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Moore’s Law
Traditional first slide for talks at TransVision:Number of transistors on Intel’s newest CPU, by year.
Changes 1974-2003• Transportation: airline deregulation, Space Shuttle• Medicine: PCR, human genome sequenced, gene therapy, Prozac,
Viagra, MRI imaging, functional brain imaging, cochlear implant, other brain implants, Lasix, cosmetic surgery
• Theory: nanotechnology, global warming• Discovered: Great Wall, ozone hole, planets around other stars, life
on Mars?, Yucatan crater• Invented: high-temperature superconductors, smart materials,
quantum wells• Adopted: personal computers, VCRs, digital media, fiber optics,
communications satellites, cell phones, Internet, video games, PDAs, artificial sweeteners
• Society: Iraq wars, Watergate, gay rights, end of cold war, globalization, AIDS
Changes 1944-1973 (1)• Transportation: highways, affordable air travel,
supersonic flight, Mount Everest climbed, moon landing
• Medicine: DNA, polio vaccine, birth control, medicines for mental illness, dialysis, open-heart surgery, cloning, protein structures, ultrasound, heart transplant, angioplasty, designer bacteria, telomeres, Ritalin, CAT scans
• Theory: behaviorism, cognitivism, chaos theory, sociobiology, Big Bang, violation of CP, punctuated equilibrium
Changes 1944-1973 (2)• Tech: atomic bomb, laser, transistor, TV, microwave
ovens, LP records, transistor radios, carbon dating, holography, QED, Xerox machine, H-bomb, weather satellites, IC, CPU, AI begun, fiber optics
• Society: fast food, civil rights amendment, environmentalism, Korean war, McCarthyism, cold war, Vietnam war, rock and roll, suburbs, sexual revolution, feminism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, Dead Sea Scrolls, Turing test, australopithecines, consumer protection, Koko & Washoe (“speaking” non-humans)
Changes 1914-1943• Transportation: cars adopted, Panama canal• Medicine: sulfa drugs, penicillin, neuron theory, respirator,
defibrillator, IV anaesthetic, insulin, X-ray imaging• Discovered: general relativity, quantum theory, game theory,
expanding universe, Gödel’s theory, neutron, Turing machine• Invented: electronic computer, electron microscope, X-ray
crystallography, heterodyne, AM, FM, fission, plastic, zipper, sliced bread, radar
• Society: World War I, communism, women’s vote, prohibition, repeal of prohibition, Great Depression, World War II, jazz, modernism, relativism, talking color movies, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, electricity, telephone, radio, King Tut, welfare, social security, income tax, labor unions, 1939 World’s Fair
Changes 1884-1913• Transportation: airplane invented, oil wells, North Pole
reached, streetcars popular• Medicine: bacteria staining, chromosomes• Tech: fingerprinting, transformer, alternating current, cloud
chamber, vacuum tubes• Discovered: special relativity, X-rays, radioactivity,
electron, Planck’s law, Markov chains, superconductivity, atomic structure, continental drift
• Adopted: Kodak camera, street lights• Society: Spanish-American war, skyscrapers, movies,
Freud, tractors, population moves from country to cities, assembly line, anarchism
Measuring Change
Land speed record:log(Power output (W)) vs. Year
Land speed record:MPH vs. Year
• Progress that is exponential by one measure may be linear by the measure that is really of interest to us
Evidence of exponential progress
Moore’s Law
Railroad track vs. Year
% of US families with radio
• Moore’s Law shows stagnation, not innovation, because we are still working on improving a technology invented 58 years ago.
Journals & Students vs. Year
Funding vs. Year
Scientists vs. Year
Doubling time: 15 years
ln(Scientists) vs. Year
Members of APS vs. Year
Evidence of linear progress
Timeline: Entries per year
Linear, or doubling time ~ 100 years
War inhibits technological progress (also see deSolla)
Timothy Ferris: Discoveries in cosmology vs. Year
Why?
• Funding shifting from government to industry
• Innovation negative feedback cycles
• Communication can reduce innovation
• Rescher’s law of logarithmic returns
% of R&D Sponsored by Industry
Negative innovationfeedback cycles
• Social stabilityinnovation lifestyle conservatism
innovation
• Economic instabilityinnovation business process certainty
time discounting innovation
Communication inhibits innovation
• Genetic algorithms: Score increases more slowly if all organisms can mate with all other organisms. Partial isolation increases rate of development.
• Island theory of biogeography:– # species = C areaz, .18 < z < .35– z=.25: An area can support 4.8 times as many
species if it is subdivided into 8 isolated areas
Rescher: Physics authors
Rescher: #important papers = log(#papers) in symbolic logic
Rescher’s law oflogarithmic returns
• Information = c log(data)
• It takes an exponentially increasing investment of resources in science to keep the output of results constant
Rescher: “Proof” of law of logarithmic returns
• Assumption: The significance of a mass of new data is proportional to the amount of new data relative to the amount of previously-existing information: I = D / D
dD/D = ln(D) + C1 = C2ln(D)
Rescher: 20 questions
• Data is the number of objects we have to consider
• Information is knowing what questions to ask to categorize the data
• # of yes/no questions needed lg(data)
End of Exponential Growth
Doubling times
• Number of PhD students: 10 years
• Number of papers: 10 years
• Number of journals: 15 years
• Number of scientists: 15 years
• Funding: 15 years
• Important discoveries: 20 years
• GDP: 20 years
Conclusions
• Rate of change is not increasing• We are transitioning from a world in which
change is limited by the human capacity for change, to one in which change is limited by money and people
• “Singularity” technologies may be necessary to sustain our present rate of change
• The posthuman era: Capacity for change presumably increases with technology, making accelerating progress possible
log(miles of track) vs. Year
log(families with radio) vs. Year