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

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.

Comments

No planetary alignment?

[andreicio]

Noone will take a disaster prophecy seriously if you can't even be bothered to pair it with some planetary alignment or ancient calendar.

Re:No planetary alignment?

[msauve]

"Noone will take a disaster prophecy seriously..."

What do Herman's Hermits have to do with silicon technology disasters?

On vacuum tubes.

[rnws]

The major difference being the tube/valve industry was done in by the transistor - i.e. we had a viable replacement that was better. The problem with the transistor is that we don't (yet) have a viable replacement.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[frnic]

Before we had transisters we didn't have them yet either.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[maxwell demon]

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.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[mwvdlee]

Until even the most complex task imaginable can be computed in less time than it takes you to click a button, there will be a need for more processing power.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[jbolden]

Today's chips were perfect for most applications in the 1980s. Once WordPerfect could outrun a human in terms of spell check and could outrun even the fastest printers CPU upgrades didn't do much. Same with Lotus 1-2-3, once complex speadsheets with lots of macros could be processed faster than a human could read a spreadsheet....

But all that excess power led to the GUI. And then technologies like OLE. Which drove up requirements by orders of magnitude. But OLE hasn't really hit another generation because everything is so unstable. Imagine the next generation of applications that have data embedded from dozens of devices and hundreds of websites. I do a Quicken report which

a) contacts my banks internet connections and pulls in all the credit card transactions
b) hits each of those vendors (100+) with the credit processing number and pulls up all the items for each transaction
c) does an item lookup to figure out what sort of expenses they are and prorates out general costs, like sales tax. That's 1000s of web information requests for an annual report.

That sort of data processing we don't yet have and certainly not on cellphones. Another area is AI where systems are underpowered.
Imagine a news search engine that knows my entire browsing history. Like a Pandora across all my news choices for the last year. I search for a story and because the system knows my preferences on dozens of dimensions its able to feed me the stories that most fit my preferences. Analyzing every article every day to do simple word counts is about the limits of a massive datacenter of google. Analyzing every article every day to determine: how much scientific background is this assuming in biology, in chemistry, in mathematics; what sort of editorial biases does it have, how human interest heavy is the presentation, how respected is in the journal.... that's way beyond what we can do today.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[jbolden]

Right now its hard to get refrigerators that maintain proper temperature at different points. Having a system that can manipulate airflow based on what's inside it: i.e. is running a fluid dynamics program, is taking pictures and analyzing them of its internal contents, is offering an interface to your computer...

There is nothing like that on the market, and yes it would be a huge economic value. Keeping food at the right temperature allows people to store better foods which can lead to them buying more sensitive foods which taste better but aren't sold because they would be ruined by the cheap equipment in most houses.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[wierd_w]

amusingly, that only confirms Kaku's prediction.

If your existing refrigerator is perfectly good, then what incentive do you have to buy the NEW refrigerator?
If you don't buy NEW refrigerators, how does the refrigerator manufacturer stay in business?

For a more geek friendly variant on this, look at microsoft. Their last 3 "New" versions have mostly been about Microsoft's bottom line, and been less about true innovation. (EG--look how hard they are trying to kill windows XP.)

When you reach a point where your company can no longer just add bloat, call it new, and sell them like hotcakes because the existing product is arguably just as good, if not better, due to physical limitations of the device, then you end up with profitability grinding to a halt, and industry suffering mightily.

What you would see instead, is a service-industry created, instead of a product-industry.... Oh wait, we already are!

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[kdemetter]

Yes, and this 'need for more processing power' , is exactly what Moore's law exploits : Moore's law basically dictates that the demand for processing power doubles every year.

As a result , it's most profitable to follow this demand.

Speeding it up would be silly ( even if new technology would allow it ) , because that means you lose money :

For example , if i suddenly were to create a processor which has 10.000x the processing power , i would go brankrupt :

- Either it would be so expensive , that no one would buy it , because no one would need that much processing power anyway .
- If it would not be that expensive , than everyone might buy it . But afterwards , it would be many many years before anyone needed a more powerful processor , and i'm not making much money in the mean time.

Moore's Law ensures that every year people will find that their computer is too slow , and they will buy a new one , which in turn provides revenue for the manufacturers.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[Anne Thwacks]

Moore's Law ensures that every year people will find that their computer is too slow

No - Microsoft does that. Moore's law ensures that new computers can perform better at the same rate that MS adds bloat to their software, or marginally faster. By avoiding the use of Windows, I can continue to use my 4 year old PC or ten year old Sparc machines. YMMV

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[martyros]

I'm by no means a hopeless optimist, but I think the arguments he's making here don't really make much sense. He's focusing exclusively on one aspect -- the increase in speed / computation power -- and saying that when that stops developing, everything will stop and die massively.

That doesn't make any sense. Cars got faster between 1910 and 1930. But after they reached "as fast as humans can actually control them safely", they stopped getting faster, by and large. Did that cause a collapse of the industry? Did everyone completely stop buying cars? Consider airplanes -- between 1900 when the first flight happened, to WW2 where they were a critical part of strategy, they got faster. But once they reached the limits of speed / air resistance economics, they stopped getting significantly faster -- at least as far as most consumers are concerned. Now the main difference in passenger experience between a plane made 30 years ago and one made 10 years ago is whether the in-flight entertainment is on one shared screen, or each person has their own screen. This lack of increase in airplane speed has somehow failed to destroy the airline economy.

When transistors hit their limit, there will still be huge amounts of transforming to do. Even within technology, there are things to do: there's a whole avenue of domain-specific chips to pursue. With the exception of GPUs (and possibly cryptography), there has been until now no point in making chips to do one specific thing; by the time you made it, Intel's CPUs would be more powerful at doing whatever it was you were going to do anyway. When we really hit the limit of silicon, that will become a rich avenue to explore.

Outside of technology, there's even more. Culturally, we don't even know what to do with all the computing we could have. If my sink or table or door or wall isn't as smart as it could be, it's not because there aren't enough transistors, it's because we don't know what to do with the transistors. I'd say that the biggest limitation right now to ubiquitous computing isn't so much number of transistors, as what to do with the transistors. Will there ever be a task that my microwave will perform that will require 4 cores of an i7 supplemented with GPUs? User interfaces, techniques, and all kinds of other things are still wide-open. I'd go so far as to say that computing power isn't nearly the biggest difference between the computers of today and the computers of five years ago.

The main point is, there's still a lot of innovation that can be done that will not somehow fail if chips don't get faster.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[bashibazouk]

I usually buy a new appliance because something mechanical breaks and with commodity manufacturing it's cheaper than calling a repair man. If it has a faster chip great. If it's doesn't, who cares. In the case of a refrigerator I'm buying cold not smart...

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[Raisey-raison]

I don't dispute that their is some limit that we will approach a limit with respect to computing speed. What I don't see, is evidence for 'economic collapse' as a consequence. Surely there will always be a need for programmers? Maybe more so because efficient programming will yield greater speeds and you won't be able to rely on mediocre quality ones and lazily rely on hardware getting faster. Similarly speaking with 2011 hardware alone we are still are nowhere near reaching the full economic capabilities of the internet - that process could go on for decades alone.

I also would like to see someone suggest some model that would explain how dire economic consequences would ensue if computing speeds stopped advancing with some empirical evidence. Until then - all I hear is scare mongering.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[Nyder]

amusingly, that only confirms Kaku's prediction.

If your existing refrigerator is perfectly good, then what incentive do you have to buy the NEW refrigerator?
If you don't buy NEW refrigerators, how does the refrigerator manufacturer stay in business?

...

I don't know about you, but no one I know buys new refrigerators because a new model came out. They buy new fridges when they go bad and can't be fixed cheaply.

Look, the whole arguement is stupid.

So, lets say they hit the end point of cpu's, big whoop. We aren't magicly not going to need devices with cpu's anymore. Will still need them. Nothing last forever, will need to replace old stuff. New people are born every day, they are going to need stuff with cpu's in them. Oh, dang, earths population keeps growing, so i guess there's still new markets for stuff.

Anyone with a little logic and common sense, see's this for what it is, some dumb ass person talking shit out his ass over stuff he doesn't know. Don't fall for it.

I can predict also. I predict we will see a whole bunch of stupid ass predictions, like this article, and like my prediction. Stupid and a waste of time.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[Omestes]

My previous desktop computer failed after about seven years.
And yes, integrated circuits do wear out. [wikipedia.org] Indeed, the smaller the structures, the sooner the chip will fail.

And I have a fully functioning Commodore 64 (and Atari 2600, Atari 5600, NES, and a PSX) plugged into a 10 year old TV in my bedroom. I'm typing this on a 7 year old laptop, which works fine sans some issues from the aging battery. The DVD-ROM drive in main computer is almost 10 years old. My mom's old computer, which we replaced because of software bloat, was nearing 15 years old, her new on is made of 5 year old components and will probably last enough 5-10 years (ignoring moving parts). Hell, her monitor is over 10 years old now.

I have an old Voodoo2 card sitting in my garage that still works, along with several bits and peices of compters up to 20 years old, most of them still work.

Most of the failures I've noticed were more due to bad components (the cap plague), over heating (user error), physical breakage (user error) or failure of moving parts (and a couple due to power surges). I don't think I've ever had a device "wear out" though.

More on topic: TFA is silly FUD. If we hit the wall, we'd probably be fine. My moms old "ancient" computer really could do everything that a user needs to do on a computer, it was replaced because software makers decided you need more hardware to do roughly the same tasks that were done on older hardware just fine. And if worse comes to worse, we'd find ways to use our same hardware differently... which is just innovation as usual. Fine, we top out on 7000 Thz prosessors, then lets shove 10 of them in there, doing dedicated tasks, and lets reduce some complexity to increase speed.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[evilWurst]

Well, yes and no. The physics is unforgiving; as Kaku says, we're going to hit a transistor shrink wall. At that point, the easy advances are over.

The transistor shrink wall isn't the same thing as peak computation power, only a predictor of it. We have room for advancement in how well we used the transistors we have; once we've got them as small as possibly, we can improve how densely we pack them, and how efficiently we utilize them for computation. Those problems are harder to solve, so we haven't been doing them as quickly yet as the transistor shrinks. But Kaku's conclusion does partially still stand even then, because the pace of improvement is going to drastically slow down. And it will be a very interesting time to be a computer engineer or computer scientist when that happens, as we're likely to resume trying wildly different experimental architectures to eke out some more improvements.

Some paths are already kind of obvious. From ARM's successes, we can see that we can get the power requirements lower, which then means we can have more cores. From AMD's upcoming chips, we can see that cores can be partly merged (to reduce the amount of idle duplicate hardware). There's room for improvement in software, too, of course. But to put it in mathy ways: there exists a Most Efficient Computer that can be made with transistors, and the pace of advancement is going to slow down as we approach it. I don't know how much time it'll take between getting the smallest transistors and getting close enough to their optimal use; I'm guessing at least another decade (so, until 2030), but that's a very loose guess.

Note that this speculation all goes out the window if we figure out another approach entirely, like quantum computing, or replacing the transistor entirely with something that can get us a better calculation density.

Re:On vacuum tubes.

[Phoghat]

And video killed the radio star

Dark predictions

[Wowsers]

I predict a dark future for Michio Kaku's new book.... namely, the bargain bin.

Re:Dark predictions

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's embarrassing when someone who's brilliant within his area of expertise starts nosing into other fields (in this case economics and the electronics industry) just to say stupid things. By the way, he did this before, although the previous victim was biology. Why do physicists think they are masters of all sciences? Granted, that was in response to a question, but he really should have said ‘I have no clue’. Why oh why do experts always think they're experts in everything?

and this is a bad thing?

[Hazel Bergeron]

Software developers are going to have to consider increasing efficiency as they make their wares more complex! And we might have to actually implement concurrency research which is under two decades old!

Who knows, we might even end up with the responsiveness of my RISC OS 2 Acorn A3000 in 1990.

Re:and this is a bad thing?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's more or less undeniable that we are going to run out of low-hanging fruit as time goes on(it is, after all, entirely reasonable to take advantage of the most accessible potential improvements to your technology, which necessarily leaves you with improved technology and a harder set of future improvements). Just imagine how disappointed somebody upgrading from a vacuum tube based system to an IC based one would be with the rate of progress at any point from then on...

The part where I think Kaku goes right off the deep end is where he predicts dire catastrophe because of this. The notion that there may be certain hard limits, based on the increasingly unhelpful properties of matter as you start working with less of it, isn't a secret to anybody, even if we don't know precisely where the hard limit is waiting... Even when we hit it, all our existing chips will still work, and transistors will still be crazy cheap. They just won't keep reliably getting cheaper at high speed.

To go with a historical analogy, Kaku makes me imagine somebody during the industrial revolution, standing on a soapbox and shouting about how "Our steam engines cannot keep improving forever, no matter how clever our machinists and engineers, we will hit the Carnot limit for heat engines, and all progress must cease! Disaster! Calamity!" In terms of the physics, that isn't wrong: thermodynamics does place certain hard limits on the efficiency of ideal heat engines. You can tighten your cylinder tolerances and lubricate away friction and insulate all you like; but that's the limit. However, it doesn't follow that no longer being able to expect next year's heat engines to be more efficient than last year's means doom. It just means that you won't keep getting nicer heat engines automatically...

Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently people can't:
make cluster computers
make boards with multiple chip sockets
make extension boards that go in PCI or potential future slots
use distributed computing
[insert many other ways to get around limited processing power]

Man, we sure are screwed in 20 years time, computers will start rebelling against us because we can't make them smaller than the boundaries of the universe!

On a more serious note, this is retarded. Period.
20 years is a VERY long time.
By then, we'd probably actually have the beginnings of working quantum computers that are useful.
By then, we'd have almost certainly found out how to get around or deal with these problems, possibly even taking advantage of quantum effects to reduce circuit complexity and power needs.
Who knows, but i know one thing for sure, the world won't end, life will go on and usual, and this book will still be shit.

This is a perfect example of the world today

[gearloos]

Michio Kaku is not necessarily the best in his field, mediocre at best, but he has the biggest voice. I was talking to an older woman awhile back and she is a devoted fan of his. I asked her what she knew of him other than that he does "layman's" break down commentaries of Physics for the discovery channel and she actually thought badly of me for trying to undermine her opinion of "the top physicist in the world today". Well, that's definitely HER opinion and not mine. Just because he has a big mouth (media wise) does not make him remotely right on anything is the point I'm trying to make here. oh, I just got it- Now I understand Politics lol

Re:This is a perfect example of the world today

[FrootLoops]

I'd bet most of the top people in their field don't take the time to make their field publicly accessible. Steven Hawking comes to mind as a counterexample with a few books, but I can't think of a single mathematician counterexample. My point is Michio Kaku doesn't have to be a "top physicist", and I wouldn't even expect him to be. That he popularizes technical stuff is enough for me.

He probably has a good point, too, that at least eventually Moore's law failing will have strong economic impacts, and it's unlikely that an exponential law can continue indefinitely.

Re:This is a perfect example of the world today

[Fnkmaster]

Hawking isn't even a top physicist. I mean, he's a serious, good physicist, and an inspiring guy, just not one of the 5-10 best physicists alive today. Kaku on the other hand is just a popularizer. Which is fine. Except that the guy seems to be a hack and huge self promoter.

Re:This is a perfect example of the world today

[MoellerPlesset2]

Michio Kaku is not necessarily the best in his field, mediocre at best, but he has the biggest voice.

I agree. But this isn't really news; This is how it's _always_ worked. The public is not going to figure out the merits of your scientific achievements on their own, and then give you attention that's proportionate to that. It's the same as in any other area: You have to market yourself.

Linus Pauling was arguably the most famous chemist of the last century. But he wasn't actually that important. The quantum-chemical contributions he made were in reality on-par with those of Mulliken, Hund and Slater. Many would say Slater should've shared in his first Nobel prize. But it was Pauling who wrote "The nature of the chemical bond", it was Pauling who popularized the subject, it was Pauling who was the bigger educator and public figure (which was not limited to chemistry). Richard Feynman was one of the most famous physicists. And while his contributions are also beyond question, they were arguably not a lot larger than those of, say, Murray Gell-Mann, who is nowhere near as famous. Because Gell-Mann was not a big educator. His popular-scientific books didn't sell anywhere near as well. Dirac was as important as Bohr when it came to quantum theory, but he wasn't anywhere near the popular and public figure Bohr was. And so he's also less known.

What bothers me about Kaku isn't the fact that his fame is disproportionate to his scientific contributions, or even the fact that it leads people to think he's a greater scientist than he is. What annoys me about Kaku is his propensity to comment on stuff that he doesn't know much or anything about. For instance, his statements on evolution, which were harshly (but justly) criticized recently by PZ Meyers. Or his commenting on the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Fukushima diaster (which he, IMO recklessly, called the worst diaster second only to Chernobyl, even though it's far from clear that it'd be worse than Three Mile Island or Windscale at this point, and certainly several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl). And now we have him commenting about Moore's Law, even though he's not a solid-state physicist.

I suspect he's letting his ego cloud his better judgment. It's not uncommon - the aforementioned Pauling, for all his scientific merits, had a whole bunch of bad, crankish ideas in areas outside his field (nuclear physics, vitamin megadoses, anesthesiology). I don't believe at all Feynman was the humble guy he tried so hard to make himself out to be, but to his credit, he was quite respectful of other fields and did not have that propensity to make himself out to be an expert on things he didn't know much about. Of course, there's also the possibility that it's not about Kaku's ego and that he just genuinely doesn't actually give a damn about educating the public, and is more interested in just getting attention for himself. But I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on that.

Gradual transition

[Kjella]

Sooner or later it will come to an end, but it will come slowly as the challenges rise, the costs skyrocket and the benfits are lower due to higher leakages and lifetime issues. And designs will continue to be improved, if you're no longer constantly redesigning it for a tick-tock every two years you can add more dedicated circuits to do special things. Just for example look at the dedicated high def video decoding/encoding/transcoding solutions that have popped up. In many ways it already has stopped in that single-core performance hasn't improved much for a while, it's been all multicore and multithreading of software. Besides, there's plenty other computer-ish inventions to do like laying fiber networks everywhere, mobile devices, display technlogy - the world will still be in significant change 20 years from now. Just perhaps not on the fundamental CPU code / GPU shader level.

Re:Maybe IT will stop sucking up 10% of economy

[sydneyfong]

Yeah, maybe we should stop the waste, and employ human operators to send telegraphs like they did in the good old days, scribes to write documents by hand....

His view

[Anonymous Coward]

His view is based upon the chip and not on the device.

What I'm seeing is folks (manager types ) using their iPhone as their business computer - eliminating the laptop and even their desktop. They're on the move and what they need is a portable communications device that also has some other apps.

Spreadsheets? That's for the back office staff. The same goes for anything else that you still need a desktop/laptop for.

So what's my point - desktops and laptops are becoming a commodity back office device (like the typewriter in the past) and the demand has stabilized and as far as business apps are concerned, there isn't any need for more power - bloatware aside.

To head off the "64K of RAM is all anyone really needs" comments, that was then, this is now. Back then, we were at the birth of the PC revolution. Now, we're in the mature commodity stage. Will we need more power in the future? Yes. But at Moore's law increases? Nope.

The future is efficiency, portability and communication.

PC's are inefficient for most uses; therefore, there won't be any "death" or "economic" destruction - just some "old" companies hitting the skids (Dell) or vastly changing their business if they can (HP).

Re:Maybe IT will stop sucking up 10% of economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, IT has far more wide ranging applications than a fridge and can create new ways of doing things, these may not always be better but a good proportion of it is. People who think that IT is a waste are usually the same people that think the space program is a waste or that education is a waste. Progress has to come from somewhere, it is not magiclly pooed from the buts of celebrities or political figures as they dance about appealing to the masses.

Re:Maybe IT will stop sucking up 10% of economy

[ZankerH]

A "new refrigerator" is, supposedly, more efficient than the last one. The emergence of IT made entire armies of secretaries, messengers, archive managers, human computers etc obsolete, changing society profoundly. The comparison to an iterative development of an existing technology strikes me as moot.

Re:Maybe IT will stop sucking up 10% of economy

[WrongSizeGlass]

Imagine if someone else came up with a "new refrigerator" and the efforts on maintaining the "new refrigerator" came to suck up 10% of the economy.

How big of an LCD will this fridge have? Will it have USB 3, Thunderbolt or Gigabit Ethernet? How about WiFi, a full Bluetooth implementation or this new fangled NFC stuff? Will my better half be able to hook up a scale that not only weighs me before I open the fridge but after to see exactly what I took out? Will a pre-recorded movie play that tells me I shouldn't be eating whatever I just took out, reminding me of my diet or just asking "are you going to bring me one, too?" What about commercials? "I see you're running low on Pepsi 3000! You should go buy some more Pepsi 3000! Now!! But wait, it's a long trip to the store and you may get thirsty - why not have a Pepsi 3000?" Will I then here her voice telling me "put that back! Have some fruit instead!"?

Not really new from him.

[s-whs]

He made similar economic predictions in the BBC Horizon episode "The dark secret of Hendrik Schoen" (2004).

That was the day I lost all respect for Kaku. His economic predictions are moronic (there will always be change, abrupt changes in what creates wealth), and in that Horizon documentary his comments seemed ludicrously off track as well.

Re:Parlellism

[maxwell demon]

Even if Moore's law come to an end, we can still improve the performance of the systems via parallelism.

And by returning to writing efficient software.

memristor-based analog computers

[mo]

Even with transistors the same size, there are so many avenues to explore in processor design. Just off the top of my head, how about a memristor-based analog co-processor for tasks like facial detection or language/speech recognition. How about processors with asynchronous clocks, or clockless designs. Sure, they're harder to build, but once transistor sizes fixate, might as well spend the effort because designs will have a much longer lifecycle.

Re:Maybe IT will stop sucking up 10% of economy

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Wait, does that mean I've been wasting the 20-30% of my budget that I spend on food? I sure am going to miss it. Oh well, at least my pastime of throwing dollar coins at drains only costs me about 2% of my income and is therefore not wasteful.

Kaku is a hack

[thasmudyan]

This guy is trying to establish himself as some kind of authority on futurism, but I just perceive him as an attention whore who actually contributes very little. Maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but his TV series "Physics of the Impossible" was one big self-aggrandizing marketing gig. I barely made it through two episodes that essentially consisted of the professor rehashing old science fiction concepts and passing them off as his own inventions. Every episode ended with a big "presentation" in front of dozens of fawning admirers. Before the credits rolled, they made sure to cram in as many people as possible saying how great and ground-breaking his ideas were. It was disgusting.

Are there physical limits to Moore's law? Sure. We already knew that. Circuits can't keep getting smaller and smaller indefinitely, and we have already run into the limit on reasonable clock speeds several years ago. And despite this, the computer industry hasn't cataclysmically imploded.

Re:Kaku is a hack

[Antisyzygy]

Like many top people in academia, hes a professional schmoozer and salesman. Seriously, if you actually look at many principal investigators they slap their names on papers when the grad students and post docs do all the work and have most of the ideas.

I am a solid state quantum physicist

[drolli]

From weird analogies and a certain amount of misunderstanding things the excerpt draws strange conclusions.

a) Misunderstanding how the frequency spacing relates to required number of cycles: The correct assumption would be that if light has 10^14Hz and you restrict yourself to single-octave circuit (for the sake of simplicity: lets say 10% relative bw circuit), then you can if you "cram" ideall of modulate fast enough, 10^13bits*log2(S/N) bits per second. so probably 10^14bits/second - that is a lot.

b) limits to Moores Law: Moores law is an economic law. There is no physical limit which i see which can be reached technologically until 2020 (in mass production). There is a technological limit to what can be produced, but going in the third dimension and new materials will give opportunity to continue on the same course for a while. If you look at what physicists are currently looking at, you realize that the end of silicon/metal/oxide technology will not be the end of Moores Law or classical computing

c) "on the atomic level i cant know where the electron is". As it happens to be i work on quantum computation and i really hate to explain that: If you arrange a specific situation, then you cant know where the electron is on the atomic scale. If the statement would be as general as he makes it, it would be impossible to have different chemical configurations of the same stoichiometric mixtures. SIngle-molecule electronic/magnetic configurations. The quantum tunnel coupling in single molecule magnets between states can be designed, and i dont see a specific reason why it should be impossible to realize single molecule devices in which tunneling does not play a role

d) he does not understand FETs AFAIU

e) contrary to his opinion, very thin 2DEGs exist and i dont see a reason why upon (finding and) choosing the right layers, the confinement can be very steep in the third direction (not infinity, but also not requiring more than 50nm thickness)

The funny thing is that he forgot what already is and probably will (there *may* be ways out, like superconductors or ballistic transport but don't bet on it) really be a problem for all classical/room temperature computers: heat. While the designing smaller elements may be possible when using the right physics/technology, reducing the capacitances of lines (associated with an energy loss in the line resistance per switching) will be difficult. Once we *really* stack in the third dimension it will need a lot of clever computer scientists (and maybe mathematicians) to reduce thee needed interconnects, since otherwise stacking the third dimension wont give us anything besides memory capacity.

So to conclude: i believe until 2050 the definition of Moores law will be obsolete. but it will not break down because we are unable to make circuits smaller, but because it may be too expensive to make them smaller or powering and cooling the circuits may become impractical. We probably will have a replacement of moores law by an equivalent scaling law for power per switching.

Pseudo-economist

[Boona]

Another pseudo-economist out to tell us that an increase in productivity and a lowering living costs will be a net loss for society. Michio Kaku can you please take an economics 101 class before writing a book about the economic impact of anything. The general population is already economically illiterate and this only fuels the problem. Thanks.

Re:Good Morning

[Anonymous Coward]

DAD?

Re:Stupid comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no. He's a gawdawful write. The entire excerpt was a dreary and largely useless lead-in to the final paragraph. Kaku writes not as if he believes in using two word where one will do but in using a hundred words where one will do.

And what does the reader get when you slog your way through to the last paragraph? The shocking news that quantum effects will put an end to conventional integrated circuits.

Jiminy Cricket! I wish I was smart enough to make that prediction! It's only been common knowledge in the tech community for a couple of decades. Maybe there's a Nobel Prize for belaboring the obvious that Kaku's going for.

The implication of the article, which Kaku's smart enough not to get too explicit about, is that when that sad day arrives AMD and Intel - they'll still be the only two microprocessor manufacturers of any note - will produce their final chips none of which will work. Oh, the tragedy! Oh, the humanity! Oh, if only they'd listened to Michio Kaku while there was still time!

Of course long before then Kaku will have cashed the checks from this piece of drek.

All the phony Luddites who moan about the arrogance of technophiles will have had their conceits confirmed that technology is the crystalization of hubris. That's probably what they're tweeting each other right now on their Iphone 2s.

Meanwhile, back in the real world Kaku's dark prognostications will be forgotten in less time then it takes AMD and Intel to produce the next generation of microprocessors.

Kaku is a blight on science

[Anonymous Coward]

Kaku is an embarrassment. In the mid/late 90s he presented himself as a "nuclear physicist" to the major news outlets (he is no such thing-he's a field theorist) and jumped on the till-then fringe protest movement opposing the launch of the Cassini mission. The opposition was based on the idea that the nuclear batteries on the probe posed a danger in the event of a launch accident. Nevermind that there had previously been launch accidents with the same battery type (military sats) and the ceramic uranium cores were simply recovered and _reused_ because they're practically indestructible. (The batteries are just warm bricks. Low level uranium fission keeps them cooking and thermoelectrics generate the juice. There are no controls to go wrong, no parts to break, nada. That's why they're used. The ceramic itself is terrifically tough.)

Anyway, Kaku saw the cameras and the bright lights and decided that he was a nuclear physicist and start spouting all sorts of total nonsense to frighten the unwashed masses. He has a long history of pretending to know things. Google "Kaku evolution blather" for another example. I watched him give a seminar once while I was in grad school and I just spent the hour squirming in embarrassment for him and his self-aggrandizement.

Yes, I loath the man. I'm a physicist and he just perpetuates the image of people in my field as hubristic egoists. He needs to be shouted down and run out of the media. There are lots of really good popularizers out there (DeGrasse-Tyson, Greene, etc) who, yes, need to establish a public presence to make a career, but who are also actually interested in facts and science and education and know their own limits.

Re:Parlellism

[mijelh]

Moore's law is only about the number of transistors, not the efficiency. There's *A LOT* of improvement to be made in that area, regardless of whether or not we continue with miniaturization. We heard on slashdot a few examples, such as probabilistic pruning and others I don't remember. 300 W now doesn't mean we'll need 300 W for the same thing tomorrow. On the contrary, just check the energy consumption of your cell phone today vs a computationally equivalent computer 20 years ago
Still, we have some limits, such as Amdahl's law (basically, you can only speed up using parallelism the segments of code that are... well, parallelizable).

hmm

[buddyglass]

Worth noting this table? Specifically the overall rows at the top for men and women. Income for men has been flat since 1970 when adjusted for inflation. All the income gains have come from women entering the workforce, going from partial to full employment, and/or the gradual elimination of sex discrimination which drives down wages. One could also argue the cost of living has actually risen faster than official inflation measures, especially when one includes the additional costs necessitated by both partners working full time. (Day care, outsourcing tasks like cleaning and yard work, etc.)

MOS transistors were developed prior to 1970, but not by much, and they didn't really start catching on until the 1970s. Now I'm certainly not arguing causation here, but by the same token I'm not sure it's valid to suggest (via sarcasm) that the move from vacuum tubes to transistors ushered in a new golden era of prosperity.

professional expert

[Ephemeriis]

I am so sick of seeing Michio Kaku all over the place...

It made sense back when he was talking about string theory. He's a physicist, after all. But these days he's just some generic scientist who's more than happy to show up on TV and talk about anything even vaguely scientific.

Did you see him commenting on the whirlpool formed after the earthquakes in Japan? Because a physicist is obviously the most qualified person they could find to talk about ocean currents and plate tectonics and whatnot.

What makes Michio Kaku any more qualified to talk about Moor's Law than I am? It isn't like he actually knows anything about microchip fabrication or economics or industrial processes... The guy is a physicist.

I disagree

[aaaaaaargh!]

Like others I believe Kaku is wrong. Here is my prediction:

Within the next 20 years massively parallel processing will become more and more common, machines with a few dozens, hundreds or even thousands cores will be the rule, and programming languages / compilers will be able to automatically turn sequential programs into parallel ones whenever this is possible. Almost all practical computing problems and needs will turn out to be highly parallelizable. The impact of this change on economy will be zero. Computers will never stop to become faster and faster.

In 50 years from now or earlier our massively parallel conventional machines will be substituted by quantum computers. These will first be available to governments and big companies and within a short period of time will be miniaturized and become available and affordable to end consumers.