My girlfriend and I have been preparing to work on a new desktop computer. It's a general interest sort of thing: partially for education, partially for entertainment. The fact of the matter is, we are sinking quite a bit into to make sure that it'll last us a long time. However, something has always bothered me with this, which has recently been made fun of in a Best Buy ad... why am I bothering with this? Why bother trying to make something great when in just a few months to the next year, the next generation of parts will come out?
Simply put, technology is evolving. If anything, it's growing faster than we are. IBM's new computer Watson, a recognition software, was just put to the test a couple months ago on Jeopardy. Even with the two greatest legacy players (one set a record for most income in a given period while another set a record for most days on), it managed to win the two games it was on. It has become a technological marvel that is able to think more like a human and separate information based on word choice and the manner they're used in.
It frightens me to think that this technology will probably be considered obsolete in a decade. Not only that, it will be compressed into some smaller and more efficient, much like microchips today are as powerful as the first supercomputers, and cost only a fraction of the price. It also frightens me that what we are building will probably be outdated in a matter of 2 or 3 years. Also some depressing is that in that time, something will be twice as powerful and probably around the same price. This begs the question: is "future-proofing" really worth it?
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