Fwd: Moore's Law, a self-fulfilling prediction?

SpareOom (New Messages)
1

Latest post in my blog on popular science:

Moore’s Law, a self-fulfilling prediction?
http://populscience.blogspot.com/2019/11/moores-law.html

Regards,

2

An interesting piece, Manuel. A couple of responses come to mind:

  • At one level, the study’s conclusion is pretty intuitive–if you set researchers researching, they’re going to find/figure out/invent the easy stuff first; the harder stuff will be, well, harder. It’s to be expected, in this sense, that “productivity” will drop over time.
  • At another level, it really seems that the study you cite is generalizing based on a single example–makes me question the validity of its conclusions (as intuitive as they are).
3

7 nov. 2019 14:18:


dan

    November 7

An interesting piece, Manuel. A couple of responses come to mind:

  • At one level, the study’s conclusion is pretty intuitive–if you set researchers researching, they’re going to find/figure out/invent the easy stuff first; the harder stuff will be, well, harder. It’s to be expected, in this sense, that “productivity” will drop over time.
  • At another level, it really seems that the study you cite is generalizing based on a single example–makes me question the validity of its conclusions (as intuitive as they are).

What do you mean by “a single example”? Moore’s Law? That’s not a single example, it’s a general measure of the advance of computer technology in the last 50 years. It affects circuit packing, clock speed, memory size, energy consumption and price. The paper I refer to, moreover, handles other completely different situations, such as life expectancy, which I’ll deal with in the next post in my blog.

The question is, Moore’s Law has been taken for granted for half a century as a “normal” development which could be extended in time indefinitely, giving rise to lots of nonsense about transhumanism and a “singularity” when we’ll reach Heaven on Earth in a very near future. This paper just states that, to do this, we need to increase manpower to an infinite value, too.

Regards,

4

OK, I’ll say “limited example” instead. But if the paper addresses other issues as well, I’ll have to wait for Part 2 (or I could actually read the paper, I guess…).

Although the Inevitability of Human Progress is an idea that really should have died in the trenches of WWI–not that anyone knows history these days (what do they teach in these schools, anyway?).