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February 19, 2008
Was Hawking Wrong?
The other day I was skimming through Stephen Hawking's "The Universe in a Nutshell" and the only chapter I could understand easily was the one that predicted the future of humanity. To be honest, I didn't get too far beyond his idea that humans would be improved genetically and grown outside the womb so as to accommodate larger brains. But his mention of Moore's Law caught my eye.
To be sure, Moore's Law wasn't anything more than a footnote in the chapter (OK, not literally a footnote). But the way it was stated as if it were a physical property of silicon (rather than a competitive convention among chip manufacturers to double the number of transistors on a chip every two years) bothered me a bit. The book was published in 2001, and since then it's become quite evident that at 32nm scale, for example, quantum mechanics causes electrons to "leak" out of logic gates. The minimum feature size for transistors is probably 16nm or 11nm. But Intel and others don't intend to depend solely on miniaturization for chip advancement.
Would the existence of multi-core chips in 2008 have made any difference in Hawking's predictions of inexorable advancement and condensed information processing for humanity?
Posted by Alexandra Weber Morales on February 19, 2008 1:34 AM