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.

Dark predictions

[Wowsers]

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

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.

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

[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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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!

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.