It's fine I completely understand.
It is hard for me as well to keep up with things online.
I am not an authority on electrical engineering at all.
In fact, I too have more hands-on time in residential construction and contracting type work. My father is an electrician, and a welder/fabricator by trade.
However, in working for himself he has been a bit of a jack of all trades and I've worked with him doing a little bit of everything. We've even done HVAC as far as installing all the duct-work and air movers, but when it comes time to purge or charge the system we call in one of our friends who does HVAC-specifically.
Also we've done framing, and a lot of engine/mechanical work.
But when you mentioned inkjet printing of circuits and the concrete storage I found the most recent articles citing the 17% stat.
I also have a lot of time with computers, and beyond my hands-on experience with them I've always read a lot about them to try and understand the practical magic of them.
All of the basic principles for them was done at a scale that people could construct by hand originally. Which is why they were always huge.
But it was the concept of using electricity and circuits to construct calculators that could store, load, and do arithmetic. Eventually long-multiplication/division, and then even more maths.
And in 1958 engineers at Texas Instruments achieved the first integrated circuits. From there it's been an exponential move forward in making them more complex and using them to do more and more things. VLSI or very-large-scale-integration.
We once had radios, phones, computers, televisions, and cameras. Today all of those things are in a brick the size of a chocolate-bar in our pockets.
The drawback to that is creating them became increasingly more specialized(and costly), and mystical. We used to have semiconductor fabs right here in the USA. Intel had several, and then there was Global Foundries in New York state.
Over time it all moved to the far-East, and today the most cutting-edge fabs(meaning the ones with the smallest fabrication) are in Taiwan at TSMC. There are some in Korea that are a little behind/larger. The current AMD Ryzen CPU's are at 4 nano-meter processes all done by precision robotics and lasers.
Also as we move forward, and networking speeds and bandwidth have grown; there's been a move to placing a lot of the real-work in the data-centers. Everything has started to move to service-based platforms where your end-device is more of a receiver than being the processing powerhouse.
In my life I've watched people go from never wanting to enter any real information into a computer to now relying on them for everything.
And it's making us less sharp. The more we let computers do our math, remember our phone contacts, and even spelling for us; the less capable we are of doing any of that.
I used to memorize a dozen phone numbers because I didn't have a cell phone. I was the only person I knew of who didn't own one for several years of my life.
And now we're at the point where even the things we'd do on the computer we're instead letting the computers do for us with AI.
Using Google used to be a skill. You needed to think about the keywords you entered to find the right information or site.
Now you can type in plain language into that search and the AI will interpret your desire, and write it to you like a person would.
Or there's Chat-GPT, or Grok.
But what I am getting at is we are creating people who no longer know how to do anything. People whose abilities are tied to the computers, cameras, and microphones where everything they do that matters is recorded.
18 years ago I was in a Barnes & Noble, and stumbled on a book called Big Data.
When I read some of it there in the store it put things into perspective for me.
Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter were really about building massive databases on everyone. Becoming the common-denominator in everyone's lives.
I think in collecting all of this data they are hoping to crack the code on consciousness itself. Maybe even trying to make people more like computers.
Then you started seeing things like "what color is this dress?" half of the people would say gold/yellow and the other half would say blue.
Or what do you hear the voice saying: "Laurel or Yanny"?
Those are almost like binary. Yellow and blue are opposites and so are Laurel or Yanny. Then we saw things like Flat Earth or The Mandela Effect, and they became widespread phenomena. People started talking about everything being a simulation.
It is a very very strange time to be a person, and computers are how it got this way.
Unlike with drugs or vice, computers are seen as necessary to living in the modern world. My generation is the last that knew a world without the internet, and that's a sad thing.
I would be surprised were that so. The coming digital ID will turn that Big Data into a weapon that will - and already is - cut people off from all comms. Across MENA, but particularly in Palestine, Big Data is weaponized against dissidents, and there are a lot of dissidents across the world, and across issues. All of them will be cut off, as completely as possible.
I expect the internet to become something exclusive, like in the movie 'Elysium', where the modern tech in the orbital habitat was reserved to an elite, while plebs suffered what they could manage for themselves under the economic pressure applied by the larcenous corporations the elite profited from. This process is ongoing today, and that is the main driver behind my interest in decentralization. I don't think we need to be a world of plebs ruled by an elite, because decentralized production is more productive than centralized production. That enables the masses with merit to prevent such an elite from continuing to have exclusive wealth and access to modern goods and services, the blessings of civilization will inure to them that make them.
I intend my sons and posterity generally to merit them thereby.