the oxygen lets go, draw both metals down into wire, string that wire for miles, spin a magnet inside a coil of it by boiling water or damming a river, and the electrons in the wire creep slower than a walk while the push runs the length of it near the speed of light, and that push can knock a photon out of a speck of matter, and a few million of those specks behind glass and plastic, flipped on and off in milliseconds rendering a moving picture of anything anyone has seen or invented.
oh yeah and we use this primarily to make the lights dance on that box to entertain ourselves.
and the most advanced version of this technology is currently being used to make emails sound like they weren’t written by the technology
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It's kinda wild to me that we built clocks so precise they count a cesium atom vibrating 9 billion times a second, strapped them to rockets, flung about 30 of them into orbit at 8,700 mph, then had to correct for both of Einstein's theories of relativity because time literally runs faster up there, and those satellites scream the exact time at the earth nonstop so a slab of glass in your pocket can hear four of them at once, solve a system of equations, and pinpoint where you're standing on a spinning rock to within a few feet
oh yeah and we use this mostly to watch the DoorDash guy drive past our house
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I've been using it for quantum stuff mostly the last 2 years. But yeah... Lots of wasted bandwidth on emails. Lmao
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Since time immemorial, mankind (& likely pre-sapient hominids) has worried that inanimate objects were actually possessed by spirits that might be malevolent.
Within a couple hundred years of discovering electricity & creating an industrial civilization, we start making things that calculate & then, within a single generation, appears to think, act, & interact - to be animated.
Much of its use is trivial,or has the potential to be harmful or even truly malevolent - whether guided by its own or our own purposes.
There are benevolent purposes as well as ill, and perhaps it will become a great blessing to mankind, but any primitive would certainly think this madness.
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“we … inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it”
Actually the whole thing is much weirder and more amazing even than your description:
youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?si=kbpt…
"I etch a pattern of geometric shapes onto a stone. To the uninitiated, the shapes look mysterious and complex, but I know that when arranged correctly they will give the stone a special power, enabling it to respond to incantations in a language no human being has ever spoken. I will ask the stone questions in this language, and it will answer by showing me a vision: a world created by my spell, a world imagined within the pattern on the stone... Yet my work involves no witchcraft. The stone is a wafer of silicon, and the incantations are software."
Daniel Hillis
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