Moore's Law.
Gordon E. Moore is an American businessman, co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation. Moore holds a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in Chemistry and minor in Physics from the California Institute of Technology.
Figure 5- Image from Intel.com
Apart from establishing Intel Corporation, a vastly successful semiconductor chip manufacturing conglomerate, Gordon Moore described a trend in 1965 that was to influence the computer hardware industry for decades -
Moore's Law.
Moore's Law refers to the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years as do the capabilities of many digital electronic devices - processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. Moore's Law predicts this exponential growth to continue for several generations of semiconductor chips. Depending on the doubling time used in the calculations, this could mean up to a hundredfold increase in transistor count per chip within a decade.
Are there any limits to Moore's Law?
Intel itself predicted the end would come between 2013 and 2018 with 16 nanometer manufacturing processes and 5 nanometer gates, due to quantum tunneling (the process by which a particle is able to tunnel through a barrier that it classically could not surmount}. ethers suggested chips could just get bigger, or become layered.
Lawrence Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman believe the ultimate limit of Moore's Law borders around
600 years.
Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, and Vernor Vinge consider that the exponential improvement described by Moore's law will ultimately lead to a Technological Singularity:
A period where progress in technology occurs almost instantly leading to an exponential growth that goes on forever.
Figure 6 Image from http://www.boothemes.com/30- breathtaking-future-city-concept-art
Ray Kurzweil himself, in his 2001 essay The Law of Accelerating Returns argued that we are about to experience "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history" and it will lead to a technological singularity occurring before the end of the 21st century, around 204S.
The way Kurzweil foresees this process, there's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth!!
So it seems we won't be experiencing a linear growth in the 100 years of progress of the 21st century, as we have been accustomed until now, it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate}.
Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to the Singularity. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.
But As Carl Sagan once wisely said:
"Exponentials can't go on forever, because they will gobble up everything."
The type of self-accelerated development we are experiencing today, sometimes termed "autocatalysis", creates conditions that are unstable, unpredictable and unreliable. And since these particular autocatalytic technologies drive whole sectors of society, there is a risk that civilisation itself may become unstable, unpredictable and unreliable. A lot more so than what it already is today.
Change that is too rapid can and, I predict will be, deeply divisive; if only an elite can keep up with technology's exponential growth, the rest of us will grow increasingly mystified about how the world works.
We can all try to adjust not only to changes but also to changes that others are making to technology, exponentially by the way. We can sit and watch how adjustments in one sector induce unexpected adjustments and innovations in other sectors in a complex process that none of the participants can possibly comprehend.
So my question is:
How will we ever be able to understand and keep up with quantum computing or nanotechnology if its subtleties keep accelerating away from us, particularly if we are not even helping half of the world's population to succeed in the most basic of tasks - to be able to comprehend a written text?
Perhaps, as Steward Brand suggests, what civilization needs is a NOT·SO·FAST button.
Let self-accelerating technologies follow their own cycle. Perhaps so. I don't really want to make a case against technological determinism. After all, development in computer technology has led to great advances in human communications, like the Internet.
But perhaps we should first and foremost consider redressing the speed of change to ensure we don't leave most of the population of the planet behind and we turn this earth into a dystopian stage subject to constant and uncontrollable change. Constant technological revolution makes planning difficult, and a society that stops planning for the future is likely to become a fragile society vulnerable to violent economic swings, unsurmountable societal divisions and horrifying wars. Besides, Brand continues, it isn't so easy for a free society to put the brakes on technology. Even if one country decided to forgo the next technological revolution, another country would gladly take it up.