How hope for humanity can be found in Moore's Law
I've noticed a curious thing of late. In a few good news articles and videos, there are very good researchers applying Moore's Law to more than just CPUs. What we are finding is that humans have a capacity for refining any process for efficiency and that Moore's Law provides a sort of standard to measure our progress.
Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, published a paper predicting that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years. In other words, Moore predicted that our efficiency for packing transistors on a single circuit would increase by 100% every two years. This prediction has proven accurate over decades by numerous electronics manufacturing companies that now use Moore's Law for product planning.
Here is where it gets interesting. In 2011, an article in Scientific American demonstrated that a trend was emerging for solar panels. Costs were going down. Manufacturing capacity was going up. Efficiency was going up, too. Now we're not seeing a doubling or halving every two years, but in some cases we're seeing impressive improvements that line up well with Moore's Law in our capacity to capture solar energy.
At The Long Tail Pipe, despite some claims that there is no Moore's Law for batteries, David Herron makes a pretty well supported claim that there is, and he did that 4 years ago. It's just more like 10 years rather than 2 years to double capacity for batteries.
I can recall that when the first battery powered cars came out, the range was somewhere around 80-120 miles on a charge. Now Tesla offers cars with more than 300 miles for range. And Electrek, the business and technology journal, has crunched the numbers to find that the median range for electric cars has increased by 56% during the last 6 years. So perhaps there is a 12-year Moore's Law for electric car batteries at the least.
As a side note, Bloomberg did a very interesting animated video to demonstrate that the way we get power is about to change forever. The take away from their video is something called "The Experience Curve". The Experience Curve says that the more we make of something, the more efficient we get at making that thing. Bloomberg has also crunched numbers to show that every time the number of solar panels doubles, the cost to make them drops by 28%. They go on to say that the same trend is possible, even likely to occur with batteries.
But the story doesn't end there with batteries and solar panels. My final example is from a Ted Talk by Michael Laberge, about fusion energy, you know, the energy source that is always 30 years away from commercialization? Well, it is still about 30 years away from commercial production, but over the last 50 years, scientists have observed a sort of Moore's Law with fusion power. You can watch the video here:
General Fusion, a company dedicated to commercializing fusion power, gave a talk a few years ago with a slide that confirms the same thing: the results of consistent work on the problem of generating energy with nuclear fusion have followed Moore's Law. You can review the PDF of their presentation deck here (see slide 7 for the chart):
http://pbnc2014.org/plan_present/4_Delage_General%20Fusion%202014%2008%2026.pdf
Once again, we can chalk up these improvements to The Experience Curve. With every iteration, with every attempt, and with every success, we learn from it. We learn from doing, and often, we learn more when we make mistakes than when we get it right. The bottom line is that we are continually making progress in energy production, from solar power, to batteries, to harnessing the power of the sun directly.
While Moore's Law gives us a model to follow for improvements to technology, the steady improvements over time give me hope for humanity.
Interesting notion, and one I agree with. Even if you don't look at data, statistics and all the other mumbo jumbo, one may divine a steady climb in technological advancements in every field just by shorthand glance.
However, one thing I believe must be taken into account is human need and desire. We create new technologies, new advancements and new solutions because human beings need and want that which is better than they already have. Dad often mentions about how the first hard drives were about the size of a very large plate, but which were only capable of storing ten megabytes worth of data. Fast forward to today, and you have SSDs that are barely about the length of one's hand without any easily-damaged moving parts in them, but which can store up to four terrabytes worth of data with relative ease, and can start up in a fraction of the time the humble hard drive would take.
This was fueled purely by need and desire (for more digital space), and because of the consumerism element of trade in today's world, the most cutting edge tech is often only the privilege of the extremely wealthy (or at least those averagely well to do), and such advancements only become more freely available to the tiers of society below once they start to look more outdated compared to their newer counterparts. Still a privilege, but also kinda depressing at times lol.
So yeah, I'd say the drivetrain behind Moore's law is directly connected to the increase in human numbers in recent decades, and the ever present need humankind has; to want what they do not already have.
Guess it's as much of a boon as it can prove a curse at times, eh? :P
Anyway, cool post, and thanks for sharing it :)
Cheers :D
After reading your reply, I had a phrase bouncing around in my mind, but could not articulate it (on the tip of my tongue). So I perused your blog thinking it would come to me and it did.
We need to move beyond Moore's Law and apply whole cost accounting to Moore's Law. We need to get better at producing what we want without destroying our environment. So then we'd need to look at the cost of what we build to our environment and build that into the price of the product. I'm sure this is happening to some degree, but it will take a few generations to really get this sorted out.
With advances in whole cost accounting applied to our way of life, we can better sustain the environment and enjoy some prosperity.
Ah, glad to know that old machine helped, I'll take that as a compliment :)
I really should write that next article sometime soon...
Well, if there's one thing we can count on, humanity will find its refinement in itself and in its practices eventually. It's always been a case of trial-and-error in our self-discovery. What we are witnessing now is simply another milestone in said discovery. Like you said, it'll take a couple decades, maybe even a century or two, but we'll get there. There are those among us who would make sure of that.
Agreed. Just need to put ourselves into enough of a position of power to twist the arms of the magnate industrialists and politicians and get them to toe the line as well first. You know they'd rather keep things the way they are right now, with their crown jewel Scarcity sitting plush atop the production lines.