Another New, Dangerous Competition To Be Worried About

Also a new "gap" to be worried about as well: Whether you are a big behind, or not, in the flipping of "flops," or floating point calculations.

And we have a new meme for mega now in the term "exa," as it will now be known as exaflops; which also means, dare we say it, that maybe one day we'll have computer chips themselves clocking not in measly giga wiggles any more. No sir. For now we can dream of exa wiggles instead (so much more like turning it up to 11 than peta wiggles would be).

You have to state it absurdly because the whole competitive mess has become so absurd. Whether it be for even another round of new nuke, weapons building (something like $1 trillion to pay for), or the ever accelerating rounds of the new software/anti software building, or any of the old, "usual suspects" here (scarce resources, market domination, etc). And again, all at a time when the fate of the planet requires cooperative action.

Our priorities will be straightened out for us, eventually. Of that you can be sure. Whether that's done with even some semblance of thought, or just as a matter of the systems involved re adjusting themselves, as happenstance would have it, is, oddly enough, still something we can have a choice in. That will not be the case indefinitely. That's also something you can count on.

Why the US and China's brutal supercomputer war matters