Moore’s law states that the power of computer processes will double every two years forever.
It can’t possibly be true, but it has been for the last 40 years!
The difficulty with this is that what happens when the exponential growth and the increase in something becomes truly exponential.
A quick story to illustrate.
I’m led to believe this parable comes from India, but I could be wrong and I’m not looking it up at the moment. It centres around a king in a very successful kingdom who’s looking for ways to entertain his subjects and asks for people to come forwards with ideas for games.
One of the subjects invents chess and brings it to him and he is so delighted he explains to the subject that they can have any reward they would like because they have done such a good thing.
The subject asks a grain of rice on the first square of the chess board to be doubled on every square through the chess board.
That mean two grains on the second and four on the 3rd etc. etc., how many grains of rice on the 64th square?
I’m told it’s something in the region of 12 quintillion but whatever it is, it’s a sh*t load of rice.
Many people in IT believe that we are now into the second half of the chess board as far as computers are concerned.
The next step forwards in the advancement of the processor and when it doubles in it’s capacity again two years from now will be extraordinarily better than where we are today, two years on from that is almost unimaginable and that’s only four years away.
Two years ago, Google built an IAHS computer called Alpha Zero which learnt to play chess in four hours using artificial intelligence and then be the world computer chess champion 38 times out of 50 and drawing the other 12.
That’s four hours to get better than the best computers for the last 50 years.
I saw a patient at work last week who explained to me that for a considerable period of time they’ve been tracking people in and out of shopping centres using their mobile phones without permission (they don’t share personal information YET but it’s all there if someone would let them).
We’re way beyond identity cards now (your mobile phone is an identity card; it just needs to be turned on and inevitably it will be because you can’t uninvent the genie).
We run headlong into any new technology (Alexa is one of the most sinister things I’ve ever seen in my life but nobody else seems to agree) and all of a sudden we’re at 1984 and there is no going back.
It’s a fine balance as to whether the advancements in technology will save the human race or be it’s undoing but either way one of the most important things you will need to teach your children is when to use technology and when not to.
While the power of a processor doubles every two years, the power of the brain does not.
Our ability to assimilate this and to adapt to meet it is the rate limiting factor.
When we built the practice a huge part of it was to provide the infrastructure to embrace the technology for the next 100 years (haha) lets say 5 years now and I believe that we do have a facility that allows us to do that.
The difficulty though will not be whether we decide to embrace the technology or not, it will be which technology to embrace and when and how much and how fast and at what cost.
Almost impossible to keep up but that now becomes the job as every 24 months we get faster and faster.
Blog Post Number - 2550