By Bret Swanson

It’s no secret that information technology has been a bright
spot in an otherwise mundane technology and productivity picture over the last
several decades. Computers and the internet — and the industries which most
aggressively leveraged them — flourished, while most of the physical industries
limped along.

But there is also a persistent worry that Moore’s law — the exponential economic phenomenon driving
digital advance — is slowing down. And if the key foundation of information
technology slows, then the economy might really be in trouble. The prognosis
for Moore’s law is thus a chief factor in overall economic possibilities.

In his new book, “The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies
Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s” (Encounter Books,
2021), Mark Mills argues that not only is Moore’s law alive and well but that a
number of other technologies are now maturing into powerhouses of their own.
Further, the confluence of information and these new physical technologies will
lead to another “roaring” era, akin to the 1920s, when radio, automobiles,
airplanes, electrification, and other technologies remade the world. In 1965,
Intel founder Gordon Moore, with help from Carver Mead, saw that transistor
densities on microchips were doubling every year or two and predicted that they
could continue to do so for the next decade, at least.

As transistors got smaller, they would get faster and
cheaper. At a furious compound doubling pace, they would launch an information
revolution. Few predictions in technology work out, and none so spectacularly as Moore’s law.

For the last 20 years, however, many technologists have argued that Moore’s law is now, or will soon be, dead. In the last five years, those assertions have hardened into common knowledge. It’s true that by the most traditional measure of feature size, Moore’s law can’t continue forever. Existing transistor designs can only shrink so far before they reach an atomic limit. Leading-edge “fabs” (or semiconductor factories), meanwhile, keep growing in cost (now around $12 billion to construct one).

And yet Mills shows that the combination of micro chip
advances and macro architectural innovations (the cloud, in which
millions of microchips are linked to perform common, commoditized tasks) have
combined to keep Moore’s law going strong. What we care about, after all, is
not just transistor size but computations per second per dollar. Additional
innovations such as three-dimensional chip stacking and wafer-scale chips may help
extend Moore’s law for another decade or two, at least. (See me nearby holding
the largest
chip in the world from Cerebras.)

Beyond chips, Mills, who is a physicist and energy expert,
broadens our too-often information-centric technological horizon with a host of
new innovations in materials and machines.

One of the most exciting fields is graphene, which is
single-layer carbon atoms in a honeycomb lattice. “The properties of such a
material,” Mills writes, “are nothing less than magical.” It’s amazingly
strong and light and has spectacular electrical properties. Rice University
professor James
M. Tour has demonstrated dozens of practical applications of flash graphene, which is special because it’s easy and
cheap to make into single sheets, unlike previous generations which stuck
together. Graphene could transform construction by massively reducing the use
of concrete and make nearly every building, vehicle, and machine lighter and
stronger. It could also revolutionize biotechnology with nano-cellular
applications.

Mills’ book is an antidote to sprawling pessimism. His
vision is not automatic, however. It won’t happen if we don’t allow
entrepreneurs to grab the antidote and drink it.

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