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Moore's Law and the power of exponential advancement

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KI4MVP

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Named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. The idea/observation is that computer capacity grows exponentially. Basically every 18 months to 2 years computing capacity and performance doubles.

Ray Kurzweil and others believe that this doubling isn't limited to computers, that it also happens with information and other technologies (like solar).

The thing about exponential growth like this is that even as fast as it occurs, it's hard to see scale the changes in the short term. Which means it can be difficult to see what it means for the future.

So given how young many on this board are (from the birthday song thread) I thought I'd post a snapshot of what things were like 35-40 years ago compared to today. Looking at how much things have changed in the past 40 years can give some perspective of the next 40 years. One thing is for certain, the world will look vastly different even 20 years form now.

The first time I ever got to see or use a computer was for one day a little over 40 years ago. A friend's mom worked and NASA and took us with her to work one weekend because she had to do some work. To keep us busy, she set us up to use the computer there.

There was no display. Instead, you used something that looked like this:

dec-terminal.jpg


There were no disk drives, instead programs were stored on rolls of paper like this:

tape-in-hand.GIF


she loaded a game for us to play. The game worked like this. The computer typed out a distance to a ship (that was going to attack us) and a wind speed. We typed 1 number, which was the angle to fire our cannon. The response was how close we came to hitting the ship, the new distance and wind speed. If you hit the ship before it got to you, you won, otherwise you lost. Either way you would start over and play again.

I thought it was the most amazing thing I ever saw.

I didn't get to use another computer for about 2 years. And then I never even saw the computer we used. The high school I went to didn't have a computer, a neighboring school system had one. What we had was a terminal (no graphics) and a modem. There was just one for the entire school. The modem transmitted about 11 characters a second (110 baud) and looked like this

2ec7a62d27552100624729c708bf5153.jpg


you had to dial the number then put the headset in the modem. I got to use that from time to time for a couple of years. Then I had to transfer to schools. The new school system didn't have a computer or a terminal.

After my junior year I talked my parents into buying me an Apple ][ plus computer.

Apple2Plus.jpg


I even managed to get it loaded with a full 48k of memory, the maximum they sold then. What I didn't' get was a disk drive or a monitor. You hooked it up to a TV with an adapter and could use a cassette player to load and save programs.

That's when I first learned how to program. I spent weeks writing a game, when I had it working, I tested it out on my family. Around then our cassette player broke. We exchanged it, the new one would never load my program back in.

In total it took 5-6 years from the first time I ever saw a computer until I had one that I could actually learn to program on. It was another 3 years before any of my friends had computers. When I started college, my computer science professors didn't have their own computer. I had two different classes where we had to program on key punch cards. The programs and the data were typed on a stack of cards like this (that you never ever wanted to drop)

858601d5e8fc2f91ba0d8707d7a033c1a396cf08.jpg


You put them in a bin, waited for the people you couldn't see took them and fed them into a computer that another university had, the results printed out and were put back in a bin.

When I got my first programming job, the company hired another computer programmer who had just finished his degree in computer science. It turned out he had never actually written a program because his college didn't have a computer. It unsurprisingly also turned out he had no idea how to program.
 
So the followup to all of that is looking forward things are going to be much different
- self driving cars are right around the corner
- solar power is following Moore's law
- combine those two, have the self driving cars be electric, be smart enough to connect themselves to power, and perhaps even build infrastructure so they can charge being driven and you make a massive dent on global warming.

But those are just a hint at what can happen over the next 20+ years thanks to exponential growth in technology. 20 years can make some of the things we do today look as ancient as the stuff I posted today from 40 years ago.

Consider web sites were invented 25 years ago. Google was founded 20 years ago. Facebook was started 12 years ago. Twitter is less than 10 years old.

We did oddly manage to forget how to send people to the moon, though which is mind boggling.
 
So the followup to all of that is looking forward things are going to be much different
- self driving cars are right around the corner
- solar power is following Moore's law
- combine those two, have the self driving cars be electric, be smart enough to connect themselves to power, and perhaps even build infrastructure so they can charge being driven and you make a massive dent on global warming.

But those are just a hint at what can happen over the next 20+ years thanks to exponential growth in technology. 20 years can make some of the things we do today look as ancient as the stuff I posted today from 40 years ago.

Consider web sites were invented 25 years ago. Google was founded 20 years ago. Facebook was started 12 years ago. Twitter is less than 10 years old.

We did oddly manage to forget how to send people to the moon, though which is mind boggling.

I personally think we are coming to the end of moores law. I used to think it was due to us reaching the limits of silicon based technology but now i tihnk there is a greater limiting factor. Heat. more power leads to more heat and removing the heat is becoming increasingly difficult. I also think all the problems that self driving and solar face are to do with battery technology which with its multi-variable deign goals makes it impossible to follow an exponential increase.

I believe that graphene polymer batteries are our best chance of solving one of the key limiters in battery technology, their life cycle, but as far as power output and efficiency we still have a long way to go. At the moment the construction of a batter for an electric car add 15% or 1 ton of CO2. Ideally we need to solve this problem moving forward. So my current thoughts are we will have incredible computing power and infinite storage to have all our social media needs met, but the real breakthroughs will have to be away from those areas and they will be limiting factors

I always go back to the 1970's motorway act in the UK where they decided not to invest in traffic infrastructure because flying cars were only a decade away
 
I personally think we are coming to the end of moores law. I used to think it was due to us reaching the limits of silicon based technology but now i tihnk there is a greater limiting factor. Heat. more power leads to more heat and removing the heat is becoming increasingly difficult. I also think all the problems that self driving and solar face are to do with battery technology which with its multi-variable deign goals makes it impossible to follow an exponential increase.

I believe that graphene polymer batteries are our best chance of solving one of the key limiters in battery technology, their life cycle, but as far as power output and efficiency we still have a long way to go. At the moment the construction of a batter for an electric car add 15% or 1 ton of CO2. Ideally we need to solve this problem moving forward. So my current thoughts are we will have incredible computing power and infinite storage to have all our social media needs met, but the real breakthroughs will have to be away from those areas and they will be limiting factors

I always go back to the 1970's motorway act in the UK where they decided not to invest in traffic infrastructure because flying cars were only a decade away

heat has always been a limiting factor for the current level of computing, but we keep solving it.

if the infrastructure is built out so the cars get power from the roads while you drive them, the need to battery technology won't be an issue in the cars themselves. There are already electric cars with over 200 miles of range.

And batteries aren't the only way to store power. For example, you can use excess power to create hydrogen, then use hydrogen based engines to generate power from the hydrogen when solar doesn't work, like at night. At some point we should reach the point where we are generating more solar power than we can possibly use.
 
I started off with vintage computers as a kid..

My first computer was a TRS-80; it didn't look exactly like this model, but close:
Tandy_Color-Computer-2_26-3134B.jpg


My first modem was a vintage 300 baud acoustic coupler modem we got from a thrift store; was a very good learning tool:
acousticcoupler.jpg


My upgraded computer (actually somewhat modern at the time):

IBM 80286 PC w/CGA monitor:
IBM_AT_System_s1.jpg


My first modem that was modern for it's era:
post-4806-0-31003300-1406311290.jpg

(except mine was the 2400 baud model)

Pretty crazy how far we've come...
 
heat has always been a limiting factor for the current level of computing, but we keep solving it.

if the infrastructure is built out so the cars get power from the roads while you drive them, the need to battery technology won't be an issue in the cars themselves. There are already electric cars with over 200 miles of range.

And batteries aren't the only way to store power. For example, you can use excess power to create hydrogen, then use hydrogen based engines to generate power from the hydrogen when solar doesn't work, like at night. At some point we should reach the point where we are generating more solar power than we can possibly use.

Storing hydrogen is a fools errand both adsorption and absorption have massive issues with poisioning and life cycle issue even if you ignore the kinetics. The best bet for hydrogren fuel cells in terms of transport is in situ electrolysis on demand from a battery that is topped up by solar or an electric infrastructure. I actually prefer the future of ethanol fuel cells. In fact Ceres power near me has just received a large government grant to develop a more sustainable ethanol fuel cell. I thinks it more likely we develop vertical plantations (similar to Singapore) where we can grow on a large scale crops for ethanol production, without reducing land usage for crops which will only increase in demand as the population tops 10 billion.

I get why solar is seen as the future, it has some limitations in terms of powering national or regions power grids (especially VAR issues) although its far from a green manufacturing process.

If we are going to go full predicting the future my bet is that we should invest in bioengineering. We need to assemble bioelectronic cells that use the light dependent reaction to generate a usable voltage. With crispr cas 9 and nanotube conduction that would give us an efficient and environmentally power source. but its just crazy talk
 
Awesome thread guys.

Can you guys explain why we wouldn't want to use more nuclear energy than we are currently? Not an area I am familiar with.
 
Named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. The idea/observation is that computer capacity grows exponentially. Basically every 18 months to 2 years computing capacity and performance doubles.

Ray Kurzweil and others believe that this doubling isn't limited to computers, that it also happens with information and other technologies (like solar).

The thing about exponential growth like this is that even as fast as it occurs, it's hard to see scale the changes in the short term. Which means it can be difficult to see what it means for the future.

So given how young many on this board are (from the birthday song thread) I thought I'd post a snapshot of what things were like 35-40 years ago compared to today. Looking at how much things have changed in the past 40 years can give some perspective of the next 40 years. One thing is for certain, the world will look vastly different even 20 years form now.

The first time I ever got to see or use a computer was for one day a little over 40 years ago. A friend's mom worked and NASA and took us with her to work one weekend because she had to do some work. To keep us busy, she set us up to use the computer there.

There was no display. Instead, you used something that looked like this:

dec-terminal.jpg


There were no disk drives, instead programs were stored on rolls of paper like this:

tape-in-hand.GIF


she loaded a game for us to play. The game worked like this. The computer typed out a distance to a ship (that was going to attack us) and a wind speed. We typed 1 number, which was the angle to fire our cannon. The response was how close we came to hitting the ship, the new distance and wind speed. If you hit the ship before it got to you, you won, otherwise you lost. Either way you would start over and play again.

I thought it was the most amazing thing I ever saw.

I didn't get to use another computer for about 2 years. And then I never even saw the computer we used. The high school I went to didn't have a computer, a neighboring school system had one. What we had was a terminal (no graphics) and a modem. There was just one for the entire school. The modem transmitted about 11 characters a second (110 baud) and looked like this

2ec7a62d27552100624729c708bf5153.jpg


you had to dial the number then put the headset in the modem. I got to use that from time to time for a couple of years. Then I had to transfer to schools. The new school system didn't have a computer or a terminal.

After my junior year I talked my parents into buying me an Apple ][ plus computer.

Apple2Plus.jpg


I even managed to get it loaded with a full 48k of memory, the maximum they sold then. What I didn't' get was a disk drive or a monitor. You hooked it up to a TV with an adapter and could use a cassette player to load and save programs.

That's when I first learned how to program. I spent weeks writing a game, when I had it working, I tested it out on my family. Around then our cassette player broke. We exchanged it, the new one would never load my program back in.

In total it took 5-6 years from the first time I ever saw a computer until I had one that I could actually learn to program on. It was another 3 years before any of my friends had computers. When I started college, my computer science professors didn't have their own computer. I had two different classes where we had to program on key punch cards. The programs and the data were typed on a stack of cards like this (that you never ever wanted to drop)

858601d5e8fc2f91ba0d8707d7a033c1a396cf08.jpg


You put them in a bin, waited for the people you couldn't see took them and fed them into a computer that another university had, the results printed out and were put back in a bin.

When I got my first programming job, the company hired another computer programmer who had just finished his degree in computer science. It turned out he had never actually written a program because his college didn't have a computer. It unsurprisingly also turned out he had no idea how to program.

Flashback time! Nice.

My Apple IIc was smokin' hot.

Apple_IIc_in_funzione.jpg
 
I always go back to the 1970's motorway act in the UK where they decided not to invest in traffic infrastructure because flying cars were only a decade away

My observation is that as fast as technology moves, it tends to move slower than most people expect. That's more of a commentary on expectations than on technological advancements.

If you watch a movie or read a book from the 70's-80's looking forward to our time, we should have a Mars colony, get more of our power from fusion, etc.. even to the extent the science/technological capabilities exist, they're rarely as commonly available as expected.
 
Awesome thread guys.

Can you guys explain why we wouldn't want to use more nuclear energy than we are currently? Not an area I am familiar with.


There is still no decent way of dealing with the radioactive waste for 10000 years although America is ahead of the rest of the world in this respect
 
I personally think we are coming to the end of moores law. I used to think it was due to us reaching the limits of silicon based technology but now i tihnk there is a greater limiting factor. Heat. more power leads to more heat and removing the heat is becoming increasingly difficult.

back to the issue of heat. that reminded me of my first job after college (in 1983). I went to work at NASA in a department that was mostly physicists. The whole department had 1 computer. A VAX 11/750. It looked something like the 4 giant boxes in the front of this photo, except I think it was wider.

11750cpu.jpg


This was the CPU box.

slide_28.jpg


The CPU wasn't one chip, the floating point processor was this board

DSCN7502.JPG


The computer was so big, it had it's own room. It generated so much heat, that room had to be custom built and have it's own AC unit to keep the computer from overheating. The room had combination locks on the door and only a couple of us were even allowed in the room (although one of the others wrote the combination on the top of the door so they wouldn't forget and nobody ever noticed).
 
Driving jobs are strategically being taken out.

Driverless cars will kill us on jobs. Merkel has gone on record as seeing immigrants as an opportunity to take over these jobs, and give them loans to get started with drivers licenses upon immigration.

I don't like any of that. But no one is going to get in the way of singularity.

Replying in this thread because I had hoped this kind of discussion would evolve out of this thread.

Self driving cars and trucks are inevitable. Which will make our roads safer and make travel more convenient. Drivers aren't the only jobs they impact. Car insurance companies and body shops will have to downsize as accidents become increasingly rare. Airlines will have to downsize as there will be no reason to use them for trips under 4 hours or so.

For people who work as drivers, who also see this coming, you have a window to prepare for a different job before the driver jobs disappear. But look forward in other fields too, because this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Massive numbers of jobs are going to get replaced by computers/AI. To the point where society will have to eventually get restructured.

For example:

It's rare to call a business and not have a computer answer the phone, one who understands what you say enough to help you with 50% of the reasons people call without ever having to talk to an actual person. You can check balances, make payments, etc. But you know you're talking to a computer. Unless moose's law falls apart, it's just a matter of time before the AI of these systems will be at the level of Watson and be able to handle 99% of calls.

On top of all of this, other jobs are disappearing as companies offer less service. Self checkouts at grocery stores, the touch devices restaurants use to allow you to do stuff like pay your bill without waiting for the server, etc. This on top of the wave of service jobs that are already scaled back massively, like bank tellers.
 
Replying in this thread because I had hoped this kind of discussion would evolve out of this thread.


Self driving cars and trucks are inevitable. Which will make our roads safer and make travel more convenient. Drivers aren't the only jobs they impact. Car insurance companies and body shops will have to downsize as accidents become increasingly rare. Airlines will have to downsize as there will be no reason to use them for trips under 4 hours or so.

For people who work as drivers, who also see this coming, you have a window to prepare for a different job before the driver jobs disappear. But look forward in other fields too, because this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Massive numbers of jobs are going to get replaced by computers/AI. To the point where society will have to eventually get restructured.

For example:

It's rare to call a business and not have a computer answer the phone, one who understands what you say enough to help you with 50% of the reasons people call without ever having to talk to an actual person. You can check balances, make payments, etc. But you know you're talking to a computer. Unless moose's law falls apart, it's just a matter of time before the AI of these systems will be at the level of Watson and be able to handle 99% of calls.

On top of all of this, other jobs are disappearing as companies offer less service. Self checkouts at grocery stores, the touch devices restaurants use to allow you to do stuff like pay your bill without waiting for the server, etc. This on top of the wave of service jobs that are already scaled back massively, like bank tellers.


The problem is no industry is safe, so it's not really a window, it's a gamble and hoping you get the next one right, and pile up as little debt while not making money as you can.

Solutions to the singularity and robot take over?

Shortterm: buy American hire American. Or human, if you care about society in an economical sense.

Or we can push to socialism, or ridding the world of the concept of money altogether, assuming a robot will take over all jobs one day.
 
Replying in this thread because I had hoped this kind of discussion would evolve out of this thread.

Self driving cars and trucks are inevitable. Which will make our roads safer and make travel more convenient. Drivers aren't the only jobs they impact. Car insurance companies and body shops will have to downsize as accidents become increasingly rare. Airlines will have to downsize as there will be no reason to use them for trips under 4 hours or so.

For people who work as drivers, who also see this coming, you have a window to prepare for a different job before the driver jobs disappear. But look forward in other fields too, because this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Massive numbers of jobs are going to get replaced by computers/AI. To the point where society will have to eventually get restructured.

For example:

It's rare to call a business and not have a computer answer the phone, one who understands what you say enough to help you with 50% of the reasons people call without ever having to talk to an actual person. You can check balances, make payments, etc. But you know you're talking to a computer. Unless moose's law falls apart, it's just a matter of time before the AI of these systems will be at the level of Watson and be able to handle 99% of calls.

On top of all of this, other jobs are disappearing as companies offer less service. Self checkouts at grocery stores, the touch devices restaurants use to allow you to do stuff like pay your bill without waiting for the server, etc. This on top of the wave of service jobs that are already scaled back massively, like bank tellers.

I'm only being a little snarky here, but i thought global warming was supposed to have devastating effects on all of us? Perhaps the kind of societal-wide technological progress you describe will not continue unabated because wel'll have other major problems to address.
 

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