It’s been 10 years since we have smartphones, 30 since we have personal computers, and 50 since we have computers at companies. From those computers that are as big as a room to the computer that we carry in our pockets, a few iterations of Moore’s Law have passed, that one that says that computers double their capacity every two years. The engineer Gordon Moore proposed in 1965 to observe the evolution of the number of components in integrated circuits.
Moore’s Law has three relevant aspects: it’s exponential growth, the time in which it has been in action (the more it works, the more evident it’s effects are) and our impossibility of making ourselves capable. Our brain has been programmed for millions of years for an adaptation to a surrounding —we call it evolution— where we don’t observe phenomenons of exponential change. Horse drawn carriages didn’t double their speed with double the horses, cars don’t go double their speed with every new model and airplanes don’t fly twice as far every motor generation. This only happens with digital technologies.
My father explained Moore’s Law to me without knowing it when I was about ten, one day when he was showing me how to play chess. He told me that chess was invented by a wise man in India a long long time ago and that the emperor wished to reward him with anything he desired. The wise man said he only wanted a grain of rice for the first square of the board, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth one and so on, successively, until reaching the 64th square (my father explained it to me with wheat, as he is from Concabella). The emperor was amazed by the wise man’s humbleness and granted him his wish.
With every iteration of Moore’s Law the impact of technology is made more evident. We already have 53.
If you calculate it, you will realize that in the first half of the board the number of grains of rice per square is quite low for a while. When we reach the half of the board, the quantity is of 2^32-1 grains of rice which is equal to a whole rice field. The problem (for the emperor) is when we start counting the second half of the chess board, where on every square we double the number of wheat fields from its predecessor.
Since Moore made the observation about the transistors that fit in an integrated circuit in 1965 it’s been 53 years, which is the same as, 35 iterations of the law that carries his name. This means that in digital technologies we are already on the second half of the board where the rhythm of changes is the order of rice fields, and not rice grains.
At the end of the board the grains reach 2^64-1, which is the same as, 264 times the world production of rice of the 2016/2017 season. Humbleness, the emperor made the wise man’s head be cut off.
