I spent 20 years, off and on, researching Moore’s Law, its history, and how it worked.
As I wrote my book, and rewrote it twice more, most industries succumbed to its charms, its promise of productivity. Journalism succumbed. Retailing succumbed. So did distribution and management.
Three industries have not yet succumbed, and I have a chapter in the book devoted to them.
These are health care, the law, and education.
It’s not that there aren’t solutions. Law libraries are obsolete. So, too, college libraries. Health care has finally surrendered to electronic records, lured by sweet, sweet stimulus cash.
But final costs, and prices, have gone up in all these areas.
It’s politics.
States refuse to define what graduates need, and unions insist teachers must give the lesson, not just test and tutor. Courts have used technology to pile more work on lawyers and judges. Time is money. Doctors have used their gatekeeping function to stop standardization of treatment, while drug companies have used regulatory capture to create pricing based on the value of your life.
I think of 2023 as being a third great inhale for tech this century. The first fall, in 2001, resulted in open source and the scaled systems we call the Cloud. The second fall, in 2008, delivered smartphones and mass adoption of cloud-based databases.
We don’t know what the third inhale will bring. I have argued for orchestration and an Internet of Systems. Every device that measures anything can become a chip, communicating wirelessly with servers that can optimize its operation.
What everyone wants to talk about, instead, is AI.
Systems like ChatGPT can automate the production of routine work now done by writers, photographers, musicians, and analysts. They can’t deliver real creativity, only a simulation of it. But many of us were only creating simulated creativity anyway. Conventional wisdom is easy to automate.
When companies like Meta talk about this being a “year of efficiency,” they’re talking about automating their own systems, doing what they now do with fewer people and less cost. Fine as far as it goes.
I’m more interested in the efficiency of health care, education, and the law. Until we can grow productivity in these areas, until we reduce the inefficiency created by people using government to resist efficiency, growth will be hard to come by.
I think the politics of our time is all about this. Oligarchs want life extended only for other oligarchs and their kids. Zealots expect schools to keep minds closed. Criminals see technology as more of a threat to them than justice.
Whatever they claim it’s all about, it’s keeping Moore’s Law from its task.
