The Speculist

Predicting the future is a tricky business. Unfortunately we don't have the flying cars and hotels in space that were once predicted. We finally have video phones of a sort, but they didn't arrive the way we expected. Even respected futurists like Arthur C. Clarke got most things wrong. We remember that he was right about geosynchronous satellites being ideal for communications, and forgive him for believing that we'd have manned missions to Jupiter and strong AI by 2001.

But Gordon Moore made a observation in April, 1965 that has been so right for so long people can't stop talking about it.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

It's pretty obvious that Moore didn't know he was formulating a law with that paragraph. He was just making a rather straightforward observation as an industry insider. And it's quite possible that Moore wasn't the first to say this. Douglas Engelbart, coinventor of the computer mouse, may have stated some form of the law earlier.

However it came about, this law has held up for more than 40 years. It has been the engine that has sustained the Information Age.

Recently Ray Kurzweil has theorized that Moore's Law is just a small part of a much larger, universal principle - that from the Big Bang forward, the universe has organized and processed information - building new more sophisticated methods from the success of older methods. These information epochs are:

Epoch 1: Information in physics and chemistry.
Epoch 2: Information in biology (RNA and DNA).
Epoch 3: Information in brains.
Epoch 4: Information in technology (which brings us to the present, but in the future...).
Epoch 5: Merger of technology and biological intelligence.
Epoch 6: The universe wakes up.

For a thousand years scientists have humbled us by proving that we aren't the center of the universe. The Earth revolves around the Sun and we are as much a product of evolution as a virus. But now Kurzweil's theory places us right back in the middle of things. It sounds corney, but we are the universe contemplating itself - and preparing to wake up.

The mechanism to take us there is incredibly powerful and can be hard to grasp. With exponential doubling each step forward is equal to all the progress of the past combined. Kurzweil used a parable of the chessboard to explain. Here's the way Phil told the story:

The ruling prince of the region where the game was developed was so taken with Chaturanga [a Chess precursor played on the same board of 64 squares] that he summoned the game's inventor and offered to reward him for his genius.

Now the man who invented Chaturanga was, indeed, a genius. He asked the prince that he be given only a very modest reward. Just one grain of rice placed in the first square of the Chaturanga board. That's all. Oh, and then two grains of rice in the second square and four in the third and eight in the fifth and so on, doubling until all 64 squares were filled.

Well, the prince was pretty shocked that his subject should ask for such a paltry reward, but he felt he had to comply. So he dispatched one of his stewards to fulfill the order. It took the steward a while to report back, and when he did the news was not good. Although harvest was just completed, the gift was going to completely exhaust the royal granaries. And they were only on the 40th square!

In fact, it turns out that if you were to keep doubling until you reached the 64th square, you would have an amount of rice greater than the total yield of every rice crop in the history of the planet earth. The inventor of Chaturanga had trapped the prince with what mathematicians call a geometric progression. As we follow the progress of the rice as it doubles with each step, we're witnessing what's called an exponential increase.

As the example with the rice grains shows, any time we witness an exponential increase, we're in for quite a show. Things start out small and get crazy really quickly.

But it's even crazier than this. The exponential improvement of the integrated circuit is fueling exponential trends in all areas of technology. This is my "Mr. Spock's Chessboard" theory. Our civilization is playing the rice doubling game on a multi-level chessboard.

Advancement on the computation board buys our way onto new boards: nanotech, genetic engineering, life extension, self-replicating universal constructors, etc. Advancement on the new boards can further fuel the progress of any other board or create new boards. It's an explosion of knowledge in all directions.

Maybe this is why people who understand Moore's Law are still surprised by how fast things move. In many ways - on many boards beyond Moore's computation board - the world is remade every couple of years.

We are notoriously bad at predicting the specifics of how the world will be remade. Perhaps the best we can do is follow Moore's example and describe the boards we play on and how they interact.