Moore’s Law
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
- Albert Bartlett
Just a few years after the end of WWII, scientists and researchers had a hunch. With all the progress being made around them, they suspected that technology’s rate of change could be predicted. After all, new technologies had played a massive role in the outcome of the war, so being able to identify patterns in their development was important.
A first attempt at this was a study carried out by the newly founded US Air force in 1953.1 Obviously, the Air Force's goal was to make faster planes, but since developing them took so long and cost so much, it seemed sensible to see what kinds of aircraft they should focus their money and efforts on. So they charted their progress as far back as the Wright brothers, and what they got seemed ridiculous. According to their study, they could have machines at orbital speed in only four years. Soon after, they could get a payload out of earth’s gravitational pull and have satellites in what seemed like an instant. Then, if they wanted to put the time, effort and money in, they could go to the moon just after. Kevin Kelly gives some context in What Technology Wants:
“It is important to remember that in 1953 none of the technology for these futuristic journeys existed. No one knew how to go that fast and survive. Even the most optimistic die-hard visionaries did not expect a lunar landing any sooner than the proverbial “Year 2000.” The only voice telling them they could do it was a curve on a piece of paper. But the curve was right. Just not politically correct. In 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik, right on schedule. Then US rockets zipped to the Moon 12 years later. As [Damien] Brokderick notes, humans arrived on the Moon “close to a third of a century sooner than loony space travel buffs like Arthur C Clarke had expected it to occur.” 2
The Most Important Line In History
Little did we know, this curve-- a quick stroke on a piece of paper-- had implications well beyond flight. One of the first to put that together was Doug Engelbart, a researcher at Stanford’s SRI International, in 1960. Engelbart started his engineering career in aerospace, working on airplane models in wind tunnels. It was here that he noticed the unexpected benefits of systematic scaling-- the smaller the model, the better it flew. He wondered how the same properties might affect multiple transistors on a single chip, a problem making waves in the world of research. Perhaps, he thought, the smaller the chip, the better it’d perform. Engelbart presented his ideas to an audience of engineers, including one Gordon Moore, a researcher at Fairchild Semiconductor, which was making the integrated chips.3
Soon co-founder of Intel, Moore published a paper called Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits during his time working at Fairchild.4 In this paper, he observed that the number of integrated circuit components of any chip had doubled since its invention. Moore thought this trend would continue for another 10 years or so. After revision in 1975, Moore's law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. It’s still on track. The integrated circuit was invented with 2 transistors on it. As of 2017, we can fit 30 billion on a chip the size of your fingertip.5
The exponential growth described is hard for us to truly understand. To illustrate this, pretend you have a penny. If you do, even better. Now imagine that cent doubled every day for 30 days. At the end of that period, you’d end up with $5,368,709.12. If you’re like most of us, something about that number doesn’t seem right. And yet, it’s true. In fact, up until those last few days, any chart just looks like a horizontal line. And then it skyrockets. Apply this concept across a wide range of technologies and you can probably realize that both proverbially and literally, we’re feeling the effects of that inflection point today.
Law or Map?
Over time, the compounding acceleration outlined by Moore has become more of an expectation than a surprise. In fact, it’s been astoundingly constant over time-- we couldn’t have plotted a straighter course if we tried. But maybe that’s what we’ve been doing this whole time. Is Moore’s law the pristine result of the uncoordinated frenzy of global competition, or is it an artifact of economic ambition?
We should start to really consider the latter. Moore certainly does, citing people’s belief system as a driving force for the curve’s continuity. He puts it well in a 1966 article, stating “More than anything, once something like this gets established, it becomes more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Semiconductor Industry Association puts out a technology road map, which continues this [generational improvement] every three years. Everyone in the industry recognizes that if you don’t stay on essentially that curve they will fall behind. So it sort of drives itself.” 6
Whether or not this collective manifestation is really the culprit here might not actually matter. After all, people need to work on stuff for improvements to be made. Rather than focusing on the why, we might be best suited to point our attention towards how to keep improving.
The Road Ahead
For those Air Force researchers, the moon was the summit of their proverbial mountain. As time comes to pass, though, we’re realizing we don’t know how tall the damn thing even is. That curve, as Peter Diamandis puts it in Abundance, “is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is a thousand times smaller, a thousand times cheaper, and a million times more powerful than a supercomputer from the 1970s.” 7
It’s not showing any signs of stopping, either.
The curve has time and time again come into the heat of debate, many questioning the longevity of Moore’s assumptions in the long run. This line of reasoning is actually totally valid. If we’re focusing on computer chips, for instance, we’re arriving at a point where cramming more components on one is halted by the laws of physics themselves. But then, seemingly by magic, quantum computing and other breakthroughs give us an out. Should the seemingly inevitable path Moore’s law charts end up being our destiny, a one thousand dollar laptop will have the same computing power as your own brain in 2023, then a mere quarter-century after, have the power of all human brains on earth.8
With that said, it becomes clear that this trend has much larger implications across the globe. As we’ve become acutely aware of this explosion, it’s hard not to become skeptical of the vertical line we’re sitting on when it comes to technological advancements after millenia of slow, cyclical growth. Looking into the future, we find ourselves asking how long it’s going to last. After all, its effects have been immense just over the last century.
Here’s a rundown of what this has meant for us so far. Globally, in the last 100 years: 9
Global income has increased 300%
Lifespan has increased 250%
Food is 13 times cheaper
Energy is over 30 times cheaper
Literacy has gone from 12% to 88%
Transportation is 100 times cheaper
Communications are 100,000 times cheaper
Information is millions-fold cheaper
Generally speaking, we’re drastically lowering the cost of living, and in doing so, doing much more than simply cramming more components on a computer chip. The longevity, connectivity and abundance we’ve created for ourselves is doing nothing short of transforming the human race. This has incredible implications on everything from education, government, commerce, and even how we connect with each other. And it’s happening a lot faster than we think.
Kelly, Kevin. “Was Moore's Law Inevitable?” The Technium.
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. Penguin Books, 2011.
Engelbart, Christina, and MRW Connected. “A Lifetime Pursuit.” A Lifetime Pursuit. Doug Engelbart Institute.
Gordon Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics magazine, April 19, 1965.
Nield, David. “IBM's New Computer Chips Can Fit 30 Billion Transistors on Your Fingertip.” ScienceAlert.
“Bob Schaller. (1996) “The Origin, Nature, and Implications of ‘Moore’s Law.’”
Diamandis, Peter H., and Steven Kotler. The Future Is Faster than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2020.
TEDxTalks, director. Imagining the Future: The Transformation of Humanity | Peter Diamandis | TEDxLA. YouTube, YouTube, 17 Jan. 2017.
Diamandis, Peter, and Steven Kotler. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. Simon & Schuster, 2015.