Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000
vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000
vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. – Popular
Mechanics, March 1949
Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home
computers -- or at least terminals connected to a central computer --
automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications
equipment. – Gordon
Moore, 1965
For centuries, explorers have searched the world for
the fountain of youth. Today’s billionaires believe they can create it, using
technology and data. -- Ariana
Eunjung Cha, April 4, 2015
The phrase “hit a wall” in idiomatic English means to
reach a point where progress stops or slows significantly.Engineers don’t
warm up to that phrase very easily.For an engineer a wall is a challenge,
more like a speed bump. They throw their hands up only if they’re being
robbed – maybe. They have little use for the word “impossible.”
Let’s say you’ve written a book on genetics, and as a way
of getting would-be readers pumped up you decide to store every word and
illustration in your book – table of contents, index, everything -- in
DNA.And not only store it, but retrieve it as well.And to get your point
across about the immenseness of DNA storage someone suggests you write 70,000,000,000
(70 billion) copies of the book in DNA.Impossible?Of course not.Geneticist George
Church did it three years ago.
On April 19, 1965 an engineer named Gordon Moore published
an article in which he noted something remarkable about integrated
circuits and their components.Often referred to as a chip, an integrated circuit is a
microelectronic device consisting of many interconnected transistors and
other components fabricated on a semiconductor wafer, usually silicon.
Without integrated circuits we would have no smartphones, tablets, PCs, Macs,
and countless other electronic devices.“For simple circuits,” Moore wrote,
“the cost per component is nearly inversely proportional to the number of
components.”
This was the engineering equivalent of striking gold.With
more components not only did you get increased performance (since electrons
have a shorter commute), but the cost per component decreased -- at least up
to a point. At the time, chips contained only a handful of components, yet
Moore predicted an exponential trend was underway, so that by 1975 “the
number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000.”
This was a bold extrapolation on Moore’s part.Prior to
using integrated
circuits transistors and other components were wired together by hand on
a circuit board.A painstaking process, but one that, early on, was less
expensive than producing integrated chips.In 1965 only a few companies were
making integrated circuits, and their customers were mostly NASA and the U.S.
military.Add to this the fact that only about 10-20 percent of the
transistors actually worked, according to Moore’s recollection.
Yet by 1975 Intel, the company he co-founded in 1968, was
preparing to market a memory chip with 32,000 components, leaving Moore’s
original estimate off only by a factor of two.
This progression of a doubling of transistor density every
year, later revised to every two years, became known as Moore’s Law.Higher
densities meant increased performance, more useful technology.Higher
densities drove component cost down, deflating retail prices and attracting
more consumers.
Bolstered
by other technological innovations, 50 years of Moore’s Law has brought
us the Digital Age, as Moore predicted.More precisely, engineers, project
managers, and entrepreneurs have innovated, invested and generally dedicated
their lives to keep Moore’s Law going.And consumers eagerly line up for the
latest offerings.
How far have we come since Moore wrote his article?Today’s
integrated circuits contain billions of transistors and are fabricated in
factories that run in the billions of dollars to build.Yet the cost per
transistor has dropped
from about $30 in 1965 (in 2015 dollars) to an infinitesimal amount
today.
In 2014, semiconductor production facilities made
some 250 billion billion (250 x 10^18) transistors. This was, literally,
production on an astronomical scale. Every second of that year, on average, 8
trillion transistors were produced. That figure is about 25 times the number
of stars in the Milky Way and some 75 times the number
of galaxies in the known universe.
Remember, that’s 8 trillion transistors for
every second of 2014.The flood of transistors has “been the ever-rising
tide that has not only lifted all boats but also enabled us to make fantastic
and entirely new kinds of boats.”
Though there have been predictions in the past of the
imminent demise of Moore’s Law, engineers were able to find ”ways around what
we thought were going to be pretty hard stops,” as
Moore stated in a recent interview.But ultimately, there are the
fundamental limits of the known world: the speed of light and the atomic
nature of materials.
As Ray Kurzweil has pointed out frequently and which a
surprising number of researchers seem to forget, Moore’s Law is a computing
paradigm and is the fifth such paradigm since the 1890 census.All five
paradigms have shown exponential growth.The first four – electromechanical,
relay, vacuum tube, and transistor – eventually lost steam and were
superseded by a technology previously found only in niche markets, such as
the military, or that languished in sparsely-funded research labs.As a
paradigm slows -- no longer progresses exponentially -- more dollars are
spent on developing the most promising technologies to replace it.
The semiconductor industry is running out of tricks to
keep shrinking silicon transistors. Right now the smallest size is 14
nanometers, and by 2020 they will need to be five nanometers to keep pace
with Moore’s Law.Is this a wall approaching?
Not
to Samsung.They’re already building flash memory chips using
three-dimensional integrated circuits to achieve performance gains.Instead of
piling transistors side-by-side on a plane of silicon, they’re stacking them,
taking up half the space of planar chips.They’re building hi-rise condos instead
of subdivisions with smaller and smaller houses.More layers means better
performance and no more shrinking.No longer will they have to retrofit
multibillion-dollar factories to produce the latest chips.
IBM
is taking a different approach, at least for now. They’re developing
transistors built with carbon nanotubes instead of silicon, which they hope
to have ready for mass production by 2020. At two nanometers in diameter, the
nanotubes, which
though seamless resemble rolled up chicken wire, could continue the pace
of cramming more transistors onto a silicon substrate.Based on simulations,
the nanotube transistors are about five times as fast as ones made from
silicon.
In his magnum
opus Kurzweil cites the work of Peter Burke, University of
California/Irvine, who demonstrated nanotube circuits operating at 2.5
gigahertz (2.5 GHz).However, in a peer-reviewed article Burke claimed the
theoretical speed limit of these nanotube transistors should be measured in
terahertz, where 1 THz equals 1,000 GHz.(What a boost that would be to my
2.66 GHz MacBook Pro!)
The biggest problem is positioning the nanotubes closely
enough together on the chip.IBM’s preferred approach is to label the
substrate and nanotubes with a compound “that would cause them to
self-assemble into position.”
Self-assembly of nanoscale circuits would be a
world-changer.As Kurzweil notes, citing the work of researchers at UCLA,
having “potentially trillions of circuit components organize themselves,
rather than be painstakingly assembled in a top-down process, would enable
large-scale circuits to be created in test tubes rather than in
multibillion-dollar factories, using chemistry rather than lithography.”
Creating nanocircuits in chemistry flasks “will be another
important step in the decentralization of our industrial infrastructure and
will maintain the
law of accelerating returns through this century and beyond.”
In two decades robots will be in charge
One of the reasons for continuing the exponential
development of technology is to eventually turn the task over to robots.They
will eventually graduate and take charge of R&D.In the 2020s, working
with advanced hardware and computational strategies, researchers will make
major progress in emulating the human brain.By 2029 a computer will be able
to pass itself off as human under competent interrogation during a Turing
Test.
Meanwhile, the inexorable march of miniaturization will
make its way into our bodies, including our brains.Nanobots the size of a
red blood cell will enter our bloodstream and augment our intelligence,
combining the pattern recognition power of our biological brains with the
speed, capacity, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology.This should
get underway sometime in the 2020s.
By the 2030s the nonbiological portion of our intelligence
will predominate.Somewhere around 2045 “the pace of technological change will
be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly
transformed.”Kurzweil calls this period the Singularity.
AI
researcher Ben Goertzel thinks the Singularity could arrive much sooner –
in 10 years.
Technology will continue to empower us with better and
cheaper products some of which will give us the ability to make better
and cheaper products. Keynesianism and its Free Lunch Institute known as the
welfare state will gradually kill off banks and their governments as we've
known them.Our overlords will not go quietly but there is a better future
ahead.
As a hint of that better future I offer this sampling of
encouraging developments:
1.Surgeon
Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday
solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output
a transplantable kidney. Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient
Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago; we meet him
onstage.
2.Just like his beloved
grandfather, Avi
Reichental is a maker of things. The difference is, now he can use 3D
printers to make almost anything, out of almost any material. Reichental
tours us through the possibilities of 3D printing, for everything from
printed candy to highly custom sneakers.
4.What we think of as 3D printing, says Joseph DeSimone,
is really just 2D printing over and over ... slowly. Onstage at TED2015, he
unveils a
bold new technique — inspired, yes, by Terminator 2 — that's 25 to 100
times faster, and creates smooth, strong parts. Could it finally help to
fulfill the tremendous promise of 3D printing?
Source: The Singularity is Near, p. 66
The chart shows the price-performance of forty-nine
computational systems in the 20th century, measured by
instructions per second per thousand constant dollars.(A rising straight line
on a log chart indicates exponential growth.)
