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Moore's Law: One Singular Sensation
by Drew Clark
In his 2005 book "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology," futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil predicts the day -- no more than a generation hence -- when computing capability will advance beyond that of human reasoning. That "singularity" is the point at which humans will cease to be the dominant force in science and technology, and artificial intelligence, or human-computing combinations, will become dominant.
For Kurzweil, an early designer of speech-recognition software who years ago successfully predicted that computers would beat humans at chess, the radical notion of singularity is driven by his analysis of something that has become a commonplace in information technology: Moore's Law, or the fact that computing power continues to double every two years.
"By the times of the singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology," Kurzweil wrote. "This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond." He said Moore's Law has spawned a "law of accelerating returns," or a process of "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."
Moore's Law, the principle to which Silicon Valley gives the most deference, has much more pedestrian origins. In a 1965 article in Electronics Magazine, Fairchild Semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore described the process of "cramming more components onto integrated circuits."
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year," or a doubling every year," Moore wrote. "Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years."
More Computer Power, More Policy Problems
Moore revised the concept in 1975, when he was the CEO of Intel. He postulated that computing power would double every generation of microchip technology, or roughly every other year.
In spite of the constant fear that Moore's Law eventually would run its course, it has held true for more than 40 years. While the first microprocessor had 2,200 transistors, current chip sets contain more than a billion. And while Moore has said his projection cannot continue forever because silicon technology eventually will be constrained by the size of atoms, Kurzweil and others believe that nanotechnologies will step in when silicon runs its course.
The growing power of computers for past generations of humans barely cracked into the realm of public policy. For many years, faster and more powerful computers did not seem to affect the everyday citizens. Now that has changed. While the "singularity" may forever remain a future prospect, the reality of everyday computing use is omnipresent, and with that comes political issues posed by Moore's Law.
One issue is personal privacy. For technologist Richard Smith, who has long explored how technology is changing the common understanding of personal privacy, threats to privacy come from the use of technologies like radio-frequency identification for tracking goods and people, facial-recognition cameras, and real-time monitoring systems.
"Anything that uses chips will get better, smaller, faster and more mobile," Smith told Robert O'Harrow in his 2005 book "No Place To Hide." "Fundamentally, Moore's Law is driving the reaction of these surveillance networks."
Businesses and governments are reluctant not to use technologies such as RFID that offer greater efficiencies and security of process ranging from inventory control to immigration control. The end result, however, is a huge assemblage of data with few, if any, rules governing the collection, use and mining of data.
"The human population does not double every 18 months, but its ability to use computers to keep track of us does," Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of the encryption program Pretty Good Privacy, said in a 2003 debate on Moore's Law and privacy. He was speaking particularly of the threat from the high-tech surveillance cameras pervasive in British cities. "You can't encrypt your face."
The End of Copyright?
Moore's Law also has led to computers that can be used as playback devices for recorded music and video. But that digital technology poses a unique challenge to copyright law.
The law gives creators exclusive rights to exploit their works' economic value. Authors sell manuscript rights to book publishers, for example, and publishers use copyright law to stop pirated editions that pay no royalties to publishers or authors.
Before the computer revolution, copyright worked because it was relatively easy to find printing presses or factories used for forging bootleg books, records or films. The inconvenience of making photocopies, or audio or videocassettes, kept copyright violations in check.
But the explosion of digital technology and the Internet changed that equation. Digital copies are frequently better than analog and do not degrade with each reproduction. The Internet in all of its forms -- e-mail, the Web, file-sharing technology -- has slashed the cost of distribution.
That erases one of the biggest advantages of the entertainment companies, potentially undermining the basis for quintessential American industries -- such as Hollywood's movie industry -- that have been built on artistic creativity. Under Moore's Law, it becomes easier and easier with every generation of technology to copy the works from those industries.
That scenario has led the entertainment industry to push for restrictions on copying technologies. The push began in the form of anti-piracy legislation first introduced in 2002 by Ernest (Fritz) Hollings, the former Democratic senator from South Carolina.
Although the Hollings bill died without a vote in the Senate Commerce Committee, it did bequeath a range of technological restrictions still being considered in this year's communications debate: the "broadcast flag" to close a video piracy loophole and an "audio flag" designed to stop users of satellite radios from copying and storing digital songs.
Moore's Law seems destined to continue exacerbating the war between artistic creativity and technological innovation.
A Changing Model For Communications
Moore's Law may have its most potent application in the field of communications. All forms of transmission -- from cellular to broadcast to telephone -- have gone digital. And Intel itself now integrates miniature radios into its chips, allowing wireless data transmissions.
In the world of single-use analog applications, it was never cost-effective to send a photograph over a telephone wire, nor was there a business model for transmitting high-fidelity music over co-axial cables, although both were technologically possible. The digitization made possible by Moore's Law, and the Internet, changes the cost/benefit equations.
That means that telecommunications companies, cable companies and broadcasters are technologically capable of branching into other lines of business -- as long as Congress and the FCC does not bar them from doing so.
But Moore's Law also means that newcomers -- from Microsoft to Google to the Vonage Internet phone company -- can take the same Internet infrastructure and re-use it to compete directly against the established communications firms.
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