The inexorable nature of technological progress

My recent Times column on Moore's Law, technological progress and economic growth:

The law that has changed our lives most in the past 50 years may be about to be repealed, even though it was never even on the statute book. I am referring to Moore’s Law, which decrees — well, observes — that a given amount of computing power halves in cost every two years.

Robert Colwell, the former chief architect at Intel and head of something with a very long name in the US Government (honestly, you’d turn the page if I spelt it out, though now I’ve taken up even more space not telling you; maybe I will put it at the end), made a speech recently saying that in less than a decade, Moore’s Law will come to a halt.

The problem is that the actual electronic components imprinted on silicon chips cannot get much smaller. They are now down to about forty silicon atoms across and once they reach ten atoms, weird quantum effects take over and they stop behaving predictably. Fortunately, other experts think that may not be the end of the story. Some other law of falling cost will come to our rescue. Technological change has developed such inexorable momentum that it effectively ignores wars, recessions, booms and borders, and we can no longer switch it off if we wanted to.

I am not an economist, but as far as I can make out, for true economic growth to happen, something somewhere has to get cheaper. If you have to work for a shorter time to fulfil a need such as mobile telephony, sandwiches or an airline ticket, you have a bit of spare time left over to fulfil another need or want. That gives somebody else a job providing for your new demand. And so on. Sometimes things get cheaper because of different organisation of people and things (Ryanair, Primark); sometimes because of new inventions that cost less to make or run.

So, for example, today it costs less than half a second of work on the average wage to earn enough to switch on a bedside lamp for an hour. In 1950 your grandparents had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to earn that much light. (And in 1880, 15 minutes.) Thanks to improvements in electricity generation, light technology and productivity — which is reflected in rising wages — you have seven and a half seconds that your grandparents did not have in which to fulfil a different need and provide a living to a different supplier.

In 1965 Gordon Moore, a mid-ranking Silicon Valley deity, drew a line through just five data points and boldly deduced that the number of transistors on a silicon chip seemed to be doubling every 18 months. His friend Carver Mead, another silicon deity, pointed out that this made chips not only cheaper, but more reliable and less power hungry. “By making things smaller,” Moore wrote, “everything gets better simultaneously. There is little need for trade-offs.”

And so it proved. Decade after decade, computing costs halved every two years. Every prediction that they would level off proved wrong. Moore expected the limit to come when chip components reached 250 nanometres, but they passed that in 1997 and have now hit 22 nanometres. The inevitable, incremental, inexorable plummeting of computing costs led to desktops, mobiles, the internet, Twitter, better cars, better accounting, better almost everything. It is a big part of the reason that average income has trebled globally in real terms since 1965.

Recently another Silicon Valley guru, Ray Kurzweil, realised that Moore’s Law was at work before silicon chips even existed. The relay, vacuum tube and single transistor had all improved along the very same trajectory: the amount of computing power you can buy for $100 has doubled every two years for a century, showing no slowdown in the Great Depression or the Second World War and no acceleration in boom times.

Yet predictions that computing costs would plunge even faster now that we knew about Moore’s Law also proved wrong. In technology you need to take each step before you can take the next. And once you’ve taken each step, the next becomes mandatory, which is why people throughout history have stumbled on the same inventions at the same time. As Kevin Kelly catalogues in his book What Technology Wants, there were six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, four of decimal fractions, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, three of logarithms, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. According to two historians, no less than 23 people deserve credit for inventing the incandescent bulb around the same time as Edison.

Such redundancy underlines the futility of trying to prevent or even steer technological change. Opponents of GM crops and fracking can prevent a nation sharing in the bounty of progress, but almost certainly cannot stop the world doing so. As Kelly argues, the technium (the sum of our technologies) marches onward, selecting its inventors rather than vice versa. It is almost as if it is alive.

With Moore’s Law, there are plenty of possible ways to keep costs falling even if component size stops shrinking. Some are mundane — better run companies, cheaper materials. But others are high-tech. If transistors can communicate using light rather than wires, speeds could jump, energy waste fall and costs plunge again. Or if last week’s Nature magazine is to be believed, carbon nanotubes — essentially folded versions of the sexy new substance called graphene — could one day “take us at least an order of magnitude in performance beyond where you can project silicon could take us,” according to Philip Wong, of Stanford University.

Moore’s Law is a reminder that by far the most useful thing you can do for humanity is to lower the cost of something. Yet far too few people in government, charities, companies, churches or aid organisations think of this as their duty. More’s the pity. Let’s hope the repeal of Moore’s Law is followed by the enactment of many more such Moore’s laws.

Mr Colwell’s job, by the way, is director of the Microsystems Technology Office at the US Federal Government’s Department of Defence’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).