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Boffins Fear We Might Be Running Out of Ideas (theregister.co.uk)
Innovation, fetishized by Silicon Valley companies and celebrated by business boosters, no longer provides the economic jolt it once did. From a report: In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago. On an annual basis, research productivity is declining at a rate of about 6.8 percent per year in the semiconductor industry. In other words, we're running out of ideas. That's the conclusion of economic researchers from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a paper published this week through the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?", economics professors Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, and John Van Reenen, and PhD candidate Michael Webb, defy Betteridge's Law of Headlines by concluding that an idea drought has indeed taken hold. "Across a broad range of case studies ... we find that ideas -- and in particular the exponential growth they imply -- are getting harder and harder to find," the authors declare in their paper.
I wonder whether it's really a lack of ideas, and or worse engineering staff. I think engineers are, on average, less passionate than they used to be. For many people in the industry it's just a career now, and not a passion. Especially in large companies like Intel.
We are running out of ideas because we stoped funding the sources of ideas like Xerox Park or Bell Labs. Innovation takes money and when all of the money chases development, not research, you run out of ideas to develop.
We're not running out of ideas. What has happened in CPU development is that we have made all of the relatively easy advances in transistor miniaturization, and further advances are becoming incremental as progress runs up against the asymptotic curves imposed by the laws of physics. Further advances in processing power are therefore coming to rely upon increasingly multicore designs and sophisticated caches, mainly because that's a less risky business proposition than investigating architectures other than the von Neumann and (occasionally) Harvard architectures.
It's also worth noting that most of the several orders of magnitude increase in processing power over the last three decades has been consumed by increasingly inefficient software as a way of keeping software development costs down.
Nature only provides so many free rides, and humans have proven themselves very good at exhausting them quickly. Ideas, even good ones, are always cheap and plentiful. It's a willingness to do hard (and therefore expensive) work that is in short supply.
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"it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago"
In 1970s, they used to make only few hundreds to few thousands of each high end chip. Today, Apple A11 or Qualcomm 835 or Intel x64 will get produced in hundreds of millions in quantities.
The real problem is that we've seen the rise of extreme leftism over the past 40 to 50 years. The seeds were planted in the late 1960s, but it wasn't until the last decade that it has really taken off and become entrenched throughout Western society, especially within the so-called "Millennial Generation".
Leftism abhors originality. It abhors creativity. It abhors free thinking. Why is that? Because individuals who engage in such activities quickly tear apart the intellectual "foundation" (or lack thereof) of leftist ideologies. Leftism collapses when confronted with any sort of intelligent analysis. That's why leftists try to hard to stamp out free thought in favor of people just mindlessly parroting leftist narratives.
Leftism is often wrongly described as "progressive", when it is actually an intense form of conservatism, even to the point of regression. Leftist ideologies revolve around fixed, unchanging narratives. There is no flexibility for these narratives to evolve. What's wrongly perceived as "progress" is actually a society regressing so as to conform to these fixed leftist narratives.
We shouldn't be surprised that we see stagnation within academia, within the various R&D fields, and within business. As more and more leftists have worked their way into academic, research and business organizations, the focus has been taken away from doing real work and coming up with real innovation.
Instead, the focus has been put on political "correctness", on faux "tolerance", and on artificial "equality". These constructs prevent real forward progress. They only allow for regression, which is exactly what we're seeing today.
While I appreciate throwing dirt over the younger generations from time to time (a pastime of the not so young), let's admit science and technology have become too darned complex, requiring any person lot more time to become more-or-less proficient in a single topic,and as a consequence, it takes much longer to find the almost mythical "synergies" accelerating any field with the help of sideways/cross-pollinated knowledge.
Also, we may have started hitting some hard physical limits, not just a lack of better ideas. If silicon makers are finding so hard to improve their chips, it may be because electronics and digital systems as we known them break up when the gates' size is comparable to that of atoms.
The solutions may again come from other fields of knowledge. If quantum effects ruin your logic gates because they are too small, better start thinking on quantum computing approaches leveraging your knowledge to make small things on a waffer.
Easier said than done, though.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Your doing a good job spouting out what Rush Limbaugh told you that liberals believe. Why don't you actually ask a liberal next time.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Be careful what you wish for. 2037 headline: "Apple introduces the new iMplant X: A device no larger than a grain of rice, implanted by trained technician at any Apple store, gives you 24/7 connection to those you love."
I just see it accumulating at the top. You make a good point, but don't forget all the gov't research we used to do and stopped (gotta cut all that pork, after all). Folks like to forget how much basic research was done on the public dime.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Another thing we can outsource to AI.
Possibly not if Moore's law fails. However, this study arguably just shows the failure of focussing entirely on applied research. For each of their case studies they focus on one thing, such as Moore's law, crop yields etc. and conclude that it gets harder each year to drive the increases. This is because each of these areas is sticking to one fundamental approach and refining and improving it more and more which is clearly going to get harder over time.
What keeps the ideas coming is fundamental research which opens up entirely new approaches to solving problems. As the quote says "No amount of continuous improvement of the candle would have lead to the electric light bulb". Indeed the entire IT revolution owes its existence to the discovery of quantum mechanics and its application to understanding condensed matter physics. Without this applied researchers would be still be working on improving the valve.
The problem is that governments love to focus less on helping companies develop better widgets. The economic returns are almost immediate - or at least immediately obvious - and so useful to a politician seeking re-election. What they need to do is to put more money into fundamental research so that as fields run out of ideas there are completely new areas full of potential ideas to improve our lives in ways we cannot yet imagine. The problem is that the return on this investment is both uncertain and likely 50+ years away and the average politician has trouble caring about anything further away than the next election.
This gave me a good chuckle. It's always amusing when people from the left or right try and explain the other side and get it completely wrong.
Newsflash to every extremist on either side: no political ideology is completely wrong or completely right. They all get somethings right and somethings wrong, and the same ideology doesn't always work in every situation and every society.
Get over yourselves. As with most things, the best solution is often somewhere in the between what the extremists from either side espouse. Stop demonizing or regaling people based on their political preferences.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
History of progress within any given industry has always been boom then trickle, boom then trickle.
When the Microprocessor first was made it was boom then slowed. We came out with multi-cores, it was boom then slowed.
Look at manufacturing. Boom during industrial revolution then growth slowed. Boom with the assembly line then it slowed. Boom after robotics then growth slowed.
Look at agriculture. Boom when farming first developed then slowed. Boomed when automation was pioneered then slowed. Boomed again with modern chemistry then slowed.
The boom normally happens when a new technology or idea is pioneered, and then, you're right, the low hanging fruit associated with that technology is picked first and growth slows.
The next boom in computer chips might come with economic quantum computing is developed, and then people will pick up the low hanging fruit until progress is a trickle again.
Just because innovation may be slow now, the next boom could happen at any time.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Cretin. It has nothing to do with political fetishes about leftism or the stupidity of modern Americans because of the lack of investment in education. The reason for the reduced progress in semiconductor technology is because we are running out of physics. The physical dimensions are now so small that leakage currents and power dissipation are reaching the limits of what is possible with the available materials. Lots of clever and difficult manufacturing processes and material configurations have been developed to make today's silicon chips. The factories that make the latest and most powerful chips cost in the region of $10 Billion because it has become so hard to make them. The problem is not a shortage of ideas, the problem is that it has become 18 times more difficult to make advances in chip performance. Of course both a right wing political expert and a bunch of media reporters choose to misrepresent academic research that measures this slow down in progress as 'political defects in society' and a 'lack of creativity' because, hey screw facts, we have irrelevant opinions and random talking points to argue about. What this demonstrates in fact is that general society is almost completely ignorant about where its technological marvels come from.
I await with interest the response to CRISPR/Cas 9 and Genetic Medicine which will be a mainstream technology marvel of the coming 50 years. You folk are probably too dumb to know what to do with it let alone recognize its potential benefits. For goodness sake learn a bit more about how the science and the world works before ranting about your prejudices and politics.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
What great work they have done for mankind:
The Cultural Revolution
The Great Leap Forward
Russian political Gulags and forced relocations,
The Red Terror
The Great Purge
The Killing Fields
The Ethiopian Red Terror
To name just a few. I wont even begin to put numbers of the deaths, however its pretty obvious they are 'leading' in the last 100 years..
The thing to remember here is that left vs right is not actually that important or decisive.
Open versus Totalitarian is (I would have used the word Liberal there, but America has redefined that word, as they like to do)
Totalitarian is consistently bad - on the left AND the right - a direction that man western governments are racing towards.
The other AC was not wrong. The left has been cannibalized and taken over by fanatics who espouse the most violent racism and sexism and call for the return of segregation, government promotion of Islam, the total extermination of all "white" people (especially Jews), and the state seizure of everyone else's private property but they would get to keep what they own. They hate the old left's principles of tolerance, equality, freedom, worker rights, science, rule of law, neutrality in government, etc. They're not called "regressives" for nothing, and "an intense form of conservatism" is a good description. "Fascist" is another good description. If you follow the money back to the billionaires financing them, you find that the rich people are even more insane than their pet nutters.
Some of the names to look into are Stephen Heintz, Julia Middleton, Muna AbuSulayman, Alwaleed bin Talal, Wadah Khanfar, George Soros, Carlos Slim, Farah Pandith, Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, Qatar Investment Authority, Arcus Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, that's just off the top of my head. I don't have access to my research at the moment. Look into how much money they control and then go laugh at anyone who complains about the Koch brothers, the Mercers, or Sheldon Adelson influencing politics.
You're not hearing about this in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, etc, because they run these outlets. All of the big social media, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc, are partnered with them to censor their content so no one will hear a bad word about them. Google and Microsoft are working on algorithms to do it automatically.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously--there is no AI. Everyone who thinks humans suck at everything because they themselves suck at everything can just get over it. You're not a representative sample of human capability and there is no such thing as AI. There are clever algorithms that make decidedly un-clever people think they're dealing with intelligence greater than themselves, but that's it. Now, for some people that would be a true statement, but for many of those people they're dealing with a greater intelligence when they're in the same room as a golden retriever or a clever 4 year old. That AI is routinely sold to people with the emotional intelligence of 2 year olds (most modern day CEOs) is a failure of our economy, not brilliance on the part of machines.