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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.
That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago.
Assuming that the absolute number of transistors still matters, this math is ridiculous. A doubling of transistor count now means roughly 10 billion new transistors vs. a doubling in the 70s meaning maybe 10,000. So for 18x the headcount you get 1 MILLION times the transistors. A researcher is about 50,000 times more effective than he was in the 70s.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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."
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.
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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.
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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
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
~ Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of US patent office (1899)
Not true. Commissioner Duell never said that, and what he actually said was pretty much the exact opposite:
In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold. -- Charles H. Duell 1902
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.
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.
Hey, if I give up my extremist views then the middle will no longer be the middle, it will be somewhere on THEIR side of the line.... No way am I giving up ground to THEM....
At least, that's how I imagine the extremists view things. Being fiscally conservative and socially liberal, I'm fairly close to the center. My problem is that none of the political parties are fiscally conservative. They all want to spend money and are just arguing over the pile...