Was Moore's Law Inevitable? | Hacker News Reader

Was Moore's Law Inevitable?

kk.org

44 pointsraju8 comments

The difference between semi-conductors and solar/battery tech is that you are already working at the molecular level with solar panels/batteries and have to change materials to get different results, this is complex as we don't have analytical models of this sort of thing.

With semi-conductors things materials don't need to be changed so much. We are still working with doped silicon (although we do need to make variations with SOI), we are just shrinking something we understand well.

Can't help but follow Kevin Kelly's vision of the future. Thanks for the share raju, surprised I missed this in my reader. Now to sneak out of the office for a walk so I can enjoy the read.

(my comment) While reading this post Kevin, I was captivated by a background image of a great stonelike wheel with many great spindles, your technium, grinding forward inevitably. Have you ever commissioned artisits to capture a fleeting image?

The paths our society rifles down are chosen by us. Even accepting the unerring push of progress we are free to navigate what rechnologies to pursue by the resources allocated to their improvement. We may be able to steer the technium rudder more easily than that of our world’s societies.

But who is the "we" who is guiding the navigation? On the one hand, you have millions of programmers and engineers like you and me, who are working toward some short- or medium-term technological goals. However, those goals are hardly chosen out of the blue. Many of us are working on goals determined by some arcane corporate bureaucracy, which we would never have chosen on our own. Others are working on goals which are self-selected, but reflect the needs of the rest of our society and our existing technological framework. The growth of bandwidth and storage (and the software to power them), for example, have such compelling entertainment applications that if one of us didn't work on them, a thousand others would.

On the other hand, if you look for the driving force behind those needs and corporations, you don't find any more control. In America, we have a central administration, backed by hundreds of representatives, who are guided by thousands of advisors and staff and lobbyists, elected by three hundred million Americans through often dubious arguments and questionable motivation. Hundreds of other nations can claim the same.

Nobody is navigating.

"Nobody is navigating."

Stronger: Nobody can navigate. The complexity of the task of navigation exceeds what one human can do by many orders of magnitude and remains firmly out of the grasp of even the best corporations or governments. Moreover, it's getting harder, not easier.

Like the sarcastic laws of thermodynamics that end with "You can't get out of the game", we're on a wild ride, nobody is in control, and there isn't anything you can do about that fact.

(In truth, it has always been this way. Control over technology has always been an illusion. It's just that now that illusion is all up in your face and you can't ignore it.)

While I can accept the strong notion that no person can navigate, this does not map to navigation doesn’t happen. Smith's invisible hand ala co-evolution (and more appropriately natural selection) guides technology perhaps even more than economics or biology.

I want to spend more time reading the article because the suggestion to let it these curves guide investment and personal application of time and effort seems less than straightforward.

Indeed; the reason humans can't navigate is that one human's influence is dwarfed by the "invisible hand". (Which may or may not be exactly Adam Smith's "invisible hand", but there's certainly an "invisible hand" of one sort or another in play.)

(btw great comments above gents, voted them all up) We crave efficiency, but always end up in local optima based on resource allocation limitations. Great business opportunities are creatively observed by sharp minds and unleashed by relentless entrepreneurship. There are social forces pushing towards lower cost, ease of access, higher functionality and always entertainment!

KK is no blogger. I have absolutely no time to read this giant essay while at work.

I did skim enough to have some optimism that Kelly knows what he's talking about. The biggest problem with many pundits is that they overgeneralize Moore's Law. It's not some magical exponential improvement in everything that has a battery attached. It's a statement about a specific technology: silicon transistors.

Kelly seems to have noticed this. He spends some time discussing the fact that magnetic storage is on a different exponential curve.

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