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Chronicling a Future That Comes At Us Too Fast

Almost a quarter century ago I began chronicling the history of technology with a book about Moore’s Law. A marketer insisted I call it The Blankenhorn Effect, but that was a stupid title. It didn’t sell.

A decade later I rewrote parts of it and re-issued it. It was now called Moore’s Law: Better and Better, Faster and Faster. I updated it again in 2019, and again in 2021. By this time, it was called Living With Moore’s Law: Past, Present, and Future. 

Last year I decided to do another update. But by this time, it was obviously going to be a complete rewrite.

ChatGPT and Huang’s Law have turned much of what we learned in the Moore’s Law Era on its head. AI has become an arms race, and Nvidia the sole supplier. Huang’s Law also ignores two crucial aspects of Moore’s Law. Forget about making chips small to improve yield, make them huge! Forget about the energy cost of circuit lines being close together, run more power! The cost of using the clouds is rising, not falling.

Each time I went through the book, changing it based on recent events, I had to make bigger changes. Things were just happening too quickly for me to get them down in a book, even an e-book.

I’m on my fourth rewrite of the rewrite, but it occurred to me this can’t be a “book” anymore. Not in the sense of something you hold in your hand, that remains the same over time. It’s certainly not a magazine, since I’m just one writer, and again last month’s issue is obsolete by the time this issue comes out.

A Modest Proposal

Because things won’t stand still, I want to suggest something to you and get your feedback. I want to ask you to subscribe. For $50, you’ll get the latest full version of the book. But you’ll also get a year of updates. This could be complete updates of the text, a brand new e-book issued mid-year. The idea is to keep my history current, not just by describing what’s new, but by describing how old technology is overthrown or made obsolete.

I don’t even know what it will look like. Maybe I’ll add TikToks, or podcasts to the mix. Maybe I’m asking that you subscribe to me, as you already can subscribe to the Substack version of this newsletter. Maybe what I’m talking about is a 21^st century version of The Whole Earth Catalog.

But technology’s history doesn’t sit down long enough to get it between two covers. As it changes the future, it changes the past, even the recent past.

I also believe we’re headed for another tech crash, like the one that ended the dot-com era. Huang’s Law doesn’t scale. It requires too much energy. ChatGPT doesn’t scale, either. Deep learning isn’t that deep. A lot still must come from basic science, lessons about how thought happens, before we can create anything like “Artificial General Intelligence.” It’s still just sophisticated database lookups.

You can ask Siri for a report on Moore’s Law, and Siri can get ChatGPT to describe it in text, in code, in moving pictures. But that’s not intelligence. That’s library science. Real human intelligence can see ahead. It can make intuitive leaps. Artificial intelligence can only operate on what it already knows. As I said recently, your cat is smarter than ChatGPT.

Will You Join Me?

There’s a reckoning ahead. I hope to still be around to cover it. I at least hope to pass this work on to someone else so they can. Before that happens, I need sufficient income from this work to sustain myself, then to sustain someone else.

That’s the journey, anyway. Who’s up for it?