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After 50 Years, Moore's Law Has Only Started To Disrupt Everything We Do

This article is more than 8 years old.

Sunday, April 19, will mark the 5oth anniversary of a phenomenon that has transformed industry and society more than any other in modern times: Moore's Law.

On that date, Fairchild Semiconductor and later Intel cofounder Gordon Moore published an article in Electronics magazine that observed that the number of transistors on silicon chips had doubled each year for the previous decade.

He also predicted that trend would continue for another decade. By 1975, the industry was calling it Moore's Law. Moore himself said that year that the doubling would now occur every two years because of the rising expense of cramming more transistors on a chip, but the trend continues to this day, when the cost of a transistor has dropped a billionfold since early 1960s.

It's hard to overstate its significance, and not just because it led to the personal computer, the iPhone and other smartphones, smart cars like the Tesla, and the Apple Watch, among many, many other electronic products--not to mention companies such as Google and Facebook whose servers power multibillion-dollar advertising businesses.

At an event Friday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., commemorating the anniversary, it was very clear that the impact extends much further than our cool gadgets or even the massive companies making them, into every aspect of human activity and endeavor. Even more important, its impact has only just begun, even though Moore himself has said he thinks his eponymous law could run out of steam by the end of this decade.

At the event, two semiconductor industry luminaries offered a fascinating look not only at the impact of Moore' Law so far but how it's poised to disrupt the institutions of society in an even bigger way in the decades to come. Onetime Intel senior executive Bill Davidow, now an adviser to his venture capital firm Mohr Davidow, and semiconductor pioneer Carver Mead, emeritus professor of engineering and applied science at Caltech, talked with David C. Brock, co-author of a book to be released May 5, Moore's Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary.

Their observations and predictions were fascinating and far-ranging enough that I prefer to pass them on fairly straight. So here's what they had to say, in edited and paraphrased form (especially Brock's questions, which Davidow and Mead often followed with whatever they preferred to talk about anyway):

Davidow: I attended a lecture in 1960 by Richard Hamming at Stanford. He wanted to talk about order of magnitude changes in technology. Every time that happens, it has tremendous social implications. Like going from horses at 3-4 MPH to trains at 30 MPH—created industrial city. I’ve often wondered what Hamming would think about an eight order of magnitude advance in 50 years, which is what Moore’s Law is about.

There are huge social and economic transformations. It was very expensive and slow to move information more than 50 years ago. So we moved people closer to the information: Wal-Mart. Now there's Amazon, moving information to the people where they are. We will rebuild all of physical infrastructure as a result of Moore’s Law.

Things tend to get driven to extremes. There was $600 trillion in over the counter derivatives by 2006, which helped cause the economic meltdown. Couldn’t happen without Moore’s Law. We’re going to see a lot more winner-take-all situations.

Q: How can societies and companies contend with this?

Davidow: They need to find ways to restructure themselves and move to more efficient infrastructures. All industry around the world is going to be restructured in this way.

Q: Even greater changes in future?

Davidow: Not sure. Change is happening so quickly… We’re going to end up with different physical, economic and social infrastructure. The challenge now is to figure out how to adapt our institutions to this new environment—labor force, GM, etc. For example, millennials are not buying cars, instead electronic devices.

Q: See any particular spaces where that dialogue is going on?

Davidow: Our leadership has very much got their mind in the 20th century. Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the hub of networking but they built more roads to get people to the events. Need more fiber optic lines than new roads. We don’t need to travel as much.

Q: What may be the consequences in a shift if Moore’s Law slows?

Davidow: Our definition of quality of life is going to change. Lots of products have become cheaper; in economic terms, our standard of living looks like it’s going down. But we don’t have to travel as much as if entertainment comes to us.

Mead: One morning I was doing my weekly chat with Gordon early in the morning—early ‘60s. With electron tunneling, he asked, how small can a transistor get? People were absolutely sure we were at the edge of the world (where transistors couldn't get any smaller0. I spent a lot of time convincing people it was doable.

Moore’s Law is not a law of physics, it’s a law of human nature. People know what’s physically possible to achieve and deeply believe that it’s doable. Gordon was working on one end, I was working on the other. It has completely changed our lives. I’m enjoying it, I don’t know about you.

There’s a lot of fighting last year’s war. (Intel cofounder Robert) Noyce said it wasn’t a matter of making individual transistors better but connecting them with the wires in between.

It’s particularly evident in public policy. (laughs). I don’t have to explain.

Q: Reflect on uncertainty in technology direction in the 1950s—they were looking at superconducting, miniaturized vacuum tubes, etc. Going back to that now?

Mead: One of the negative consequences of finding if we could just scale the transistor we could go three or four orders of magnitude is that we stopped thinking about process technology and device physics. It was all about going smaller. Now we’re having to rebuild that. We’ve been through these cycles many times. Maybe it’s a good thing when we get to the point where we need to rethink it again.

Q: What’s the impact on the human spirit of Moore’s Law?

Davidow: Colors do not exist. All that we sense is energy levels and our mind creates colors. Music doesn’t exist. All we hear are vibrations and our mind creates music. It’s going to be fascinating to imagine the mind in the virtual environment.

Mead: There’s a lot of noise out there about how we’ve got much computing that we’re going to be able to build brains and they’ll be intelligent. In late Middle Ages, minds were clockwork. Then it became a telephone switching network because that was the fanciest technology. Now computers. People look at the cell and say it’s a switch. Then neurobiologists got sharper tools. It wasn’t the neurons, it was the synapse. Now inside the synapse, whole chemical variations, so many state variables. We still have a lot to learn.

Q: Gordon Moore said Moore’s Law was all about economics as about the extensibility of silicon technology. Moore’s Law has been a huge deflationary force in the world. Also a big boost in productivity. How do you see its place in macroeconomics and where we’re heading?

Davidow: I’ve thought a lot about deflation because one of my problems is economists measure it in 20th century terms.

Mead: Or 18th or 17th.

Davidow: All the rules we’ve lived by change significantly. We keep applying old metrics to new environments. They don’t reflect accurately what’s going on. We’re going to make a lot of bad economic decisions.

Mead: That’s an understatement. Most of our economic discussions don’t account for innovation. It isn’t one of the things that goes on in most models. That’s nuts. It needs to get front and center in all discussions of economics.

Q: What excites and concerns you looking ahead?

Davidow: What will we use to define our identities in the future? If the tools become so good that we really don’t have to work 40 hours a week, how are we going to define our personal identity.

Mead: This reminds me of discussions in the ‘50s about what are we going to do with our time (with all the labor-saving devices). The absolutely essential change that’s happened recently is we’ve gone from a broadcast mentality to a point-to-point mentality—but people are trying to turn it (the Internet) back into a broadcast mentality.

Davidow: Businesses are trying to preserve the algorithms of the past. They need to figure out what’s next.

Mead: People are finding new and innovative ways to use the platform. Look for the things that are the pinch points preventing us from going forward in certain areas.

Q: Are there any other areas beyond silicon electronics where Moore’s Law applies, such as medicine or social justice?

Mead: Absolutely. Magnetic recording, optical communications, old-fashioned radio technology.

Davidow: The exponential growth in knowledge is another thing that’s happening.

Q: What will be the future of the semiconductor industry if venture capitalists don’t invest in it anymore? (Some applause from audience, a large proportion of which looks to be old chip engineers.)

Davidow: Intel or Samsung could have done what Qualcomm did. You could lose some of that. I don’t know what you do about that.

Q: What do you make of the accusation that you created the term Moore’s Law?

Mead: In the early ‘60s when I was trying to convince people of the possibilities of silicon technology, a reporter talked to me and an article came out that used that term. There might have been a couple glasses of wine involved.

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