The Future Or Moores Law Philosophy Essay

Moores law is named after Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation. He first published what later became known as Moores Law in a 1965 Electronics Magazine article called Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.

The Law states that computer manufactures will increase the number of transistors to be placed on an integrated circuit, exponentially by a factor of 2, in every 18 to 24 months. The steady growth of the Law, has held true for decades, and while scientists have had to resort to ever more creative methods to keep it going, Intel has proven that such exponential growth will last for at least for a few more years.

It seems that, while Gordon Moore was arguably the first to note the exponential growth in computing power, this exponential trend has been a part of technological progress for much longer than was originally thought.

According to futurist Kurzweil, “Moore’s law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to forecast accelerating price-performance ratios. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to [Newman’s] relay-based “[Heath] Robinson” machine that cracked the Nazi [Lorenz cipher], to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer.” This is illustrated in the chart below.

What is technology singularity? This idea was first proposed by the mathematician Vernor Vinge who defined Technological Singularity as a time at which the rate of accelerating change increases to a point where it becomes human surpassing.  He said computers within a decade of our current era will be more powerful than the human brain. The machines will rapidly become much smarter than the humans who initially created them. This will cause a convergence of all technologies, until humans became totally embedded and submerged into a virtual world. This singularity is a state in which humans will be components of a cybernetic social network of such complexity that no one person will be able to understand more than a tiny fraction of the whole.

As much as Singularitarians rely upon Moore’s Law to fuel our visions of the future, it’s not some inescapable truth of the universe. Producing ever smaller transistors is a job for thousands of engineers around the world, spending billions of dollars in research. Each step towards increasing computer processor performance per dollar requires innovation, and those innovations take time and effort to perfect. TriGate is a great example – millions of dollars and a decade of preparation for its eventual launch.

If you were to chart the evolution of the computer in terms of processing power, you would see that progress has been exponential and Moore’s Law seems to be self- fulfilling prophecy than a mere law or observation. But will technology singularity sustain of completely wipe off Moore’s Law? According to Moore’s Law, the progress of computational power on computers seems to have an exponential growth; whilst the futurist claim that technology singularity will accelerate at rate that no human brain can comprehend, as computers will achieve human-level intelligence and will be an infusion of different technologies embedded together and the growth will not be exponential. Moore’s Law may continue indefinitely, but it will rely upon the creativity and resilience of many developers at the top of their game. Can they keep it up? Can we keep pushing computers to become faster, better, and more efficient so they double in performance every two years?

But on the contrary to support Moore’s Law, Intel, commercialized the world’s first 3D transistor, known as TriGate. The 22nm transistor performs better and uses less energy than the current cutting edge 32nm transistor. Computers can already perform individual operations orders of magnitude faster than humans can, Farmer said; meanwhile, the human brain remains far superior at parallel processing, or performing multiple operations at once. For most of the past half-century, engineers made computers faster by increasing the number of transistors in their processors, but they only recently began “parallelizing” computer processors. To work around the fact that individual processors can’t be packed with extra transistors, engineers have begun upping computing power by building multi-core processors, or systems of chips that perform calculations in parallel.”This controls the heat problem, because you can slow down the clock,”

Denning explained. “Imagine that every time the processor’s clock ticks, the transistors fire. So instead of trying to speed up the clock to run all these transistors at faster rates, you can keep the clock slow and have parallel activity on all the chips.” He says Moore’s law will probably continue because the number of cores in computer processors will go on doubling every two years.

According to a research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Microsystems Packaging Research Center, they demonstrated a new technology called system-on-package (SOP). It addresses the “other”90 percent of the electronic system and paves the way for “mega-function systems.”In contrast to Moore’s Law, which addresses 10 percent of system integration at the IC- or device-level only -called the First Law – SOP addresses the system integration problem, leading to the “Second Law of Electronics.” SOP combines nanoscale ICs with newly developed micro- to nanoscale, thin-film versions of discrete and other components. It embeds both of these components in a new type of package so small that it eventually will transform handhelds into multi- or mega-function systems. SOP technology represents a radically different approach to electronic and bio-electronic systems. It shrinks bulky circuit boards with their many components and makes them nearly disappear, leading to package-sized systems – hence the name system-on-package. In effect, SOP sets up a new law for system integration. It holds that as the components shrink from milli- to micro- to nanoscale, component density will double every few years, leading to an exponential increase in the number of system functions packaged in a device the size of today’s cell phones.

Whether we attain the levels and surpass singularity still remains a fierce subject of speculation among the scientist and futurists. Below are excerpts of opponents of singularity, who forecast the phasing out of Moore’s Law.

According to Peter Denning, distinguished professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on innovation, he says that “By 2030 whatever technology we’re using will be sufficiently small that we can fit all the computing power that’s in a human brain into a physical volume the size of a brain,” after all this has been said, there will be the evolution of a super intelligent machine that will surpass human understanding. The British mathematician I.J. Good hypothesized that “ultra intelligent” machines, once created, could design even better machines. “There would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make,”

Others argue that Moore’s law will soon start to break down, or that it has already. The argument stems from the fact that engineers can’t miniaturize transistors much more than they already have, because they’re already pushing atomic limits. “When there are only a few atoms in a transistor, you can no longer guarantee that a few atoms behave as they’re supposed to,” Denning explained. On the atomic scale, bizarre quantum effects set in. Transistors no longer maintain a single state represented by a “1” or a “0,” but instead vacillate unpredictably between the two states, rendering circuits and data storage unreliable. The other limiting factor, Denning says, is that transistors give off heat when they switch between states, and when too many transistors, regardless of their size, are crammed together onto a single silicon chip, the heat they collectively emit melts the chip.

Some scientists say computing power is approaching its zenith. “Already we see a slowing down of Moore’s law,” the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku said in a Big Think lecture. He says that Computer power simply cannot maintain its rapid exponential rise using standard silicon technology.  He claims that Intel Corporation has admitted this company is now going to three-dimensional chips, chips that compute not just flatly in two dimensions but in the third dimension.  The problem is that a Pentium chip today has a layer almost down to 20 atoms across, 20 atoms across.  When that layer gets down to about 5 atoms across, it’s all over.  You have two basic problems are heat (the heat generated will be so intense that the chip will melt and disintegrate) and leakage. (You don’t know where the electron is anymore.) That’s the reason why the age of silicon will eventually come to a close. The quantum theory takes over.

Kurzweil (1999; 2001) has proposed that technical progress can be characterized as accelerating exponential development. According to Kurzweil’s “law of accelerating returns,” technical change is generated in an evolutionary process where the outputs of the process are used as inputs in the next phase of the development. This leads to exponential growth. Kurzweil maintains that the rate of exponential growth itself increases. When a particular evolutionary process becomes more effective than its alternatives, greater resources are deployed for the further progress of the effective process. As a result, the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially.

Evolution, and technology-evolution continued by other means-therefore is a process that leads to accelerating change. Using his observations as a basis, Kurzweil argues that technical development will rapidly lead to computational devices that are more intelligent than humans. The increasing capabilities of computers will further accelerate the speed of technological progress and, at least from our limited perspective, lead to an apparently infinite speed of change. Kurzweil calls this approaching point of extremely rapid change

“Singularity.” Kurzweil’s hypothesis of approaching “Singularity” therefore consists of four major claims. One is the empirical claim that technical developments in computing show exponential growth and that the growth speed has increased over time. Another claim is that this process is generated by a “law of accelerated returns” which feeds back

resources to those areas of technology development that grow rapidly. The third claim is that technology creation can be understood as an evolutionary process. The fourth claim is that the speed of change will soon reach levels where the human intelligence, at least in its current forms, perceive infinite pace of change and that this will lead to major changes in the society and in individual lives.