My 486 wasn’t powerful enough, and neither is AI

Back in the mid-90’s, I worked for a few years at Electronics Boutique, a software and video game store. It was great! It was a fascinating time in the world of video games, going from systems like the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, through failures like the 3DO and Virtual Boy, into the next generation with the Nintendo 64 and the first PlayStation. It was such a fun era to be working in a store like that.

Computers were also moving quickly, and I still remember a conversation I had with a woman that came in to shop. She had just purchased a 486 DX2 66, a very popular chipset for a few years. At the time, it was top of the line and could run any program or game we had in the store. In fact, it was seemingly so powerful at the time that she said “the power of this computer will last for the rest of my life”.

Having seen the progress of computers to that point, I knew she was completely wrong and that by the next year we’d already have games that she probably couldn’t run. “The power of this computer” wasn’t likely to last more than a few years, much less the rest of her life. It’s easy to get excited about the powerful new thing we have, but history shows that technology becomes obsolete remarkably quickly.

Case in point, the latest iPhone has roughly 650,000 times the computing power of that computer.