How long will Moore's Law continue boosting computing power? (featuring Dr. Adam Becker)

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26:13All right, so in 1947, Bell Labs creates the transistor, just in time for us to use it to get to space, which is the most important topic that we have to keep getting to every episode. All right, so now we've got the transistor. How do we go about shrinking it? Yes, the transistors are built out of semiconductors. You hear the semiconductor industry everywhere. And what does that really mean? Well, we understand what conductor is, right? It's something where electricity can flow. And an insulator is something where electricity cannot flow. And to understand that, you have to take your vision of the atom, where you have electrons orbiting around the nucleus or being in fuzzy quantum mechanical states, and think about what happens when you put a lot of atoms together.

26:55Like what is the energy level of an electron around an iron atom? Well, it's a bunch of levels. What happens when you have a billion iron atoms in a lattice? What happens to those electrons? Well, they don't really belong to any individual nucleus anymore. They sort of like move around the iron superhighway. They can flow around from here to there. And what distinguishes a conductor from an insulator is whether or not there's a big gap between energy levels. Like can the electrons get up to those energy levels where they can flow around between all the atoms or not? If they can get up there, then it's a conductor.

27:31If there's a really big gap so they can't get up there, then it's an insulator. Semiconductors are things that are sort of halfway in between. They have a medium-sized gap between the energy levels where the electrons are stuck around individual atoms and the ones where they're just flowing across the superhighway. And so that's something you can control. control if you tweak it a little bit by like adding a little bit of germanium or this other kind of thing you can control that gap and so what you want when you're building circuits is you want places where things conduct really well and then places where things conduct really really terribly and so rather than having to have different kinds of material like if i build a circuit in my garage i use copper for the wires and then i use rubber for the insulators it's better if you can have a single kind of material and just sort of like tweak it and like okay i'm gonna make this part of it conductor and that part of it an insulator because it allows you to print circuits onto your material.

28:23Okay. And so what is the material you use? So we use silicon. Silicon is the semiconductor of choice. And then you dope it with various things to change its behavior, to make it a conductor. And the way that we have shrunk transistors from pretty big stuff you could see on your garage bench to tiny stuff, almost the size of atoms is through a technique called photolithography, which essentially prints a circuit onto a piece of silicon. We grow these huge silicon wafers. They're like 10 inches. And then you want to print a circuit onto it. And you want to print like billions and billions of transistors.

28:57And you want them to be as small as possible for the reason we just pointed out. So like, how do you print this stuff onto a piece of silicon? So this is what photolithography is. essentially you design your circuit on the computer and then you print on the surface of the silicon this thing called a photo mask and the photo mask like protects the silicon from the next thing you're going to do to it which is blast it with really high energy light so you shoot like super high energy light at the silicon which is partially covered by this mask and the parts that are exposed get a little bit chemically changed then you dip the whole thing in like acid and the parts that were exposed get like eaten away, for example.

29:37And so what you're left with is just the pattern that you wanted. That's like a very hand wavy explanation of how photolithography works. But the things to understand is that it's limited by those photons. Like if you use photons that were really wide wavelengths, then you're going to get a fuzzy picture. If you use photons with really narrow wavelengths, which means high energy photons, right then you're going to get much crisper picture and so over the decades we've been trying to shrink these transistors to get more and more transistors on these chips and have faster computers and one way to do that is to crank up the energy of those photons and so now we're in the like extreme ultraviolet limit where the photons have a wavelength of like 13 or 14 nanometers wow and that's hard because it requires like special optics you can't just use normal lenses to bend this kind of light.

30:29It's why it's very hard to do like x-ray optics also. The higher the energy light, the harder it is to bend it. Have we maxed this out? We probably have maxed this out because anything beyond this requires insane optics. Like already the optics are insane. You know, making a single mask for these things costs like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there's like a few places in the world you can do this kind of stuff. The equipment is extremely expensive. The operating conditions are very, very particular. You have to have specialized clean rooms. Like, this is really the pinnacle of technology.

31:04It's incredible. And that's why, you know, a few of these players in this field, like the Taiwanese semiconductor industry, is so important for the worldwide computing industry. Like, a single company goes down and, like, we can't make computers anymore. Wow. Oh, my gosh. Right. Right. All of the geopolitical tensions just came into focus. Yeah, exactly. That's one reason why Taiwan is so important, because a lot of this stuff is done by Taiwanese firms. All right. So we figured out photolithography and we've kind of reached the limit. Yeah. Is that the end of the story? It's not quite the end of the story.

31:37And, you know, I have more to say about like how impressive it is. Like in the mid 90s, we were doing things at like 350 nanometer scale, which sounds pretty awesome. I'm like, that sounds pretty tiny. And then late 90s, it was like 180 nanometers. Then the 2000s, it was sub 100 nanometers. These days, we're getting down to like 10 nanometers, single nanometers. It's amazing. But it's getting harder and harder because we're already beyond the wavelength of the light that we're using, right? And we're approaching the size of the atom, right? Silicon atoms are like 0.2 nanometers across. So like you're going to build a transistor out of something.

32:16It's like, you know, you can't make things out of Legos if you only have a few of the bricks. Right. And so it's challenging to make transistors smaller than about a nanometer because we're really reaching that fundamental limit of the size of the silicon atom. And every year it gets harder. Like it's true that we've increased the transistor density every two years. We've doubled it. But the amount of money spent in this research has increased by a factor of 10 or 20. So it's not like a constant effort every year to achieve this. We have to ramp up the energy and the creativity. And that's great.

32:52You know, it's like inspired all sorts of cool things and spinoffs and whatever. But it gets really, really complicated. And the sort of cutting edge of this is to now start stacking these transistors. So like, well, don't just think of it as a plane. let's like go up in the third dimension let's make the transistors more powerful by shrinking them further and then allowing them to grow in sort of the third dimension above this sort of plane and the leading edge of technology right now are these transistors called fin fet so fet which stands for field effect transistor and then a fin meaning like they literally have this like fin over the gate that controls it like a physical thing it looks like a shark fin that makes it possible to be efficient while shrinking even further.

33:38So you can make the sort of footprint of it smaller while keeping its effectiveness because you have this third dimension. And so that's what stacking is. And really, people think that we've reached the limit of what we can do technologically. And as some of the listeners have said, we're going in other directions. Like instead of making your CPU more dense, you just have multiple cores. Or you start building other dedicated stuff like graphics processing units that are really good at linear algebra, which is needed for graphics and also for machine learning. And so we're sort of like simultaneously trying to go in many directions at once to improve the power of computing, but it's not clear that we can keep doing this.

34:16And a lot of people think that we really are at the edge of what we can do to improve computing speed. Wow, and so stacking isn't going to be the magic solution because there's like limits on stacking? Yeah, exactly. Like stacking gets you a little further, but if we're going to keep doubling, then it's hard. And I think there's something to be said about the sociological impact of this doubling. Moore's law is not something that comes out of the fundamental laws of physics. It's something that was predicted and that we maintained really over decades, which is really incredible. One of Intel's earliest processors, the 4004, had 2 ,300 transistors in it, whereas the 8386, which I've spent a lot of time programming on as a teenager, had like hundreds of thousands of transistors.

35:02And this MacBook I'm sitting in front of has billions. It's incredible. But it sort of guided the field. I think people, because they thought this was possible and maybe even inevitable, they worked for it. It's a target. And so if you think something is possible, then you stay late and you push hard and you come up with new ideas. And so in some sense, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Okay, so first of all, have we hit the limit to Moore's Law already, or you just think we're going to hit it soon? Like, when is the first year you think where we'll be like, Moore's Law, gone? I think we're right at that inflection point.

35:36You know, we're still seeing improvements in speed. We're still seeing big boosts in productivity. But we're sort of running out of avenues. And so I still see that, like, my MacBook is faster than the one I gave my son, which is my two-year-old MacBook. But I don't know that the one I'm going to get in two years is going to be as much faster. So I think we're right at that inflection point. So that feels a little scary to me. So like, you know, over time, we've gotten computers that are better. And so at least, you know, in my field, almost every, you know, five years, you expect, you know, the statistical models of the systems that we study to get more complicated so that we can get a better understanding out of each one of our data sets.

36:16Are we not going to be able to do that anymore? Or do you think in 20 years, our computers are just going to start getting bigger again until they fill up a room? Because we're going to want to keep getting more complicated in our analyses. Yeah, well, I think we're already seeing our computing getting bigger. I mean, think about like the data centers that are being built by Meta. And Microsoft is like trying to turn back on nuclear reactors because they need the power for their AI data centers. These things are vast and they're consuming huge amounts of our resources. So I think, yeah, our appetite for computing is just growing.

36:48And even if our computers don't get faster, we're just going to keep building them bigger and bigger. But I also think that for those of us who do things that are not directly just computing, that there are other ways to increase speed. I was talking to Katrina about this, and she was saying that Moore's law also kind of applies to genomics. You know, like the first study of a human genome cost like how many millions for one genome? and then the NIH had a target of like, it should cost less than$1 ,000 to sequence a human genome. And they hit that target and now it's cheaper than$1 ,000. And where does this come from?

37:23Part of it comes from computing, but also part of it comes from like the miniaturization of biology. And I've seen this just like observing her field, something that used to be like a PhD level of work, then in a few years becomes a little box on the lab bench. You press a button and it's done while you're at lunch, right? Yeah. And that allows you to now do things that were impossible 10 years earlier. And that kind of transformation of the scope of the capacity of the field enables broader, deeper thinking. And that's not just computing, right? That's miniaturization of like the actual biology, like micro little bits.

37:57It's essentially like what Theranos was tapping into this feeling like, oh, eventually we should be able to diagnose diseases with tiny little drops of blood and this kind of sense. And so I think that there's lots of dimensions that we can follow for improving our scientific and technological industrial capacities, not just is my computer faster. So when someone says, like you just did, such and such follows Moore's law, do they essentially mean we do it better with smaller stuff and like we do it exponentially better in particular? Yeah, I think it's about exponential growth. That's a crucial thing because exponential growth builds on itself.

38:38It's like putting a dollar in the bank. Every year you have more dollars and those dollars earn more dollars and eventually you have all the dollars. Whereas if you're just selling lemonade and you're making a dollar every day, you're making the same amount of dollars every day. It's not increasing. So it's all about that exponential growth. And I think that that's what people mean when they refer to Moore's Law sort of more colloquially than just like the density of transistors on a chip. That's kind of interesting because like Moore's law isn't really a law, like it's an observation. And so it seems like now anytime we see exponential growth, we say the words Moore's law instead of just saying exponential growth.

39:15Or am I being negative? No, I think you're right. And I think it says something about our aspirations. You know, we live in a time when we expect our children's lives to be very different from our lives and our grandparent lives. And that's really unusual. Like most of human history, you could tell your kids what their life was going to be like, because it was going to be basically the same as yours and your grandparents for like the last 10 ,000 years. Right. Because like change was inconceivable because nobody had ever experienced it. But now we live in a time when like, we know that's not true.

39:49And so I think it leaves us with this like gap in our wisdom. And then we project forward. And some of us are optimistic and we're like, yay, this is going to change our lives in a way that solves all of our problems. And as you'll hear from Adam, some of us are less optimistic about what this means and whether it's the right way to place our bets. I do feel like that was a slightly simplified view of history, but this isn't Daniel and Kelly's historical universe. So we're moving on. Hey, I had to fit it into about one minute, so I'm not going to do a deep dive. But yeah, I mean, do you disagree with me about the broader assessment of the way that human experience has changed?

40:26I do think human experience was similar for a really long time. You know, like when our ancestors moved out of Africa, there was probably a lot that changed in a couple generations. And the Industrial Revolution and climate. Yeah, yeah. I think there's probably been a lot of moments where things were like, oh, crud. But usually probably they were getting worse, whereas now we're hoping that it's getting better. But anyway, so when I was reading Adam Becker's new book, More Everything Forever, there was a discussion on Moore's Law where I realized like, oh my gosh, I fundamentally didn't understand Moore's Law very well or what underpinned Moore's Law.

41:03And I didn't realize that we were perhaps reaching the end of Moore's Law. And so we reached out to Adam Becker and asked if he would talk to us about sort of the implication of the death of Moore's Law. I'll be super dramatic about it. But how this expectation of exponential growth impacts our view of the future in ways that are not always necessarily realistic, let's say.

41:36We'll be right back.

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44:17All right, so then we're very happy to welcome to the podcast Adam Becker, who is an astrophysicist turned author. He wrote the widely acclaimed book, What is Real, one of my favorite books about quantum mechanics. If you write to me to ask for a book about quantum mechanics that explains stuff in an accessible way, I often recommend it. And he has a new book out called More Everything Forever about the rise of techno-utopiasts and how we can project our future and the future of technology. Adam, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks. It's great to be here. So let's start just by talking about Moore's Law.

44:54It's the foundation of so much of the techno-utopian movement. Why do you think that it has inspired sort of this broader fanaticism, especially when it's just like an empirical observation, not like a deep law of the universe? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, Moore's Law, yeah, it is an empirical observation, but it's so regular. It's so comforting. And it has, you know, the fact that Moore's Law held more or less accurately for what, about 50 years, it did change a lot of things about the world. And it took computers from being these large, slow, you know, refrigerator sized things that live in mainframe rooms at corporations to, you know, tiny little things that live in our pockets or on our wrists and have much more power than all of the main frames that existed, you know, in the 1970s combined, right?

46:00Caused all sorts of changes in our society, some for the better, some much for the worse. But, you know, living through that, it seemed like clockwork, right? You know, I mean, I only lived through like the last part of it, but I remember when I was a kid, It seemed like computers were just always getting smaller and faster and better every single year. And you could just get, you know, the advice was wait as long as you can to get a new computer because the longer you wait, the better it'll be. Right? And it was this amazing thing. And it made a lot of people a lot of money. And a few people truly enormous amounts of money.

46:40And so you put all of that together and it kind of makes some sense that some people would take it extremely seriously as this general thing because it seemed to be, you know, if you lived a comfortable middle or upper class life, it seemed like the most important thing in the world in the late 20th century. Right? And it wasn't really like anything that you'd seen before. It was easy to think, oh, this is just going to continue. So Ray Kurzweil is this inventor and futurist who, you know, he made like real serious contributions to text to speech technology and like assistive devices for the visually impaired and I think hearing impaired as well.

47:25You know, he made serious contributions to the field of electronic instruments, like, you know, musical instruments. But he is best known as a futurist. He is best known as somebody who, you know, makes these forecasts about what the future is going to be like. So he's a retired electrical engineer, you're saying? Essentially, yeah. I have a lot of those in my inbox. Yeah, me too, man. I'm pretty sure that if you put anywhere on the internet that you have a PhD in physics, you get a lot of retired electrical engineers in your inbox. Guys, my inbox has pictures of feces from people who want to know if they have parasite infections.

48:01I'm feeling pretty low on sympathy right now. Oh, but I once got— But I'm so sorry for you guys. Yeah. No, we should have a separate episode just talking about what's in our inboxes because I have some crazy stuff. In any event. All right. So you were telling us how Ray Kurzweil was thinking about how Moore's Law is transforming technology and that's the engine of transformation of society and predicting the future of society more broadly. Exactly. Yeah. And like Kurzweil extends Moore's Law in his, you know, forecast of the future and says, oh, this is part of a more general trend in the history of technology and the history of, you know, even life in the universe.

48:46And he calls it the law of accelerating returns, where he says, you know, once you have better technology, it's going to allow you to make the technology that you've already got even better. And then that'll just be a self-reinforcing cycle that leads to this exponential trend. And Moore's law is just one manifestation of that trend. And it's going to, you know, he says, it's something that you can see if you look back through the entire history, not just of human technology, but evolution of life on Earth, because you see the same thing with biological, quote unquote, technology. And he says, you know, this is going to continue.

49:20And in short order, we are going to reach this point that he calls the singularity, which is where you've got, you know, technology that has developed to such an advanced degree that it gives us, you know, godlike powers of creation and destruction and transformation and just changes the fundamental nature of life on Earth and in the universe. Well, a lot of what you said sounds reasonable, right? Sure. There is evolution and there is transformation and things are changing more rapidly. But from reading your book and from your tone, I'm guessing you don't agree with Kurzweil about the singularity and how we're all going to be techno-gods in the future.

49:55Why not? Why will Daniel not be a techno-god? Yeah. I mean, look. Daniel in particular. Yes. I have a personal stake in this question now. Yes, Daniel in particular. Yeah, you are not going to be a techno god, Daniel, because by having me on this podcast, Ray Kurzweil is going to put you on his list and then he won't allow you to ascend to techno god. I knew this was a mistake. Yeah, exactly. Worse than trying to fight a land war in Asia, huh? Yes, exactly. Yeah, no, that's number two now. Number one is inviting Adam Becker onto your podcast. Okay. But I mean, look, Kurzweil is taking this exponential trend and just extending it out into the future and saying it's going to last forever.

50:38And the one thing that's always true about exponential trends is that they end, right? If you see any sort of exponential trend in nature or in technology or whatever, your first thought should be, oh, that can't last. because it just doesn't. There are not enough resources. There's not enough space. There's not enough anything to allow exponential trends in general to continue forever. One of the examples that Kurzweil gives in his book, The Singularity is Near, which is probably his most famous book from about 2005. Doesn't he have a few books? Like The Singularity is Near, The Singularity is Nearer, The Singularity is Nearish?

51:21Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Singularity is Nearer came out last year. And when I tell people that that's a title, they usually don't believe me. But that is actually the title. He wrote a book called The Singularity is Nearer. Next year, the singularity is near ear. Yeah. Nearest.

51:40But the classic example in biology of exponential growth is something like bacterial growth in a Petri dish. And yeah, if you chart the number of bacteria in this nutrient-rich medium over time, yeah, it grows exponentially until they fill the dish and eat all of the agar, and then they die. to try to play devil's advocate. So when I was talking to space settlement folks, they would say something like, you know, the reason we need to go into space is because exponential growth does end at some point. But our species is so amazing that we can see when we're getting close to the like asymptote and the exponential curve.

52:20And so we can go out to space and get resources and we can be more proactive about it. What what is wrong about that argument? Yeah. I mean, where to start? Yeah, where to start. But you got to pick somewhere. Okay. I'm going to pick on, you know, I'm going to do what we should all strive to do or what I strive to do and punch up. Right. I'm going to pick on somebody bigger than me. Jeff Bezos makes the same argument. Right. Yeah. Jeff Bezos says that we need to go out into space because of exactly this. He says, you know, we are using exponentially more energy as time goes on. And if that trend continues, as it has for decades, if not centuries, then in about two, three hundred years, we're going to be using all of the energy on Earth that we get from the sun and we'll have used up all of the non-renewable resources.

53:08And so at that point, we need to go out into space, if not before then. Otherwise, we're going to have what he calls a civilization of stasis and rationing. And, you know, he's not wrong about the first part. If somehow we continue that exponential trend in energy usage, then yeah, and I think it's in about 300, 400 years, we'd be using all of the energy available to us on Earth. And also, we'd be using so much energy that like the waste heat from our energy usage would like boil off the oceans. We can't do that, right? It's not possible. I mean, putting aside that it's implausible that that trend will continue, the problem is with the second half.

53:48Because yeah, OK, we get like 300 to 400 more years here on Earth if you continue that trend. So Bezos says we have to go out into space. And what he doesn't say is where resources are unlimited, but he implies it. The problem is that if you really want exponential growth to continue, going out into space doesn't actually help you that much if you're looking on a timescale of centuries. because if you do that, like about, I think it's like a thousand years after we hit that point of using all of the sunlight that hits earth, we get to a point where we're just using the entire energy output of the sun.

54:26And then if we spot Bezos and company, a warp drive, so they can go faster than light to try to amass even more resources very, very quickly outside of the solar system, which we shouldn't spot them a warp drive. There's no reason to think that you can build a warp drive and a lot of reason to think that you can't. But if we do spot them a warp drive, that only gets you like about another 2000 years before you're using all of the energy in the observable universe. Wow. So, you know, there are limits, growth ends. And the fact is that, you know, all of that is wildly implausible. It's not like the lesson that I want people to take away from all of this is, oh, well, we better keep in mind that growth has to end at some point to the next like 3 ,000-ish years.

55:16The answer is, oh, no, growth has to end a lot sooner than that. Because, you know, going out into space has lots of problems, even putting aside the lack of warp drive. Just living in the solar system is an extraordinarily difficult and dubious proposition. To give Bezos a little bit of credit after ragging on him just now, one of the things I like that Jeff Bezos has said, is he makes fun of Elon Musk for wanting to go to Mars because Mars sucks. But Bezos's solution is, you know, for going out into space is not considerably better, which is to build like hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous city-sized space stations and then have everybody live inside of them.

55:56This is also not a great idea for many, many reasons. All right. So it's reasonable, I think, to make these arguments against like the strongest version of those claims, you know, exponential growth will last forever. And you're right. That's obviously impractical because the universe is finite or the observable part of it is finite, at least. But what if we just like water down those claims a little bit and we just say, you know, technology is transforming society very rapidly. And even the future you describe as refuting exponential growth, that sounds pretty awesome. Like if in 2000 years, we're tapping into all the energy from the sun and nearby stars and have an incredible, star-spanning civilization, a lot of people out there would be like, that sounds great.

56:39What's wrong with that? The prospect of large numbers of people living and working in space has an enormous number of technological and social and political questions tied to it that are very, very difficult to solve and may not be solvable. And some of those problems are sort of irreducibly time consuming. You can't solve them without doing like lengthy experiments involving things like radiation exposure and low gravity exposure and things like that. And I see Kelly nodding and, you know, Kelly may know more about this than I do because, you know, this is one of the subjects in my book. Kelly and Zach wrote an entire book about this, an excellent book that I really like.

57:24I do always find a way to pull the conversation back to space settlements. Sorry for derailing us, but you do a great chapter on it in your book. Yeah, thank you. And you have nothing to apologize for. It's in my book. But let me maybe highlight a difference between the takes you guys have in your books. Kelly and Zach say that, you know, we're maybe not ready to settle space, that we haven't done the necessary legwork and we shouldn't get overexcited and jump too fast and send people to Mars now because there's a lot of stuff we need to figure out, but that it's possible. And if we do it right, maybe you could figure this out.

57:56We just aren't there yet. But I feel like your book goes a step further and suggest that it's dangerous to make these projections. Somebody out there listening might say, all right, Adam, maybe we won't get there as far as these guys project, but however far we get will be great. What do you say to that person? Is there a danger in this kind of thinking? Yeah. I mean, this gets back sort of to the last question that you asked me as well. Because we don't know that it's possible to have large numbers of humans living off of Earth, because it's very possible that that's not something that we can do.

58:34We need to find a way to live safely and healthily within the limits imposed by Earth. We can't just assume that we're going to be able to leave. The danger is that this rhetoric of, oh, it's always going to be possible to expand out into space and grow forever can be used. And in fact, it's not hypothetical. It is being used to justify this sort of logic of rapacious consumption that is not sustainable here on Earth. And because there's a very good chance that we cannot in any meaningful way leave Earth, we need to stop doing that and find a way to live here. That's not to say that we shouldn't explore space.

59:18I think robots in space are amazing. I like the Voyager probes make me cry. You know, I'm a cosmologist by training. I think getting data from space is really important and interesting. I'm not even saying that we shouldn't send people into space to, you know, the Apollo missions were amazing and really interesting. They were, of course, you know, not primarily missions of scientific discovery. It was about the Cold War. But still, the fact that we did a crude sample return mission to the moon several times and nobody died is amazing. But the visions that we have of the future are used to justify all sorts of things right here and now.

59:58And so we need to be careful about what we think the future is going to look like and whether that's remotely plausible. And I really think that the things that Musk and Bezos and these other tech billionaires are talking about are sort of like saying, you know, yeah, well, it's OK that we're doing what we're doing right now, because in the future, we're all going to live in like Hogwarts and have broomsticks and magic wands. And like it's roughly the same level of plausibility. And so to try to get us connecting Moore's Law back with where we are in the conversation, to me, I see the connection being that you've got this thinking that we're going to have exponential growth in our ability to do everything.

1:00:40So like when I was talking to space settlement people, they'd be like, I talk about a problem and they'd say, well, AI is going to solve it. Everything is expanding. Our ability to do anything related to technology keeps expanding exponentially. And so, you know, we've talked about how we have limits. And so you can't expect exponential trends to go on forever. Do you connect then this kind of Moore's Law thinking with techno optimism and these sort of views of the future? Or have we just gotten off on a different topic? No, no, no. I think these things are connected, right? Like there's a reason why all of these different things are in my book.

1:01:14One of the things that I like to remind people about when we're talking about Moore's law is that Moore's law, it's not just that it's an empirical observation rather than a law of nature. Moore's law was a decision. Moore's law was a choice that the leaders of the semiconductor industry made, and then they continued making it for decades. And there was a roadmap and lots and lots of different plans made in order to ensure the continuation of Moore's Law for as long as possible. There are massive, massive amounts of money and corporate resources poured into this. And in fact, Moore's Law is not even an example of accelerating returns as Kurzweil would have.

1:01:57But in a sense, it's an example of diminishing returns because the semiconductor industry got less bang for their buck over time. They had to spend more and more money even adjusting for inflation just to get the same doubling of the number of processors crammed into the same space. the techno-utopian sort of ideas that Kurzweil pushes using Moore's Law as, you know, sort of the justification and this, you know, eternal expansion into space stuff that we've just been talking about, they all sort of traffic in the idea that the future of technology is not just, you know, eternal exponential growth and expansion, but that it's inevitably that.

1:02:39Not that that's, you know, something that we could do, but that it's what we have to do. It's what is going to happen. And the only alternative, if there is one, is the extinction of the species. And, you know, again, Musk is extremely clear about this. Musk has said the only choice we have is eternal expansion out into cosmos or extinction. And when he's pushed on this, he, you know, he brings up the fact that, you know, in about half a billion or a billion years, it's going to get so hot on Earth because of, you know, the sun getting hotter that the oceans will boil off. And yeah, that's not wrong, but a lot's going to happen between now and then.

1:03:21Not only is it not a particularly pressing problem, but it may not even end up being our problem at all because there are many other things that could cause humanity to go extinct between now and then, like, say, civilizational collapse due to global warming, For example, a problem that tech oligarchs and other billionaires have done a lot of work to try to prevent humanity from solving. But instead, Musk says that the solution is to leave Earth. And this is the sort of rhetoric that I was talking about, you know, in terms of like, this is what this eternal expansion idea gets you. But it's also, I think, part of the connection with the logic of taking Moore's law as this law of nature, that we can always count on these exponential trends and we can always count on human ingenuity and technical knowledge and know-how to get us out of any problem.

1:04:13If you believe that, account for all of the problems in the world today. There's so many problems that we have that are not amenable to technological solutions that people have tried to solve for a long time that are fundamentally social in nature or had a technological component but also have a social component like climate change, right? We have a lot, if not all, of the technology that we need to address climate change. But we haven't yet as a species, and that's primarily a social and political issue, not an issue of technology. So to paraphrase your argument, I think you're saying it's not that computers won't get faster and that technology can't help us in the future.

1:04:53It's just that we can't rely on it always doing so to magically solve all of our problems and in doing so distract ourselves from the real problems we face in the more immediate future. Yeah, yeah. I mean, also Moore's Law is over. I mean, come on. We have the transistors down about as small as we can get them. You know, you can't make a silicon transistor smaller than an atom of silicon. But you do see a role for technology in shaping our future. I mean, it's not that you don't want chat GPT to cure cancer, right? I definitely think that this is a role for technology and shaping our future. Technology is a big part of how we shape our future.

1:05:30I'm going to just pretend that you didn't say the thing about ChatGPT curing cancer, although there's this tweet. One of my favorite tweet and responses ever is where Sam Altman said something like, be me, build ChatGPT to cure cancer or whatever. And then people start criticizing you. And he goes on and on and has a pity party for himself. And then somebody just responded with, did you cure cancer or whatever? But, you know, there has been actually great progress made on treating cancer just in the last few years. Right. You know, like these I don't remember the names of the drugs because like I'm not a cancer guy.

1:06:08But like these approaches of like getting cancer patients own immune systems to properly recognize and attack the cancers in their own bodies has been like incredibly successful. and is really promising for further development. It's really amazing. And like there have been all sorts of really amazing biomedical advances that are currently being destroyed by RFK Jr. and Trump. Like mRNA vaccines are one of the great success stories of biomedical science in the last 20 years. And I think that's important. And I think in general, vaccines are great. There's all sorts of really wonderful technology that we've created that has made the world generally a better place, or has at least enabled people to make the world a better place, right?

1:06:49In general, technology is a tool and there are questions about how you use it, right? You know, nuclear power can be used to build nuclear power plants, but it can also be used to make bombs, yada, yada, yada. I think I just yada, yada nuclear apocalypse. But yeah. I think you did. Yeah. Whatever. I'm a physicist. Of course, that's what I'm going to do. But the point is, yeah, of course, there's a role for technology to play in shaping our future. It's just not two things. Technology is not the only thing that shapes our future. and the development and like future direction of technology is not inevitable.

1:07:21Technology is something that humans make and the future development of technology is filled with contingency and human choice. It is not like we build every single technology that it is physically possible to build. It's not on rails. It's not like it's, you know, the analogy I make in the book, it's not like a tech tree in civilization, right? Where like the future of technology is just sort of revealed to us and we have, we just make a choice about which branch we're going to pursue first. That's not how anything works. All right. Well, thanks, Adam, for coming on. And let's hope that ChatGBT does cure cancer before any of us get it.

1:07:57Thanks for being on the show, Adam. Absolutely.

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