[ExI] An Abstract from Moore's Law by LIkka Tuomi

[citta437 at aol.com]

"
Moore's Law gave us a compact and a deceptively exact way to express 
beliefs in technological determinism. Later it became transformed to 
economic determinism, which argued that people would buy computers 
because they will be ridiculously cheap. Moore's Law also provided a 
convincing basis for arguing that the development of economies and 
societies is at the hands of technical experts. The fact that Moore's 
Law has so often been misrepresented and used together with 
contradictory evidence indicates that it has expressed strong and 
fundamental convictions about the nature of progress. Contrary to what 
its users have often claimed to say - that the history of 
semiconductors and computing has followed a well-defined exponential 
path - the rhetoric point of Moore's Law has been directed towards the 
future, determined by technological development and understood by the 
speaker.

Gordon Moore obviously was right in predicting that the complexity of 
semiconductors would grow rapidly and that silicon chips would become 
economically and socially extremely important. Indeed, his 1965 
analysis of the dynamics of integrated circuit industry contained key 
insights that made semiconductor industry what it is today. In a way 
his prediction, however, was too successful. It allowed technologists, 
economists, and politicians to neglect important factors that have been 
driving social, technical, and economic development during the last 
decades. Although the increasing use of computing technology has made 
people more aware of, for example, social, cultural, organizational, 
political, ethical, and cognitive issues related to information 
processing, physics is still commonly seen as the hard core of future 
developments. As a result, many discussions on the future of Moore's 
Law have focused on physical limits. In recent years economic 
considerations have gained legitimacy also in this context, partly 
because Moore himself has frequently predicted that the increases in 
chip complexity will not be limited by physics but by the exponentially 
increasing costs of manufacturing plants.

As computing technology becomes increasingly pervasive, we eventually 
have to ask what benefits it actually brings. Fundamentally, this 
question can only be answered in a theoretical framework that is able 
to define development. In theory, there are many different ways to 
approach this question, both old and new. It should, however, be clear 
that development cannot be reduced to shrinking line-widths, maximum 
number of components on a chip, or minimal manufacturing costs. Indeed, 
one of the paradoxes of the information society is that we still have 
very limited understanding on how to link technical advance and 
development. Partly this is because technical advances have simply been 
defined as development. This exaggerated and somewhat limited focus on 
technical advances has produced a wide variety of extensions to Moore's 
Law, eventually pushing it far beyond its original scope and available 
evidence. In the process, some of the kinks in historical evolution 
have been eliminated and scientific facts have been created when 
needed. True innovation, however, is not predictable. It requires that 
we remember our history so that we are not doomed to repeat it."

 About the Author

Ilkka Tuomi is currently Visiting Scientist at the European 
Commission's Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective 
Technological Studies, Seville, Spain. From 1987 to 2001 he worked at 
the Nokia Research Center in various positions, most recently as 
Principal Scientist, Information Society and Knowledge Management. From 
June 1999 to December 2000, he was Visiting Scholar at the University 
of California, Berkeley.
E-mail: ilkka.tuomi at jrc.es