By James Pethokoukis and Neil
Thompson

In living memory, computers filled entire rooms and delivered only a fraction of the processing power of today’s pocket-sized devices. But over the decades, computers began to shrink while becoming more powerful thanks to Moore’s Law. Those computing improvements have been central to productivity growth, but Moore’s Law seems to be slowing. So what does this mean for the future of computers and, more importantly, for the future of productivity and economic growth? To answer those questions, Neil Thompson joined a recent episode of Political Economy.

Neil
is an innovation scholar in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, a research scientist at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy,
and an associate member of the Broad Institute.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: What is Moore’s Law, and what does the world look like today if it
didn’t exist?

Thompson: So Moore’s Law is an incredibly important trend, which is sort of used to talk about broadly all of the improvement in computing we’ve had in the last five or six decades. The actual origins of it, though, come from basically the miniaturization of computer chips and the elements that are on computer chips. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, gave this speech back in 1959. And in this talk, he says, “I think we could just keep miniaturizing stuff all the way down to the point where it’s just a few atoms.” And he said that about computers, right? He said, “We can make them and these parts will be really small, like 10 or a 100 atoms big.” And this was a pretty remarkable thing that he said.

And
it turned out as we did that, we were able to put more transistors on our chip,
which meant we could do more and we could run our chips faster. And a huge
amount of the revolution we’ve had in IT all really comes from this. If we were
still using the computers back in those early days, we really could not be
doing almost anything that we’re doing today. So it has had an enormous effect
on society. And yeah, it has really been very transformational.

There have been many stories over the
years about the end of Moore’s Law. Have all those reports of its death been
greatly exaggerated, or are we finally there?

Yes, you’re absolutely right. You can go back decades and find people saying, “Well, this is going to be a problem.” And actually, it’s a real credit to the technologists and engineers that they were able to push through that and get past it. But since 2004, what is clear is we’ve lost many of the benefits of Moore’s Law. When Gordon Moore actually made up this law, it was really about the number of transistors you could fit on a chip. But what it translated to, generally, was this incredible speed up in the capacity of our chips and how fast we could run them. And so we sort have taken to calling all of those things Moore’s Law. But in practice, actually in 2004–2005, we lost, I think, one of the most important parts of that, which is the speed up on our chips.

So
chips at that point were about 3 gigahertz. The chips in your computer today
are about 3 gigahertz. And so we’ve really plateaued, whereas before that we
were improving it exponentially. So it’s no longer just lone voices in the cold
saying it’s going to end. Now, it’s a lot of the community.

How concerned should I be about
productivity growth with Moore’s Law at an end?

I
am worried about this. If you look across society and you think of general
productivity improvements, you’re talking 1 or 2 percent per year kind of as
how we make things better over time. And at its peak, the improvement that we were
making in our chips was 52 percent per year. So it was vastly faster. And that
really had sort of spillover effects on everybody else. And then as we get to
the end, the question is, where do we go from here if this engine has been
slowing down? And of course, there are some candidates. People talk about
artificial intelligence: Are we going to be able to use that? Quantum
computing: Are we going to be able to use that? And I think it’s not at all
clear that any of them will be able to sort of take up that mantle in the way
that Moore’s Law has done, particularly over so many decades.

If we’re at the end of Moore’s Law,
is there a new technology that would return us to these massive gains?

None
that we know yet. There are candidates. People have proposed architectural
changes in the way we do our switches that might make things more efficient. I
think there’s some possibility there. Although, again, probably not the decades
and decades of Moore’s Law. People have talked about things like optical
computing. That seems like that might be interesting, particularly for some
kinds of calculations. Then there are other things like quantum computing,
which I think many people have the sense of quantum computing is just the next
generation of computing. I actually don’t think that’s right. I think it’s more
like a different kind of specializer. So I think that’s what the landscape
looks like right now. But as I say, I don’t think there are any of these that
really look like they’re going to be the next general-purpose technology, for
the moment.

How difficult would it be to start
manufacturing these chips in the US instead of overseas?

It
really depends on how cutting edge you want your chips to be. The smaller you get,
the harder it gets, the closer you’re getting to moving around individual atoms
and things like that. And so if you want to be away from the cutting edge,
actually, there are lots of places that can build that. And so that is more
broadly available technology.

The
problem with [cutting-edge chips] that is building one of those factories these
days costs $20 billion or $22 billion. So it’s a big deal. It’s really hard.
You need very cutting-edge equipment to do it. The challenge there is that we
probably did not worry about this as much in the past because there used to be
25 different companies, all of whom were on the frontier of building chips. And
as these factories have become more and more expensive over time, what we’re
down to is now basically three different companies that produce these cutting-edge
chips. So it is very hard. There are not very many folks that do it at the
cutting edge, but it certainly is important that we have good production
facilities and that we know that they can be secure.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a
weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Neil Thompson is an innovation scholar in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, a research scientist at the MIT Initiative on the
Digital Economy, and an associate member of the Broad Institute.

The post 5 Questions for Neil Thompson on the Death of Moore’s Law appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.