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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.
Noone will take a disaster prophecy seriously if you can't even be bothered to pair it with some planetary alignment or ancient calendar.
I predict a dark future for Michio Kaku's new book.... namely, the bargain bin.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
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.
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.
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
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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....
Don't quote me on this.
Before we had transisters we didn't have them yet either.
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).
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.
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
DAD?
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.
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.
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!
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
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
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.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
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.