Moore’s Third Law

Almost 20 years ago I began the most important work of my career.

My working title was "Moore’s Lore,” stories about Moore’s Law. A "marketing expert" insisted I put my name in the title. 

The original Moore’s Law, described by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore for Electronics magazine in 1965,  estimated that circuit density could increase for 10 years, at the same cost, and indeed by 1975 Intel was shipping chips that had over 64,000 circuits on them. Moore then “formalized” the law, saying he expected density to continue doubling, at the same pace, for as far as he could foresee. 

That’s Moore’s First Law. Moore never mentioned a second law, but it’s there.

Moore’s Second Law is that just as circuit complexity grows exponentially, so does its capital cost. While you can make up this cost by making more chips, it means the chip-making business is consolidating. Today there are only four manufacturers of microprocessors – Samsung, China’s Taiwan Semiconductor, the Middle East’s Global Foundries, and Intel itself.

The implications of Moore’s Second Law, as it continues grinding down, is that chip production becomes a national security issue.

Ever since Moore’s 1965 article came out, cynics have been trying to call a halt to Moore’s Law. As circuit lines get close together their distance can’t be measured, the cynics note. Every increased expense or shortfall in decreasing circuit size is seen to be evidence that the “Law” is “ending.”

In fact, as my book stated (and repeated in 2010, when I edited and re-released it for the Amazon Kindle) Moore’s Law is more like a pebble dropped into a pond. It has multiple directions. It exists in multiple dimensions. Exponential improvements can compound one another as products are redesigned to fit the improvements. Along the way, the nature of computing changes, and the nature of what we can do is transformed.

Who cares how much faster the PC I’m typing on is compared to one produced in 2001. The main hard drive no longer has any moving parts, it’s connected to the Internet at speeds up to 100 megabytes per second, and behind that Internet are cloud networks that run even faster. User interfaces have shrunk to finger-sized, and improved usability has eliminated the need for instructions. Computing is now a visual medium. It’s a wireless medium. That iPhone in your hand holds more raw computing power than the average data center did in 2001.

All of this brings me to what I’m now going to call Moore’s Third Law, written into the 2010 book’s title, “Better and better goes faster and faster.”

Moore’s Third Law is that change is constantly accelerating.

I’m not just talking about computer design. I’m talking about all kinds of change.

Moore’s Law has been accelerating change for 50 years. We haven’t noticed it, in part, because today’s cities are structurally identical to those of 100 years ago. Streets, cars, light poles with phone wires, underground pipes for water and gas, trains and buses supplementing the roads. We have none of the flying cars or private space stations that were predicted in The Jetsons.

That’s about to change.

When Moore was writing, mechanics were the thing. My great-uncle was still working then.  Like Moore he carried a protractor and a slide rule to work with him. Manufacturing productivity was still rising, but the pace was slowing, and the new resource era would redistribute wealth upward, toward the needs of capital, rather than creating it through mass employment.

For the most part Moore’s Law has been working its magic under the surface. I began freelancing from home in 1983. My wife, a computer programmer, now works from home half the time, and many of her colleagues do this full time. Fewer people are chained to desks, and many of those that remain are becoming surplus to requirements.

Today, thanks to Moore’s Third Law, the economics of resources is being replaced by the economics of human capital. A computerized society depends on high quality human capital to grow. Human capital means trained, engaged, passionate minds are where the money is. Two decades ago Richard Florida called these people the Creative Class, but their power is only possible because Moore’s Law magnifies it.

Trump is the last, dying resistance to this change. Trumpistan is wedded to mercantilism, the defining political model of the Nixon Era. He gives lip service to manufacturing, the economic model that ruled from the Great Depression until the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973.

The requirements of the technology era we’re in are different. Education matters. Immigration matters. Free trade matters. The environment matters. Human rights matter. Tolerance matters. They don’t just matter politically, but economically. The nation that maximizes its human capital wins the economic race, and thus the political race.

Trumpistan is doomed.

But there are other, even bigger changes coming. A global cloud makes distances irrelevant. Self-driving cars make commuting times irrelevant. Robotic manufacturing and warehousing make low-skill labor irrelevant. Renewable energy will make all alternatives obsolete, and slow global warming.

Cloud networks are making DNA into a programming language and making a longer lifespan something you can buy. Until these solutions scale, the cost of that longer life will rise to infinity, and beyond, because most people don’t want to die until they do. But scaling the solutions means your grandchildren will make that choice for themselves.

Moore’s Third Law offers opportunities, and choices, the kind those of my generation can only imagine. Computing is bringing space travel to the market, but it’s also providing the capital that can clean up the planet, if that capital is deployed.

Moore’s Law is creating an excess of capital, and of labor, along with the need for both financial and human capital to focus on new challenges. The necessities of life are coming within reach of most people, and what do we want then? How will we choose? “Poor man wants to be rich, rich man wants to be king, and a king ain’t satisfied until he rules everything,” Bruce Springsteen wrote in Backstreets.  Will this define our choices? Or will We, the People, make these choices in our slow, messy, democratic way?

These are becoming key questions for the world, but the questions will keep changing as Moore’s Law continues to accelerate. It will accelerate.

We’re not ready for it, for any of it, but ready or not here we go.