Every so often you notice a story that flashes a hazard light about the prevailing wisdom about the way the world works. Thus it was last week, reading Jack Schofield’s Guardian article about the limits of Moore’s ‘law’, the long-standing projection by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will doubled every two years (effectively doubling performance against price in that time). It’s been suggested before that the microprocessor manufacturing process will reach physical limits. Schofield’s piece was on the increasing investment cost of processor manufacturing plants. One of the consequences is likely to be the end of the exponential growth in computing performance which has underpinned the speed and scale of the information and communications technology revolution.

While not wanting to write a long post, it’s worth making a few points.

• The growing cost of the fabrication plants has always been the ‘dark side’ of Moore’s law – the performance-to-price ratio of chips may double every two years, but the cost of building the production plants keeps on growing (if not quite so quickly). Nonetheless, the numbers are now quite large; Intel is spending $7 billion upgrading its fabrication plants;  Global Foundries, an AMD spinout, is spending $4.2 billion building a new fabrication plant in upstate New York, helped along by a $1.2 billion incentive from the state. As well as production costs, design costs are also increasing.

• The cost grows because the engineering becomes more complex as transistors shrink in size. The scale is staggering, but the current generation of chips is 45 nanometers (nm) across – or 45 billionths of a metre. The next generation will be 32 nm, with 22 nm following along behind it. By way of a yardstick, the Intel 8088 chip, in 1982, was 3,000 nm (or 3 m icrons), while atoms are about a nanometre across. As Charlie Stross said in an interesting discussion of this, “it’s hard to see how we can miniaturize our integrated circuits below the 10nm scale”. Since increasing miniaturisatioon is the basis of current sector competition, there will be a big shake-up in the industry as we reach these limits.

• I’ve written here before on the work of Carlota Perez, who has a model of technological innovation going back to the Industrial Revolution which sees industrial innovation progressing in waves of around 50 years, with each wave (this is a Schumpeterian model, not from Kondratiev, by the way) progressing through a cycle of rapid innovation, leading to irrational investment exuberance (with speculative bubbles thrown in) to a shift to slowing rates of growth and more normal rates of return. her model has the current ICT wave starting in 1971, and the characteristics described above, with cost and complexity reducing the rate of return, fits her model pretty well.

• Of course, this doesn’t mean that there won’t be innovation in the sector. But it does mean that innovation is more process driven, and may require suppliers to think about what customers need and value, rather than simply pushing for ever greater density of transistors.

The final observation here is that maybe the Moore’s law curve wasn’t exponential after all – maybe it was just a sigmoid S-curve with a particularly steep gradient on the way up. Without getting into arguments here about The Singularity (and thereby revealing myself to be a simple-minded type whose brain is not sophisticated enough to understand the implications of exponential growth) it’s worth just mentioning that Theodore Modis has been over this ground in some technical detail. As Modis observes, “Nothing in nature follows a pure exponential. All natural growth follows the logistic [S-curve] function, which indeed can be approximated by an exponential in its early stages”. Equally, systems theorists would observe that in general, in any system, a balancing loop will eventually slow the acceleration created by a reinforcing loop.

And that’s what seems to be happening here. The relationship between reducing the scale (from 45nm to 22nm and beyond), and its cost, isn’t linear; it gets progressively more expensive as scale reduces and density increases. As a result, the cost of the fabrication plants and chip design accelerate to a point where they are no longer viable investment propositions. Two connected balancing loops change the underlying dynamics of the computer business – and change our assumptions about the continuing rate of technological change.

The image at the top of the post – showing processing power performance on a logarithmic scale, is from Computer Measurement Group, and is used with thanks.

In his post, Stross (who writes science fiction for a living) described the landing as a ‘stunt’ – among lots of (disputed) technical analysis about the power-to-weight ratios of rocket launches.

Wernher von Braun and his colleagues didn’t see it as a stunt, of course. They saw it as a stepping-stone, a valuable intermediate step in establishing a metaphorical beachhead in space. … Unfortunately, the real goal of the rocketry pioneers called for something a bit bigger than an ICBM. … Think about it. The real mission wasn’t to go to the moon; it was to bring two astronauts and 100Kg of moon rocks back from the lunar surface and into lunar orbit (to rendezvous with the CSM stack for the journey home) — and it took a 3000 ton behemoth to accomplish this. Launching a bigger, more useful LEM (one that could carry 3 or 4 astronauts to the lunar surface, along with a decent-sized rover and supplies for a couple of weeks) would have added tonnes to the LEM payload … and hundreds, if not thousands of tons to the launch stack.

I’ve posted before on the way this particular bit of futures turned away from popular expectations of space colonisation, and one of the comments [43] to Stross’ post points out the length of time between Amundsen and Scott reaching the South Pole and the establishment of the research stations there.

Once the flags of Britain, Norway, etc. had been planted at the south pole, national prestige was satisfied. Afterwards, nobody bothered much with Antarctica for about another half century, until the first international geophysical year (1959?). Since then, the continent has been studded with permanently manned scientific bases and weather stations. But nobody has bothered to try to colonize Antarctica on a large scale. … If history is any guide, about a half century after the Apollo program (within the next ten to twenty years) look for permanently manned stations in orbit, on the moon and maybe on Mars.

In my earlier post, I suggested that the end of the space adventure was down to cost – the resources went into the arms race instead – and also because of a shift in the public mood from expansionist optimism to more protective pessimism. Looking at the picture of the flag on the moon, I also wonder if the notion that a shared national endeavour was possible, or desirable, had crumbled (“We choose to go to the moon in this decade” said Kennedy, in his famous speech, “… because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills”). Flags were burning in protest against the Vietnam war, and a month after the moon landing Hendrix assailed the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Gil Scott-Heron’s song “Whitey’s on the moon” came out the following year:

I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon).

Is it too late to re-energise the idea of manned space exploration? It might be. Even if the money was there, or the political will, the engineers with the skills and knowledge to design, build and launch rockets can no longer be taken for granted. Charlie Stross again:

We used to have them, but some time in the past 40 years they all retired. We’ve got the institutions and the data and the better technology, but we don’t have the experience those early pioneers had. And I’m betting that the process of rebuilding all that institutional competence is going to run over budget.

Related post: Working on the moon

When I was a kid in the late 1960s, the hovercraft and Concorde were trumpeted as the great British technological innovations – the result, perhaps, of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s modernising meme about “the white heat of technology“. I even seem to recall, although heaven knows I may have imagined this, a set of British stamps which featured both.

This thought was prompted by a few days spent last weekend in the Isle of Wight over the (English) Bank Holiday. The island often seems, well, quite old-fashioned, and the longest running commercial hovercraft services in the UK plies noisily from Portsmouth to Ryde, across a stretch of water also served by a car ferry and a passenger catamaran.

Concorde, which has been out of service now for more than half a decade, was also as famous, or as controversial, for its noise as its speed. The two technologies raise interesting questions aboout how, and when, particular ideas about the future stop being useful.

As it happens, two things I’ve read recently both refer to the end of that ’60s idea that the future of air travel would be supersonic. In Adam Gordon’s book Future Savvy he points out that average commercial air speeds are now lower than they were in 1970. He ascribes this to the idea that passengers’ ‘utility’ for air travel has changed. (Utility is an economists’ term used to measure the ways in which the users of a product or service value it). Instead of valuing speed (or, more accurately, time), and being willing to pay for it, Gordon argues that passengers increasingly valued price, and safety.  Freddie Laker, the low-cost transatlantic flights entrepreneur of the 1970s, called the market right even if he couldn’t quite make his business model work. Southwest Airlines, the low-cost airline founded in 1971, was another sign of the actual future of the aviation business.

And in his recent keynote speech on the future of gaming, Charlie Stross explains the failure of supersonic air travel to establish itself as the dominant model in technological terms: that the challenge of making planes fly ever faster reaches some steep technological limits which make the cost prohibitive. “The civil airliner business hit a odd brick wall in the late 1960s. The barrier was a combination of increasing costs due to mushrooming complexity, and the fact that aerodynamic drag goes up nonlinearly once you try to go supersonic.”

On Sunday morning, the noise of the hovercraft was the strongest sensation; its drone dominated the aural landscape. Concorde did this too, of course. Fights over its noise levels recurred throughout its history. And given that we are, as a society, becoming more sensitive to noise, it made me wonder how long the hovercraft was likely to remain in service in the face of a new generation of fast ‘supercat’ ferries. Certainly, it wouldn’t survive public scrutiny if it were proposed as a service now.

Social utility and social values

There are a couple of important points here. The first is that the questions about ‘utility’ are at heart not economic questions but questions about changing social values, the value of a social technology, and the way that it is configured, changes as the values of its users change.

The second is that its not just the values of the users of a service or a product which matter. The values of people who are affected by the operation of a product or service (the ‘utility’ of a quiet Sunday morning in Ryde) are becoming increasingly important. In terms of aviation, for example, the noise created by a third runway at Heathrow, or the carbon emissions it represents, or the associated environmental degradation (explicit or implicit), all of which are costs to everyone -service users or not – are as likely to scupper it as the economics of the flights.

I think there’s also another story wrapped inside this one. It’s hard now to recall how strong the idea was that supersonic was the only possible future for aviation. Fortunately, there’s a fine quote in Future Savvy that reminds us, from Richard Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew, speaking in 1972.

It must be obvious to anyone with any sense of history and any awareness of human nature that there will be SSTs [supersonic transports]. And Super-SSTs and Super-Super SSTs. Mankind is simply not going to sit back with the Boeing 747 and say, ‘This is as far as it goes’.

This links neatly, perhaps too neatly, with an idea of Jaimais Cascio’s I’ve been meaning to write about for a few weeks now – the concept of ‘legacy futures‘. He defined it like this: “Legacy futures are rarely still useful, but have so thoroughly colonized our minds that even new scenarios and futures models may end up making explicit or implicit references to them.” Think ‘jet-pack’; or in his account, more controversially, Second Life.

Thinking through legacy futures

I’ve been turning this idea over a bit for the past few months; I’ve even presented to clients, and it’s fine as far as it goes. It captures a problem that futurists sometimes have. As Cascio says;

we have to figure out how to deal with the leftover visions of the future that still colonize our minds. If I describe a scenario of online interaction and immersive virtual worlds, for example, I know that the resulting discussion will almost certainly include people trying to map that scenario onto their existing concept of how Second Life represents The Future.

The problem here is that it’s easy to create a distinction between the dull old ‘legacy futures’ that trap other people in the past, and the smarter new futures which we should be grasping instead. But we all have models of the future in our heads, and we need to have them if we are able to function in our organisations and communities. The point at which our futures model becomes a ‘legacy future’ is not clear cut; the point at which it stops being useful, and starts being a hindrance, is a judgment call.

Which reinforces the idea, I think, that futures is an evolutionary and exploratory process, in which you test the fit of your existing ‘legacy’ future against changing and emerging ideas of the future. And sometimes, legacy futures mutate and re-emerge; the idea of space colonies, captured memorably in the film 2001, and which I’ve written about here before, is long-consigned to the ‘legacy’ folder, only to re-emerge, possibly, as the future of premium tourism.

The picture of the hovercraft at Ryde was taken in 2007 and is from SteRittey’s flickr photostream.

Now extrapolate that in line with most technology trends. Tomorrow’s future is one in which we may be able to store and retrieve everything that everyone on the planet does in their entire lifetime: a planet’s worth of ‘lifelogs’.

There’s too much in the talk to be able to summarise it here. There are also some rich asides. But there are some arguments which are worth pulling out.

1. “The cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s — everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it’s seeped into the public consciousness. In the 1920s, boys often wanted to grow up to be steam locomotive engineers; politicians and publicists in the 1930s talked about “air-mindedness” as the key to future prosperity. In the 1990s it was software engineers and in the current decade it’s the politics of internet governance.”. But this is actually misleading…
2. It’s the network which makes computing radical, not the computing. Not a new thought, but worth remembering. “Which didn’t happen before, with computers. It’s like the difference between having an experimental test plane that can fly at 1000 km/h, and having thousands of Boeings and Airbuses that can fly at 1000 km/h and are used by millions of people every month. There will be social consequences, and you can’t easily predict the consequences of the mass uptake of a technology by observing the leading-edge consequences when it first arrives.”
3. The notional end-point where present bandwidth and information processing revolutions take us to is about 25-50 years away: “as far ahead as we can see without positing real breakthroughs and new technologies, such as cheap quantum computing, pocket fusion reactors, and an artificial intelligence that is as flexible and unpredictable as ourselves.” If 10 Euros buys 1gigabyte now, it could plausibly buy 100Gb in a decade and 10 terabytes in 2 decades. And 10Tb is a big number… a megabyte for every second of the year, enough for a personal videostream. Or a lifelog.
4. So how does the storage work? Probably on synthetic diamonds, which would become everybody’s best friends. He does the calculations in the piece.
5. Of course, as he mentions, there are drawbacks to all of this: “it would fundamentally change our understanding of privacy, redefine the boundary between memory and public record, and be subject to new and excitingly unpleasant forms of abuse — but I suspect it’s inevitable, and rather than asking whether this technology is avoidable, I think we need to be thinking about how we’re going to live with it.”
6. Apart from the area of privacy, where he sees the ‘digital natives’ – the under-25s – already exhibiting different behaviours from those of us who are older, the other big impact is on history.

“This century we’re going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization, we’re going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000…

Total history — a term I’d like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven’t experienced yet. I’m really not sure what its implications are, but then, I’m one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive… Meet your descendants… They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.”

But enough paraphrase. Read the piece yourself. It’s worth it.