Generational Dynamics World View

[David Horn]

(10-30-2019, 06:44 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(10-29-2019, 06:16 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: … Nobody believes this.  You're saying that progress in computer technology, which has been proceeding exponentially for decades, is now stone cold dead.

Not at all.  Let me try putting it in different words, since those didn't work for you.

Moore's law is a law about computing power and costs.  It is not a law about computing power and size.  Sometimes the computing power will come in the form of machines that sit on desktops.  Sometimes it will come in the form of machines that fill rooms.

In the current phase, which is likely to extend to 2030 at least, the machines get bigger as the cost of computing power goes down.  That will change if and when the trend jumps to a different technology, as it may have several times in the past, but the next such jump is more likely around 2050 than 2030.

There's also no guarantee that the next jump will go to smaller rather than larger machines.  It may turn out that quantum computing can be done much more efficiently in space with large volumes of hard vacuum, and we'll have huge quantum computers in orbit which we access over a wireless internet equivalent, as just one possibility.  They will by that time be much smarter than human beings, but they may not be able to walk around on Earth.

I agree, however one thing's for certain. The actually processing will be done on a tiny chip of some sort -- probably a cube or, even better, a sphere. There is still lag time in a quantum machine, though quantum physics makes this less true than it has been to date. Moving things around is the single largest time waster, and that's not likely to change dramatically.