The Curse of Moore’s Law
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
In accordance with Moore’s Law, the performance of computer chips has been doubling every two or three years since the 1970s. Three years from now, you’ll be able to buy a computer with the same power for half the price or a computer with twice the power for the same price. This phenomenon has been driving economic growth, increases in productivity, and social change.
The predictability is due in large part to the relationship of the physical size of a circuit to its speed. Electricity moves at the speed of light, which means (as computer pioneer Grace Hopper often pointed out) that it travels about a foot every billionth of a second. If you cut the size of a circuit in half, you double its speed and hence its performance, without the need for any other innovation. And the use of ever more powerful computers accelerates the development of the next generation of computers.
The pace of this advancement is slowing now as technology reaches physical limits, though major innovations, like quantum computing, might keep the trend going for a while.
So what is the curse? We have experienced nearly fifty years of incredible progress in technology. As individuals, we have become used to the consumer electronics products we buy becoming obsolete quickly. Rather than fix a broken device, we buy a new more powerful replacement. We take such progress for granted. And the economy depends on this trend for increasing productivity and lowering the cost of technology products. When this progress comes to an abrupt halt — as it eventually must — the repercussions are likely to be disastrous.
