Michio Kaku's Dark Prediction For the End of Moore's Law

Posted by timothy on Sunday March 20, 2011 @12:24AM from the techno-malthusian dept.

nightcats writes "An excerpt from Michio Kaku's new book appears at salon.com, in which he sees a dark economic future within the next 20 years as Moore's law is brought to an end when single-atom transistors give way to quantum states. Kaku predicts: 'Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.'" Exactly the way the collapse of the vacuum tube industry killed the economy, I hope.

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Re:On vacuum tubes. by frnic · 2011-03-20 00:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

Before we had transisters we didn't have them yet either.
Re:On vacuum tubes. by maxwell+demon · 2011-03-20 00:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

So what? Already today the chips are just perfect for most applications. Add 20 more years of Moore's law, and we won't even need more powerful chips. You'll have the power of today's supercomputers on your cell phone. I doubt Moore's law would continue even if physically possible, because there will be no need for it.

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The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.