Will Moore's Law Become Irrelevant Before it Breaks Down?

Just about everyone with a computer will have heard of Moore's Law at some point. Named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, this is the obaservation that the numbers of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years.

Strictly speaking, this isn't a natural law. It's a projection - the sort of hypothesis-based-on-past-evidence that your investment advisor might give you when he's trying to sell you on a new mutual fund. But what's so remarkable about Moore's Law is how reliably it's held true since Gordon made his observation in 1965. The transistors in our computer processors are down to 10 nanometers this year. That's smaller than most known viruses!

Every few years I'll read an article about how some physical challenge means that Moore's Law will come crashing to a halt after this next generation of chips. And then the industry comes up with new multi-layer lithography processes, and multiple cores, and other work-arounds to make our gadgets faster and smaller.

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I've still got my original monochrome 1984 IBM PC AT. (Rather, my mother has it; it's in her attic somewhere unless she's thrown it out.) That thing sped along at 4 MHz and had a 10 MB hard drive. My biology professor gave it to me as a gift when it was 10 years old, and I was thrilled, because I knew these things cost around $6000 when they were brand new. It was the first time I owned a computer with a hard drive. Believe it or not, up to that point I'd been swapping out those 5.25" floppy disks - the ones that were literally floppy. They held 720 KB, but you could double that by physically flipping the thing over like a goddamned vinyl record. That 10 MB hard drive seemed like more than I'd ever need.

Now I zip around the internet with a Thinkpad X220 Tablet. This thing boots from a solid-state drive in about ten seconds, connects me to the vast sum of all human knowledge known as the internet, and has a second hard drive with a capacity of 1,000,000 MB (which is a more impressive way of writing 1 TB, and 100,000 times larger than my first hard drive). This thing is six years old and I got it for around $200 from eBay.

We've got a few other computers in the house as well, not to mention the ones we carry around in our pockets. For someone who grew up when personal computing was getting started, it can be pretty mind boggling to think about.

But here's the thing that's starting to bug me. Even though Moore's law is doing just fine and computers are getting faster and faster, it doesn't seem like the benefits of those increases are going to the users any more.

Let me explain. With this five year old laptop I can write and edit novels, process photographs, and manipulate and share video. I can read, listen to, or watch just about any cultural content humankind has produced. I can use a stylus to paint on the pressure sensitive screen. I can hook it to a printer to make it a desktop publishing powerhouse, or to a big screen TV to turn it into a movie theatre. Then I can throw it in my backpack and take it with me.

This thing already does more than I'll ever need, and it's over five years old.

Now, I'm not complaining about this, mind you. It's a miraculous state of affairs. And I don't want to invoke that famous Bill Gates quote about RAM: "640K ought to be enough for anybody." (By the way, it turns out he might not have said that.) In fact I've even got another computer that's newer and faster, but these old Thinkpads are so sturdy and well built, and such a physical pleasure to type on, that I prefer the slightly older one.

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And yet, to most of us, it seems like our computers are getting slower and slower.

That because the barriers to computing productivity are increasingly artificial. Web-sites are so loaded with ads now that it's impossible to read a newspaper without playing five minutes of whack-a-mole with pop-ups and and come-ons. Most of those ads flash and play music and interact somehow, so they send your processor into overdrive. Not to mention all of the stuff you don't see happening: the data harvesting, the government surveillance, the keystroke logging and all the rest of the privacy-invading apparatus that has been sold to us under the guise of customization and personalization, or that we've agreed to by clicking on legal documents we've never read.

Visiting just a few websites these days means you're interacting with hundreds of companies all over the world. Think I'm exaggerating? Try installing the Lightbeam add-on for Firefox and you can see a pretty dramatic representation of just how many companies have a share of your computer, and your privacy, as you work on-line.

At the same time, software updates load our machines down with so much unwanted "functionality" that it's no wonder they come grinding to a halt when trying to perform simple tasks. Then we're sold whole suites of antivirus software, even though these programs do more to slow down and damage a computer than the viruses they're meant to protect us from.

We used to be able to say "no thanks" to all this extra baggage. After all, you wouldn't buy a half-ton pickup and then load it up with 2000 pounds of optional features, would you? But since the advent of Windows 10, the updates are mandatory, and they'll come streaming through your cable modem whether you like it or not. Eventually that computer's going to grind to a halt, and you'll have no choice but to head back to the mall for a more powerful model.

I fight the tide by running Linux on this old Thinkpad and Windows 8 on the newer computer. But there will come a time when support for Windows 8 expires (looks like January 2023) and while Linux will probably work on old hardware for much longer, that doesn't help my processor browse web-sites that are too loaded down with scripts.

(This is why I'm so impressed with how slick and streamlined Steemit is. No ads! Never change, guys!)

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Truth be told, I'm a nerd. I love learning about computers, taking them apart, improving them with new parts, experimenting and collecting and tinkering. I keep telling myself I'm going to build a big desktop gaming rig one of these days. But my skin-flint puritanical mind can't get past the fact that I actually have more fun putting these things together than I do playing games on them. And while I might be able to load up Skyrim with a bunch of mods, or install all those fancy shaders in Minecraft, the fact is that any extra processing power I buy is just going to wind up serving internet data miners, ad-hosting companies, and Microsoft. So I satisfy my tech-fetishism by picking up old computers at the dump and seeing what I can make out of them, and occasionally tinkering with a Raspberry Pi.

I suspect Moore's Law will keep marching along, making our computers faster, smaller, and more powerful. I just wonder how much longer anyone's going to care - among the end users, at least. Because it's gone from being a miracle to just another way to sell people stuff they don't need.