Moore: exponential growth of Goodness!

Moore's law.

It's a concept that I like very much. It gets more and more.. interesting, the more I think about it. It' widely known, but gets much less hype than it really deserves.
Think about this; you might equal the effects of mr Newton's law of gravity with Moore's law.. To push a slightly ambitious analogy, just consider only one difference between these; the medium they affect.. Gravity affects anything that has mass and is a force that accelerates objects with mass toward each other..

The most notable effect of this law is that if you let go of your cup of coffee it will most likely, depending on your location, accelerate toward the gravitational center of the earth.

Moore's law is not a law of nature, it is more a close relationship between the fundamental production process of transistor-based technology, the development of these methods, and economical laws of supply and demand, that have, in a so remarkably linear way, scaled down the size of transistors so they shrink about 50% in size every 18 months. This is not a simple predictable development that can go on forever (and should really be named 'Moore's tendency' to be more correct)

The immediate effect this has is to continuously affect the size, price, and the raw material cost per-transistor in micro-chips. This translates nicely into the daily life so that anything that can be done with a transistor-based chip, WILL be done with a transistror. And every 18 months these chips WILL be smaller, more powerfull and less hungry for electricity and in general better suited for whatever purpose you can put them to. With the increasing computational- , and micromanaging power disponible on a global scale, this will be a force that accellerates the flow of information, and speed up the automation of machines, and virtually every other process that can be controlled or enchanced by microchips.

This could be percieved as 'nothing unusual', given that this development is an everyday phenomenon, just like gravity it's nothing much to get worked up about, it's just there, right? The coffe cup hits the floor, and new line of computers hits the store every season time and time again. Right?

Wrong!

Even though these two phenomenons are very difficult to compare, there is one difference. Both forces can be said to accelerate something, either matter, or 'human technolgical development'. But the most striking difference is that the acceleration caused by gravity is very abruptly ended when the gravitational objects finally impacts into each other, (or, if we're talking the inter-planetary level here, enters an orbit of some kind). But, Moore's law, if it holds true, and microchips continue to develop and increase in efficency, the acceleration of human development, will NOT stop, until the Moore constant is declining. There are many, many arcicles which discuss the future of the Moore constant, the rate of increase or decrease, or (not unlikely) be completely obsoleted, by a new fundamental computational paradigm change. Who knows..

But for the mental excercise, just consider the possibility that Moore's law might predict the future, for as long as the next 100 years (not very likely, but still)..

The effect would undoubtly be that everything you ever imagined, that involved microchips, will be reality, and very quickly, become yesterday's news. Everything chip-controlled will become increasingly small, until the very barriers imposed by fundamental physics rules will protest, and then things will become more and more complex, still pushing the rules of the physical playground. Just imagine something being as small as you can imagine, and then you will probably be in the right neighborhood, but still a tad too big.

When thinking along these lines of miniaturization, a new and exiting development will also take place, moved by the same economy/technology push and pull as the computer advances are governed by: the next obvious step will be to integrate the advances in computational and ultra small technology with the most complex mechanism yet known to humanity, man himself...

Try this. Imagine the Darwinean evolutionary theory of the journey from mokey to man mixed with the consequences of Moore's law..... done thinking?




I wanna be a cyborg.

O' web interface, thy blessings be ever so many, BUT..

[metablog warning!]

While web interfaces are accessible, platform independent and mostly reliant
on open standards, and gererally quite handy to use, one BIG problem is the uncanny ability to eat a big potion of work (think 'homework' and 'The Dog'), and still be hungry for more.. One distraught click, and GONE.

"Nonononoo.. I didn't want that! Escape! Regret! Undo! *click-click-click*"

Some more navigating, reloading and restless flickering back and forth through the website, before the bitter realization that the text is beyond rescue, AND that this probably is caused solely by my own very poorly guided action. With the assistance of a interface without the necessary foolproofing, and a solution lacking a basic undo/rollback feature I have given myself a mental equivalent of a good, healthy punch in the face. Stupid, stupid!

Security features like session timeout, being used to avoid unauthorized access to shared computers, have many, many hours of my creative work on its conscoiusness.

This is a source of intense negative vibes in my case, because of the sheer pointlessness of what has happened before my eyes. Written material, of reasonable quality, just disappear by accident of navigation. Here I, the writer, spend some of the most valuable rescource known to man, fractions of my own lifetime, refining, considering and putting to print my own words.

And then, for no good reason the words are lost. Without even a hint of purpose to their brief existence, there have been no audience, no transfer and mating of memes , no good done, with the possible exception of joy on the authors part, however fleeting, derived from work well done.

The text can wery well be re-created, maybe in a even better way than the initial, but the writers motivation, mood, and all stress-related physiological processes take a serious hit.

Data loss in general, and those caused by web interfaces in general, sucks. The only vaguely positive data loss experience I've ever had, was the rapid, successive, catastrophic loss of content on every hard drive in my posession. Weird enough, it felt therapeutic.

The conclusion of this rant must be, beware of data loss, keep backups and save always!

First posting, all set and.. POSTS AWAY!

Why the silly title? You might wonder what kind of message I'm trying to broadcast, but hey, it's probably more than one.

First of all i really like the sound of it, My Castle. It's all mine. And I can do whatever I want around here. Probably without anybody taking notice, lest I be loud enough, and invite people over, ever so often.

I'm online pretty often. The majority of my friends are online too, and not in the "what's-new-in-the-online-version-of-the-local-paper-today,-maybe-some-porn?"-wussy kind of way. We go online to socialize, to seek knowledge, software(legal and, to a varying degree, not-so-legal), news sources of our own preference, even sexual satisfaction (though few make this a public activity, SOMEONE has to fund the multi-billion industry of online porn, right?). The internet is a MAJOR medium, with a considerable impact on our lives.

Me, for one, myself dabble with the idea of getting disposable income from work and operations, in some way or another, connected to the great big internet. That's a quite thorough adoption of, and a heavy reliance on a technical solution, like the internet is.

This may seem stupid, but what I find most remarkable about this is that EVERYBODY does this. It's nothing special about this for a lot of the people living in the good old civiliced part of the world(no offence to countries with non-functioning TLD's like .er). The growing percentage og people, on a regular, or constant basis, connecting to a global, digital network, is so huge that people did not even bother to imagine the effects of a only 20 years ago.

And and as a firm believer in Moore's Law, I will have to say 'you ain't seen nothing yet!' about this developing trend.

Forget everything about the 68'ers, the dessert, the X and Y generation, it's the online generation that counts.