Lesson 11: Moore’s law
To succeed in this course, you need motivation. To start a business, you need motivation.
Over the next five days, I am going to provide a lot of motivation. Part of it will be positive. Part of it will be negative.
I begin with the opening words of Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Keep this in mind all this week . . . and for the rest of this course.
Reading assignment: none.
Today, watch YouTube videos.
What is Moore’s law? Here is a lady who knows how to teach. She has no fancy equipment. She gets her message across.
Notice her computer screen. It is a CRT [cathode ray tube] — obsolete. This is an old video.
Here is a lecture from 2007. The speaker is Ray Kurzweil. He invented the original program for converting text into voice. The blind use it. He has invented many other devices. Here, he gives an overall view of the future. Bill Gates has said of him that he is “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”
It’s generally agreed that Moore’s law will reach its limits on silicon in 2020.
So what? More’s law applies to silicon. Silicon is the fifth technology in this process of information cost cutting. This process of information price reductions began no later than in 1890: the punch cards that were used to tally up the U.S. census. From then until 1950, the half-price time period was three years. From 1951 to Moore’s observation, it was two years. From 1965 until 2000, it was closer to 18 months. But the pace of change is now slowing, as this fast talker explains.
This physicist offers guesses.
You are done for the day in this course. I leave you with this question: if the cost of information falls by 50% every three years, what will you do for a living in 2030? How will you compete with software?