Great article, and I 100% agree. I'd even go further than this, and say that the rise of AI has clarified my vague feeling that computing has been going wrong for a very long time. There's a famous article by David Chisnall with the subtitle "Your computer is not a fast PDP-11." [0] I believe it should be a fast PDP-11, and outside of specialized batch processing machines, we should sacrifice performance to make this possible.

Instead of cache, software-managed fast and slow memory spaces.

Instead of branch prediction, memory with multiple read ports/buses and software-managed parallel prefetch queues.

Instead of hardware speculative execution, VLIW.

Instead of automatic DRAM refresh, a hard-real-time OS handling the refresh timing.

I don't care that this would to make things on average slower and more expensive. Modern computers have tremendously fast average-case performance, but the software is still mostly laggy garbage. We sacrificed ease of understanding and didn't even get responsive software in return. I believe that if modern computers really were fast PDP-11s, we would not be in the situation we are now, where most programmers see nothing wrong with software taking some unpredictable human perceptible time to respond to inputs, even when simply processing text. I care more about worst-case performance than average-case performance.

As the article says, "Like a fisherman might feel one with a fishing rod, I treat the machine as a continuation of myself." A fishing rod always responds in zero milliseconds. A computer should do the same. You can say AI is qualitatively different because by embracing it we abandon even the possibility of understanding, but in practice we mostly abandoned understanding already. There's no practical way to count cycles any more.

Of course, most computer users don't care about this, so there's no commercial market for the kind of hardware I'm imagining, but I'd love to see the "fast PDP-11" approach taken to its limit. Let's make computers it's possible to completely understand.

[0] https://queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3212477.3212479

Grieving the loss of details