Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How long will Moore's Law continue boosting computing power? (featuring Dr. Adam Becker)

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Daniel and Kelly discuss the future of computing and talk to Adam Becker about what it all means.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th. season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there.

The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month. Join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I feel like an old man whenever I buy a new computer.

I mean, why does my laptop need 64 gigabytes of memory when? I learned to program on a PC that had 20 kilobytes. No joke. Kids these days don't understand how hard we had it back in the day, right? But it's also a nice feeling. It tells me that we're making progress, and that's good. It's creating new worlds and new ways of life. It's literally saving lives by accelerating science.

That's all great stuff, right? But how long can it go on? What is the engine of this exponential growth in computing power, and can we count on it to take us to the stars to cure cancer and to develop self-driving toothbrushes? Today, we'll dive into the physics underlying this trend and ask whether there are fundamental limits that could block us from achieving our dreams, and we'll talk about whether there's a danger in assuming technology will solve all of our problems. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.

Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space. And I realized when we were starting to do this episode that I wasn't 100% clear on what Moore's Law meant exactly. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've been programming computers for more than 40 years. They get faster and I get slower.

Oh, oh, you're not slowing down yet, Daniel. You stop. So my question for you today, Kelly, is what was your first computer? Let's age, Kelly. Okay, so later when we talked to Adam Becker in our interview, he mentions that there was a while there where folks wouldn't get a computer because you'd wait as long as you could because the computers kept getting so much better so quickly that if you could wait, your computer would be much better.

And so my family waited way too long. We didn't get one until I was in, like, high school? And I know. And I don't even remember what it was. But in the meantime, I had to write my essays on, like, it was like a brother typewriter, but it also had a little electronic screen. And so I could very slowly and laboriously click through my essays. And then I would print it and something would be wrong. It would take me forever to find where the error was. It was very annoying. But what about you? Did you have, like, the first Apple computer ever? Oh, Apple was way too advanced. I go way before that. What? My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, which I think had 20 kilobytes of RAM, and we stored stuff on an audio tape.

What? You know, like you'd write a little program, and then you store it on these cassette tape that you could later listen to and like, ooh, what is that sound? So, yeah, we were very, very early. In fact, I remember hanging out with my dad in grad school while he was doing his research, and he was literally feeding punch cards into those punch cards. French cards machines. So I feel like I've personally experienced a huge fraction of the transformation of computers into the basically supercomputers we have today. I mean, my smartphone is so much

more powerful than anything my dad ever used in his research. That is absolutely amazing. I didn't even know that we were storing data on like cassette tapes. Oh, yeah. That's amazing to me. Yeah, before magnetic floppies, for sure. So when you like are using your, are you a MacBook guy? I am, yeah. So like when you're using your Mac, do you ever? day think, I am so lucky I'm not doing this on punch cards? Or are you just, do you take it for granted now? I think it's awesome. It's incredible. I mean, every time I get a new MacBook, I'm like, wow, this drive is 10 times bigger than anything I've ever seen. And the memory is just shocking. And it's also then incredible to me how rapidly our computational ambitions grow. You know,

my group does a lot of computation. And we're basically limited by computation. And so every time we get more powerful computers. We scale up our ambitions and solve bigger, harder problems. And so we're always at the edge of what the computers can do, right? Like, we have an infinite number of questions we can ask with harder computers. So yeah, I'm in awe of the MacBook, not just because it's so much more powerful than anything I've used, but it's so reliable. I mean, I spend hours and hours a day in front of this thing. It almost never gives me problems. So, yeah, it's incredible what engineers have provided. It is incredible. And today, we're going to talk about one way in which that incredible ability has been expanded,

which has to do with Moore's Law, which I thought was about how much data you can store on your computer. And I think it's much more than that. You're right. It's much more than that. It's also about how things are growing over time and how long that will continue. And there's this lore about Moore's Law, which is permeated Silicon Valley and broader culture. So in a minute, we're going to also talk to Adam Becker about how this has impacted philosophy and politics. and policy and how it might affect our future. But first, we wanted to know how long people thought Moore's law might continue to make all of our computers faster. So I went out there and I talked to our group of volunteers.

Here's what they had to say about the future of Moore's law. So I'll give it six years and then I'm going to sell my Navidia stock, but quantum computing will change the game. We are restricted by things like how small we can make stuff, so I think it's not true anymore. My first thought was to say no, but I know very little about quantum computing. I would say until the computer speeds reach to speed a light. Maybe 10 years. Another good decade or so.

My understanding is that it's already done. I don't think we are doubling in raw processing speed. In my understanding, Moore's Law kind of slowed down for laptop desktop chips a number of years back but has continued with mobile just because they were a little behind. But then you also have graphics and neural processing units that power our AI platforms of today. So can we go into the future? I think we can go for a number more years given the innovations in transistor stack it. I thought Moore's Law had to do with cost decreasing as speed increased.

We do seem to be close to a tipping point with electrons being too large for the tiny circuitry. However, it seems that optical circuitry might be a good replacement for that. They're currently reaching the lower limits of workability before they start reaching quantum effects with silicon. We are getting closer to the particle level and that stops us. Honestly, I thought it had already stopped. So do you think these are optimal? optimistic or pessimistic? I mean, I think they're realistic, which seems to be the option that always gets left out. So I think there were a lot of people who said, you know, I thought

we've already reached the limits or we're getting close to reaching the limits. And I'll admit that I did not realize we were getting close to reaching the limits. But it seems like a lot of our listeners are on top of this trend. Yeah. And so we're not giving financial advice. So I won't tell you whether or not to buy or sell Nvidia stock. But, you know, sometimes I wonder about these tech companies because their stocks also seem to follow Moore's law. Like, how can Google just keep getting more valuable? I keep missing out on buying Google. I can tell you that if you can make a time machine, one of the first things you should do is go buy Nvidia and Google stock. All right. So let's dig into it. What in the end is Moore's Law? So Moore's Law was something

postulated by Gordon Moore. He has a first name. And he was one of the founders of Intel. So a big dude in like, you know, semiconductors and electronics. And he suggested initially that the number of transistors you could squeeze onto a chip would double every year. And it's a little bit more complicated than that. He also was talking about the power usage and the cost. But roughly speaking, he was talking about the density of transistors on chips getting higher every single. year, which means the speed of these computers is growing very quickly. So transistors are about

speed and not storage, or are they about both? They're about both. The transistor fundamentally is a tiny programmable switch. And the reason that computers got small and got fast is because we were able to make transistors small and make them fast, which allows us to have lots and lots and lots of switches in a small area, which is what allows a computer to be complex and to be fast. And so essentially it's saying we can make computers denser every year, and that makes computers faster and more powerful. Okay, so this has to do with why we went from computers that took up entire rooms to something you can now stick in your bag and take with you. Yeah, exactly. And we'll dig into that in a minute, but the history here is that in 1965, more predicted this. And then 10

years later, he revised it. It was like, well, every year, maybe that's too optimistic. Let's go for every two years. And so that was the prediction in 75. And you'll see that it mostly held up until fairly recently. It's sort of an extraordinary prediction in that sense. Though, you know, anytime there's a prediction that holds up, you've got to wonder, like, well, what were the other predictions this person made? Like, if you just spew predictions constantly, eventually you're going to get one right. Yeah, yeah.

Well, especially he gave himself another decade to, like, fit the trend line. That was pretty generous to himself. But, okay. Exactly. So let's dig into what a transistor is and why it allows computers to be faster, because that's crucial to understand why Moore's Law has worked and how we've made it work and whether it's going to work in the future.

Basically, a transistor is a programmable switch. Like, computers operate on digital logic. I have a number in the computer, the number four. They store it in binary. But to store things in binary, you need a physical system that can store a zero or a one. The way you can, like, write a digit on a piece of paper, that's like I'm representing the number four

by scratching this graphite onto this sheet of paper. I want to store things in my computer in zeros and ones, because binary is the code for computers, and physically that means a switch. You know, as you can imagine, either just literally like a light switch, but here we're doing an electronic switch. Okay. And so just to, if we switched from using transistors to things like DNA to store data or quantum computing, could you still apply Moore's law? Like if we switched to some other method or is Moore's law specific? specifically about the transistors that we're talking about now? Yeah, great question. You're talking about fundamental changes in how we do computing.

So currently computing operates on bits, zeros, and ones. And we're saying those are represented by transistors, which is like a physical implementation of that bit. You switch to quantum computing, the fundamental element of that is a qubit, which isn't necessarily a zero one, but it has the probability to be in several different states. And so it requires a different physical system to model that we don't use transistors or not even like quantum transistors. In fact, transistors are already relying deeply on quantum mechanics.

So quantum transistor is redundant. But yeah, qubit, there's no guarantee that you can, like, build qubits and then build them more densely and more rapidly. There's certainly no more's law for quantum computing. That's a guarantee. And biological computing, like DNA is super awesome as an idea. But there you have, like, four possibilities, right? DNA is basically base four.

And so it's a question of, like, how do you encode numbers? into DNA? Do you use all four bases? Do you group them into two to make binary? The technology is fundamentally different. So again, you wouldn't expect necessarily further to be Moore's Law. But you might get some other law, which could be better. So yeah, Moore's Law reflects the details of the technology we're using to represent the fundamental element of computing, which is a zero or a one. And then crucially, the logic that operates on those zeros and ones. Let's get into that logic. Yeah, because what you want to do is represent like numbers in your computer. I want to put

the number four in. But also, I want to calculate stuff. I don't just want to write four into my computer. I want to be able to add four to two. I want to be able to compare four and seven, right? That's what allows you to program a computer for it to do useful computation. And if you know something about computing, you know, like the basics of computation is a Turing machine, which can like read in numbers and write numbers onto this infinite tape. And so in order to do logic, you need to be able to have things that respond to different inputs. So in logic, you have things like gates, like a knot gate, is something which if you give it a zero, it responds a one.

If you give it a one, it responds to zero. It's like a logical map from inputs to outputs. Or an and gate. An and gate gives you a one if both inputs are one and a zero otherwise. Or the converse of that is a NANDGate, N-A-N-D, which is the combination of an and-Gate and a not-gate. And the really cool thing is that if you can build a N-D-Gate, you can build any logical map.

Nandgates are like the basis function of logic. So if you have NANs, people have shown that you can build any map from inputs to outputs, and essentially any sort of computer logic. So you can build not gates and and gates out of transistors. Transistors are like this digital switch. And we'll go into the detail of the physics of how they work. But essentially, they're programmable switch.

You can turn them on or off in response to other stuff. So from that, you can build logic. And from that, you can build NAN gates. And from that, you can build literally anything like add and comparators and anything you need in computers. So this is like the basic, the smallest little Lego brick of computing is a switch, a programmable switch that goes from zero to one. And that's what a transistor is an implementation of.

And it didn't have to be a transistor. It could have been something else. It could have been DNA. It could have been whatever. But this is like the best, fastest, smallest thing that we invented. And this is what revolutionized our society. What does a transistor look like? Yeah.

What does the transistor look like? It looks like nothing because it's super duper tiny, right? Like, the ones that we're building these days are order nanometers, right? So, like, you put one on your finger, you can't see it. The number of transistors on a typical chip is billions. So you can't see an individual one. They used to be able to. Like, when they were first building them in the 50s, you would, like, make one, you know, on a bench.

You could think of it as sort of like three wires coming together. You have a source, a drain, and then a gate. and the gate basically decides, do I connect the source in the drain? Do I open or close this switch? And so it's sort of like a wire with a lever in it that, you know, you can open or close, and then another wire that determines whether or not that's open or closed. So that's not a physical description of what they look like. We can get into like the semiconductors in a minute, but that's sort of the logical construction.

And when I think about Moore's Law, I think, well, what exactly is the connection between more transistors and speed? Like, it's cool to have things small because then you can put a computer in your watch or whatever, but why do smaller computers operate faster? Because that's really the crucial key. When you sit down at your laptop, you're not like, wow, the transistors are super dense. You're like, wow, you know, word opened in a bill a second instead of, you know, spinning my beach ball forever. Yeah. So it's the speed that's really crucial.

And that's really transformed society, right? It's computational power. And miniaturization means faster operation for a few reasons. Number one, things just don't have to go as far, right? Electronics is limited by the speed of light. It's not instantaneous. You close a switch. The electrons don't move instantly, right?

The current doesn't change instantly. And so we are still limited by the speed of light. And so if the distances between the transistors are smaller and the transistors themselves are smaller, things just happen faster because there's a speed limit to information in the universe. That's awesome. I guess I hadn't imagined that as a limiting factor. Okay, super cool. What's next? Yeah, that's one. The other is you can have wider data paths. Like, instead of just using 32 bits to store your numbers, you can use 64 bits, right? Remember, bits are this essential element of binary numbers. And so if you have like a 2-bit number, you can only store between 0 and 4. If you have an 8-bit number, you can store many more numbers. You have 32. These days, computing is 64, 128 bits. If you hear about these numbers as the sort of the core of the computing of your CPU or your operating system, that's what it describes. Like, what size numbers are we operating on?

And this is important because basically it's how much your computer can do in parallel. Like, if you can add 228-bit numbers, it's really 128 bit-wise operations done in parallel. Instead of if you're doing 64-bit numbers, then you're only doing 64 operations in parallel. And so you can do more operations in parallel. You can pass more data at the same time. And so data flows more quickly. Another thing that really limits the speed of computers is how long does it take to get the data into the actual CPU, right? Like you have these numbers in memory.

You want to do some calculation on. You've got to slurp them from memory and put them into the registers in your CPU. They're actually doing the comparisons or the adding or the subtracting or whatever. And so the wider the data path, the faster the data. it gets loaded and the faster the computation happens. And CPU probably means senorabditis pirouetting underwater? What does

CPU mean? CPU means central processing unit. It's a thing on your computer that does the actual crunching, you know, that does the adding or subtracting or comparing or loading or unloading or writing to memory. It's the closest thing we have to a digital brain. Okay.

But there's another sort of mechanical element to like why speed means faster computers. And you know, back in the 1950s, people were doing electronics and they're doing it sort of the way you might do it in your garage. You got resistors, you got capacitors, you solder them together, you make these big sort of physical circuits. But in the late 1950s, people invented what's called the integrated circuit. Integrated circuit is just like, you know, it's a big green board and it's got the whole circuit printed onto it. You don't have to like solder the components together. And this really allows for, like, the embedding of these transistors and other components inside these protective layers, which enhance their reliability.

And so that means you can make them smaller. You can make more complex circuits that you have to, like, wire together yourself with dripping hot bits of solder. And so this makes them more reliable so you don't need as much error correction, et cetera. And so that allows things to be smaller and to be faster. So you've got integrated circuits, you got wider data paths, you got short. distances to travel and you have faster switching. All these things are why more transistors means faster computing. Okay. And so when did we get our first transistor? Yeah. So the transistor was invented in Bell Labs in 1947, I think it was. And there was a lot of research in the 40s,

different kinds of technologies for transistors, try this, try that, try the other thing. But the basic concept was invented in the late 40s in Bell Labs. And, you know, Bell Labs is one of these like elements of another era, an institution that I really miss. You know, it's a privately funded research lab that did basic research. You know, this is an arm of the telephone company, but they just, like, gave nerds money and said, hey, play around, figure stuff out. And they came up with things like the transistor, which is, I think a trillion-dollar idea would be underestimating it, right?

Like, it's literally the foundation of our entire economy. It's transformed the way we live. Wow. And so I think even if every other piece of science was a waste of money, this one brings the average up. Like this one idea means all of science has been worthwhile, just from a purely economical, cynical point of view. And that's the way science works, right? Like a lot of fuzzes out and occasionally a huge, huge payoff. Anyway, it was the late 1940s.

People figured this out. And, you know, we've only had quantum mechanics for a couple decades then. People had ideas for making transistors before then, but weren't able to make it work. But at Bell Labs, smart guys figured this out, won Nobel Prize. It was really pretty awesome. Awesome. And when we get back, let's talk about how we went about shrinking these transistors. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend. former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, Hey, I'm Jacob Schick, I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own mark to suicide. One tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending

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I won't say whitewash Because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me But the whole pretending and code You know, it takes a toll on you Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again As part of My Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, so in 1947, Bell Labs creates the transistor, just in time for us to use it to get to space, which is the most important topic that we have to keep getting to every episode. All right, so now we've got the transistor. How do we go about shrinking it? Yes, the transistors are built out of semiconductors. You hear the semiconductor industry everywhere. And what does that really mean?

Well, we understand what conductor is, right? It's something where electricity can flow. And an insulator is something where electricity cannot flow. And to understand that you have to take your vision of the atom, where you have like electrons orbiting around the nucleus or being in fuzzy quantum mechanical states, and think about what happens when you put a lot of atoms together. Like, what is it?

the energy level of an electron around an iron atom? Well, it's a bunch of levels. What happens when you have a billion iron atoms in a lattice? What happens to those electrons? Well, they don't really belong to any individual nucleus anymore. They sort of like move around the iron super highway. They can flow around from here to there. And what distinguishes a conductor from an insulator is whether or not there's a big gap between energy levels. Like can the electrons get up to those energy levels where they can flow around between all the atoms or not. If they can get up there, then it's a conductor. If there's a really big gap so they can't get up there, then it's an insulator.

Semiconductors are things that are sort of halfway in between. They have a medium-sized gap between the energy levels where the electrons are stuck around individual atoms and the ones where they're just flowing across the superhighway. And so that's something you can control. If you tweak it a little bit by like adding a little bit of germanium or this, other kind of thing, you can control that gap. And so what you want when you're building circuits is you want places where things conduct really well and then places where things conduct really, really terribly. And so rather than having to have different kinds of material, like if I build

a circuit in my garage, I use copper for the wires and then to use rubber for the insulators, it's better if you can have a single kind of material and just sort of like tweak it and like, okay, I'm going to make this part of it conductor and that part of it an insulator because it allows you to print circuits onto your material. Okay. And so what is the material you use? So we use silicon. Silicon is the semiconductor of choice. And then you dope it with various things to change its behavior to make it a conductor.

And the way that we have shrunk transistors from pretty big stuff you could see on your garage bench to tiny stuff, almost the size of atoms, is through a technique called photolithography, which essentially prints a circuit onto a piece of silicon. We grow these huge silicon wafers. They're like 10 inches. and then you want to print a circuit onto it, and you want to print like billions and billions of transistors, and you want them to be as small as possible for the reason we just pointed out. So, like, how do you print this stuff onto a piece of silicon?

So this is what photolithography is. Essentially, you design your circuit on the computer, and then you print on the surface of the silicon this thing called a photo mask. And the photo mask protects the silicon from the next thing you're going to do to it, which is blast it with really high-energy light. So you shoot like super high energy light at the silicon, which is partially covered by this mask, and the parts that are exposed get a little bit chemically changed.

Then you dip the whole thing in like acid, and the parts that were exposed get like eaten away, for example. And so what you're left with is just the pattern that you wanted. That's like a very hand wavy explanation of how photolithography works. But the things to understand is that it's limited by those photons. Like, if you use photons that with really wide wavelengths, then you're going to get a fuzzy picture. If you use photons with really narrow wavelengths, which means high energy photons, right? Then you're going to get much crisper picture. And so over the decades, we've been trying to shrink these transistors to get more and more transistors on these chips and have faster computers.

And one way to do that is to crank up the energy of those photons. And so now we're in the, like, extreme ultraviolet limit where the photo. photons of a wavelength of like 13 or 14 nanometers. Wow. And that's hard because it requires like special optics. You can't just use normal lenses to bend this kind of light. It's why it's very hard to do like x-ray optics also. The higher the energy light, the harder it is to bend it.

Have we maxed this out? We probably have maxed this out because anything beyond this requires insane optics. Like already the optics are insane. You know, making a single mask for these things costs like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there's, like, a few places in the world, you can do this kind of stuff. Wow. The equipment is extremely expensive. The operating conditions are very, very particular.

You have to have specialized clean rooms. Like, this is really the pinnacle of technology. It's incredible. And that's why, you know, a few of these players in this field, like the Taiwanese semiconductor industry, is so important for the worldwide computing industry. Like, a single company goes down and, like, we can't make computers anymore. Wow. Oh, my gosh. Right. All of the geopolitical tensions just came into focus.

Exactly. That's one reason why Taiwan is so important because a lot of this stuff is done by Taiwanese firms. All right. So we figured out photolithography and we've kind of reached the limit. Yeah. Is that the end of the story? It's not quite the end of the story. And, you know, I have more to say about like how impressive it is. Like in the mid-90s, we were doing things at like 350 nanometer scale, which sounds pretty awesome. Like, that sounds pretty tiny. And then late 90s, it was like 180 nanometers.

From the 2000s, it was sub 100 nanometers. These days, we're getting down to like 10 nanometers, single nanometers. It's amazing. But it's getting harder and harder because we're already beyond the wavelength of the light that we're using, right? And we're approaching the size of the atom, right? Silicon atoms are like 0.2 nanometers across. So, like, you're going to build a transistor out of something. It's like, you know, you can't make things out of Legos if you only have a few of the bricks, right?

And so it's challenging to make transistors smaller than about a nanometer because we're really reaching that fundamental limit of the size of the silicon atom. And every year it gets harder. Like, it's true that we've increased the transistor density every two years. We've doubled it. But the amount of money spent in this research has increased by a factor of 10 or 20. So it's not like a constant. effort every year to achieve this. We have to ramp up the energy and the creativity. And that's

great. You know, it's like inspired all sorts of cool things and spin-offs and whatever. But it gets really, really complicated. And the sort of cutting edge of this is to now start stacking these transistors. So like, well, don't just think of it as a plane. Let's like go up in the third dimension. Let's make the transistors more powerful by shrinking them further and then allowing them to grow in sort of the third dimension above this sort of plane. And the leading edge of technology right now are these transistors called fin-fet. So FET, which stands for a field effect transistor. And then a fin, meaning like they literally have this like fin over the gate that controls it like a physical thing. It looks like a shark fin that makes it possible to be

efficient while it shrinking even further. So you can make the sort of footprint of it smaller while keeping its effectiveness because you have this third dimension. And so that's what stacking is. And really, people think that we've reached the limit of what we can do technologically. And as some of the listeners have said, we're going in other directions. Like, instead of making your CPU more dense, you just have multiple cores. Or you start building other dedicated stuff like graphics processing units that are really good at linear algebra, which is needed for graphics and also for machine learning.

And so we're sort of like simultaneously trying to go in many directions. at once to improve the power of computing, but it's not clear that we can keep doing this. And a lot of people think that we really are at the edge of what we can do to improve computing speed. Wow. And so stacking isn't going to be the magic solution because there's, like, limits on stacking? Yeah, exactly.

Like, stacking gets you a little further, but if we're going to keep doubling, then it's hard. And, you know, I think there's something to be said about the sociological impact of this doubling. You know, Moore's Law is not something that comes out of like the fundamental laws of physics. It's something that was predicted and that we maintained really over decades, which is really incredible. Like one of Intel's earliest processors, the 400 transistors in it, right?

Whereas like the 8386, which I spent a lot of time programming on as a teenager, had like hundreds of thousands of transistors. And this MacBook I'm sitting in front of has billions. It's incredible. But it's sort of guided the field. I think people, because they thought this was possible and maybe even inevitable, They worked for it. It's a target, you know. And so if you think something is possible, then, like, you stay late and you push hard and you come up with new ideas.

And so in some sense, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Okay. So first of all, have we hit the limit to Moore's Law already or you just think we're going to hit it soon? Like, when is the first year you think where we'll be like, Moore's Law, gone? I think we're right at that inflection point. You know, we're still seeing improvements in speed. We're still seeing big boosts in productivity. but we're sort of running out of avenues.

And so I still see that, like, my MacBook is faster than the one I gave my son, which is my two-year-old MacBook. But I don't know that the one I'm going to get in two years is going to be as much faster. So I think we're right at that inflection point. So that feels a little scary to me. So, like, you know, over time, we've gotten computers that are better. And so at least, you know, in my field, almost every, you know, five years, you expect, you know, the statistical models of the systems that we study to

get more complicated so that we can get a better understanding out of each one of our data sets. Are we not going to be able to do that anymore? Or do you think in 20 years our computers are just going to start getting bigger again until they fill up a room? Because we're going to want to keep getting more complicated in our analyses. Yeah. Well, I think we're already seeing our computing getting bigger. I mean, think about like the data centers that are being built by meta. And Microsoft is like trying to turn back on nuclear reactors because they need the power for their AI data centers.

These things are vast, and they're consuming huge amounts of our resources. So I think, yeah, our appetite for computing is just growing. And even if our computers don't get faster, we're just going to keep building them bigger and bigger. But I also think that for those of us who do things that are not directly just computing, that there are other ways to increase speed. I was talking to Katrina about this, and she was saying that Moore's Law also kind of applies to genomics. You know, like the first study of a human genome cost like how many millions for, one genome. And then the NIH had a target, like, it should cost less than $1,000 to sequence a

human genome. And they hit that target. And now it's cheaper than $1,000. And where does this come from? Part of it comes from computing, but also part of it comes from like the miniaturization of biology. And I've seen this just like observing her field, something that used to be like a PhD level of work, then in a few years becomes a little box on the lab bench, you press a button, and it's done while you're at lunch, right? Yeah. And that allows you to now do things that were impossible 10 years earlier. And that kind of transformation of the scope of the capacity of the field

enables broader and deeper thinking. And that's not just computing, right? That's miniaturization of like the actual biology, like micro little bits. It's essentially like what Theranos was tapping into this feeling like, oh, eventually we should be able to diagnose diseases with tiny little drops of blood in this kind of sense. So I think that there's lots of dimensions. that we can follow for improving our scientific and technological industrial capacities,

not just is my computer faster. So when someone says, like you just did, such and such follows Moore's law, do they essentially mean we do it better with smaller stuff and like we do it exponentially better in particular? Yeah, I think it's about exponential growth. That's the crucial thing because, you know, exponential growth builds on itself. You know, it's like putting a dollar in the bank, every year you have more dollars, and those dollars earn more dollars, and eventually you have all the dollars. Whereas, like, if you're just selling lemonade and you're making a dollar every day, you're making the same amount of dollars every day.

It's not increasing. So it's all about that exponential growth. And I think that that's what people mean when they refer to Moore's Law sort of more colloquially than just like the density of transistors on a chip. That's kind of interesting because, like, Moore's Law isn't really a law. Like, it's an observation. And so it seems like now any time we see exponential growth, we say the words Moore's law instead of just saying exponential growth. Or am I being negative?

No, I think you're right. And I think it says something about our aspirations, you know. We live in a time when we expect our children's lives to be very different from our lives and our grandparent lives. And that's really unusual. Like most of human history, you could tell your kids what their life was going to be like because it's going to be basically the same as yours and your grandparents. for like the last 10,000 years, right?

Because, like, change was inconceivable because nobody had ever experienced it. But now we live in a time when, like, we know that's not true. And so I think it leaves us with this, like, gap in our wisdom. And then we project forward. And some of us are optimistic. And we're like, yay, this is going to change our lives in a way that solves all of our problems. And as you'll hear from Adam, some of us are less optimistic, you know, about what this means and whether it's the right way.

to place our bets. I do feel like that was a slightly simplified view of history, but this isn't Daniel and Kelly's historical universe, so we're moving on. Hey, I had to fit it into about one minute, so I'm not going to do a deep dive. But, yeah, I mean, do you disagree with me about the broader assessment of the way that human experience has changed? I do think human experience was similar for a really long time, you know, like when our ancestors moved out of Africa, there was probably a lot that changed in a couple

generations. And the industrial revolution and climate, yeah, yeah. I think there's probably been a lot of moments where things were like, oh, crud, but usually probably they were getting worse, whereas now we're hoping that it's getting better. But anyway, but so when I was reading Adam Becker's new book, Moore Everything Forever, there was a discussion on Moore's Law where I realized, like, oh, my gosh, I fundamentally didn't understand Moore's Law very well or what, like, underpinned Moore's Law, and I didn't realize that we were, you know, perhaps reaching the end of Moore's Law.

And so we reached out to Adam Becker and asked if he would talk to us about sort of the implication of the death of Moore's Law. I'll be super dramatic about it. But how this expectation of exponential growth impacts our view of the future in ways that are not always necessarily realistic, let's say. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just to... chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam.

Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate.

Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back.

This season we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah.

We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about. what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end

the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of my culture podcast network on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA, using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases

to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so then we're very happy to welcome to the podcast, Adam Becker, who is an astrophysicist-turned author. He wrote the widely acclaimed book, What Is Real, one of my favorite books about quantum mechanics. If you write to me to ask for a book about quantum mechanics that explains stuff in an accessible way, I often recommend it. And he has a new book out called Moore Everything Forever about the rise of techno-utopists

and how we can project our future and the future of technology. Adam, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks. It's great to be here. So let's start just by talking about Moore's Law. It's the foundation of so much of the techno-utopian movement. Why do you think that it has inspired sort of this broader fanaticism, especially when it's just like an empirical observation,

not like a deep law of the universe. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, Moore's law, yeah, it is an empirical observation, but it's so regular, it's so comforting. And it has, you know, the fact that Moore's law held more or less accurately for, what, about 50 years, it did change a lot of things. about the world. And it took computers from being these large, slow, you know, refrigerator-sized things that live in mainframe rooms at corporations to, you know, tiny little things that live

in our pockets or on our wrists and have much more power than all of the mainframes that existed, you know, in the 1970s combined, right? Caused all sorts of changes in our society. some for the better, some much for the worse. But, you know, living through that, it seemed like clockwork, right? You know, I mean, I only lived through like the last part of it, but I remember when I was a kid, it seemed like, you know, computers were just always getting smaller and faster and better every single year. And you could just get, you know, the advice was wait as long as you can to get a new computer because the longer you wait, the better it'll be. Right? And it was amazing thing. And it made a lot of people a lot of money and a few people, truly enormous

amounts of money. And so you put all of that together and it's, it kind of makes some sense that some people would take it extremely seriously as this general thing because it seemed to be, you know, if you lived a comfortable middle or upper class life, it seemed like the most important thing in the world in the late 20th century, right? And it wasn't really like anything that you'd seen before, you know, it was easy to think, oh, this, this is just going to continue. So Ray Kurzweil is this inventor and futurist who, you know, he made like real serious contributions to text to speech technology and like assistive devices for the visually impaired and I think hearing impaired as well. You know, he made serious contributions to the field of electronic

instruments, like, you know, musical instruments. But, you know, He is best known as a futurist. He is best known as somebody who, you know, makes these forecasts about what the future is going to be like. So he's a retired electrical engineer, you're saying? Essentially, yeah. I have a lot of those in my inbox. Yeah, me too, man. I'm pretty sure that if you put anywhere on the internet that you have a PhD in physics,

you get a lot of retired electrical engineers in your inbox. Guys, my inbox has pictures of feces from people who want to know if they had parasite infections. I'm feeling pretty low on sympathy right now. Oh, but I once got... But I'm so sorry for you guys. Yeah. No, we should have a separate episode just talking about what's in our inboxes

because I have some crazy stuff in any event. All right, so you were telling us how Ray Kurzweil was thinking about how Moore's Law is transforming technology and that's the engine of transformation of society and predicting the future of society more broadly. Exactly, yeah. And, like, Kurzweil extends Moore's law in his, you know, forecasts of the future and says, oh, this is part of a more general trend in the history of technology and the history of, you know, even life in the universe. And he calls it the law of accelerating returns where he says, you know, once you have better technology, it's going to allow you to make the technology that you've already got even better.

And then that'll just be a self-reinforcing cycle that leads to this exponential trend. And Moore's Law is just one manifestation of that trend. And it's going to, you know, he says it's something that you can see if you look back through the entire history, not just of human technology, but evolution of life on earth because you see the same thing with biological, quote unquote, technology. And he says, you know, this is going to continue. And in short order, we are going to reach this point that he calls the singularity, which is where you've got, you know, technology that has developed to such an advanced degree

that it gives us, you know, godlike powers of creation and destruction and transformation and just changes the fundamental nature of life on Earth and in the universe. Well, a lot of what you said sounds reasonable, right? Sure. There is evolution and there is transformation and things are changing more rapidly. But from reading your book and from your tone, I'm guessing you don't agree with Cursewile about the singularity and how we're all going to be techno gods in the future. Why not?

Why will Daniel not be a techno god? Yeah, I mean, look. particular. Yes. I have a personal stake in this question now. Yes, Daniel, in particular. Yeah, you are not going to be a techno god, Daniel, because I, you know, by having me on this podcast, Ray Kurzweil is going to put you on his list and then, you know, he won't allow you to ascend to techno god. I knew this was a mistake. Yeah, exactly. Worse than trying to fight a land war in Asia, huh? Yes, exactly. Yeah, no, that's number two now. Number one is inviting Adam Becker onto your podcast. But I mean, look, Kurzweil is taking this exponential trend and just extending it out into

the future and saying it's going to last forever. And the one thing that's always true about exponential trends is that they end. Right. If you see any sort of exponential trend in nature or in, you know, technology or whatever, your first thought should be, oh, that can't last. Because it just doesn't. There are not enough resources, there's not enough space, there's not enough anything to allow exponential trends in general to continue forever. One of the examples that Kurzweil gives in his book, The Singularity is Near, which is probably his most famous book from about 2005. Doesn't he have a few books? Like, The Singularity is Near. The Singularity is Nearer. The Singularity is Nearer. The Singularity is Nearer. The Singularity is Nearer came out last year. And when I tell people that

that's the title. They usually don't believe me, but that is actually the title. He wrote a book called The Singularity is Nearer. Next year, the singularity is near ear. Yeah. Nearest. But the classic example in biology of exponential growth is something like bacterial growth in a petri dish. And yeah, if you chart the number of bacteria in this, you know, nutrient rich medium over time, yeah, exponentially, until they fill the dish and eat all of the agar, and then they die. To try to play devil's advocate. So when I was talking to space settlement folks, they would say something like, you know, the reason we need to go into space is because exponential growth does end at some point.

But our species is so amazing that we can see when we're getting close to the like asymptope and the exponential curve. And so we can go out to space and get resources and we can be more proactive about it. But what is wrong about that argument? Yeah. I mean, where to start, right? But you got to pick somewhere. Okay, I'm going to pick on, you know, I'm going to do what we should all strive to do

or what I strive to do and punch up, right? I'm going to pick on somebody bigger than me. Jeff Bezos makes the same argument, right? Yeah. Jeff Bezos says that we need to go out into space because of exactly this. He says, you know, we are using exponentially more energy as time goes on. And if that trend continues, as it has for decades, if not centuries, then in about two, three hundred years, we're going to be using all of the energy on Earth that we get from the sun and will have used up all of the non-renewable resources. And so at that point, we need to go out into space, if not before then, otherwise we're going to have what he calls a civilization of stasis and rationing.

And, you know, he's not wrong about the first part. If somehow we continue that exponential trend in energy usage, then yeah, I think it's in about three. three, 400 years, we'd be using all of the energy available to us on Earth. And also, we'd be using so much energy that, like, the waste heat from our energy usage would, like, boil off the oceans. We can't, we can't do that, right? It's not possible. I mean, putting aside that, you know, it's implausible that that trend will continue, the problem is with the second half, because, yeah, okay, we get, like, three to 400 more years here on Earth if you continue that trend. So Bezos says, we have to go out into space. And, you know,

what he doesn't say is where resources are unlimited, but, you know, he implies it. The problem is that if you really want exponential growth to continue, going out into space, it doesn't actually help you that much if you're looking on a time scale of centuries. Because if you do that, like about, I think it's like a thousand years after we hit that point of using all of the sunlight that hits Earth, we get to a point where we're just using the entire energy output of the sun. And then if we spot Bezos and company a warp drive so they can go faster than light to try to amass even more resources very, very quickly outside of the solar system, which we shouldn't spot them a warp drive. There's no reason to think that you can build a warp drive and a lot of reason

to think that you can't. But if we do, spot them a warp drive, that only gets you like about another 2,000 years before you're using all of the energy in the observable universe. Wow. So, you know, there are limits. Growth ends. And the fact is that, you know, all of that is wildly implausible. It's not like the lesson that I want people to take away from all of this is, oh, well, we better keep in mind that growth has to end at some point to the next like 3,000-ish years.

The answer is, oh, no, growth has to end a lot sooner than that. because, you know, going out into space has lots of problems. Even putting aside the lack of warp drive, just living in the solar system is an extraordinarily difficult and dubious proposition. To give Bezos a little bit of credit after ragging on him just now, one of the things I like that Jeff Bezos has said is he makes fun of Elon Musk for wanting to go to Mars because Mars sucks. But Bezos's solution is, you know, for going out into space is not considerably better, which is to build,

like hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous city-sized space stations and then have everybody live inside of them. This is also not a great idea for many, many reasons. All right. So it's reasonable, I think, to make these arguments against, like, the strongest version of those claims. You know, exponential growth will last forever. Sure. And you're right. That's obviously impractical because the universe is finite, or the observable part of it is finite at least. Yeah, yeah. But what if we just, like, water down those claims a little bit? And we just say, you know, technology is transforming society very rapidly. And even the future you describe as refuting exponential growth, that sounds pretty awesome. Like if in 2000 years we're tapping into all the energy

from the sun and nearby stars and have an incredible, you know, star-spanning civilization, a lot of people out there would be like, that sounds great. What's wrong with that? The prospect of large numbers of people living and working in space has an enormous number of technological and social and political questions tied to it that are very, very difficult to solve and may not be solvable. And some of those problems are sort of irreducibly time-consuming. You can't solve them without doing like lengthy experiments involving things like radiation exposure and low-gravity exposure and things like that. And I see Kelly nodding. And, you know, Kelly may know more about this than I do because, you know, this is one of the subjects in my book. Kelly and

Zach wrote an entire book about this. An excellent book that I really like. I do always find a way to pull the conversation back to space settlement. Sorry for derailing us. But you do a great chapter on it in your book. Yeah, thank you. And you have nothing to apologize for. It's in my book. But let me maybe highlight a difference between the takes you guys have in your books. Okay. Kelly and Zach say that, you know, we're maybe not ready to settle space that we haven't done the necessary legwork and we shouldn't get over-excited and jump too fast and send people to Mars now because there's a lot of stuff we need to figure out, but that it's possible. And if we do it right, maybe you could figure this out. We just aren't there yet. But I feel like your book goes a step

further and suggest that, you know, it's dangerous to make these projections. You know, somebody out there listening might say, all right, Adam, maybe we won't get there, you know, to as far as these guys project, but however far we get will be great. What do you say to that person. Is there a danger in this kind of thinking? Yeah. I mean, this this gets back sort of to the last question that you asked me as well. Because we don't know that it's possible to have large numbers of humans living off of Earth, because it's very possible that that's not, you know, something that we can do. We need to find a way to live safely and healthily within the limits imposed by Earth.

We can't just assume that we're going to be able to leave. The danger is that this rhetoric of, oh, it's always going to be possible to expand out into space and grow forever can be used. And in fact, it's not hypothetical. It is being used to justify this sort of logic of rapacious consumption that is not sustainable here on Earth. And because there's a very good chance that we can. cannot in any meaningful way leave Earth, we need to stop doing that and find a way to live here.

That's not to say that we shouldn't explore space. I think robots in space are amazing. Like the Voyager probes make me cry. You know, I'm a cosmologist by training. I think getting data from space is really important and interesting. I'm not even saying that we shouldn't send people into space to, you know, the Apollo missions were amazing and really interesting. They were, of course, you know, not primarily missions of scientific discovery. It was about the Cold War.

But still, like, the fact that we did, like, a crude sample return mission to the moon several times and nobody died is amazing. But the visions that we have of the future are used to justify all sorts of things right here and now. And so we need to be careful about what we think the future is going to look like and whether that's remotely plausible. And I really think that the things that Musk and Bezos and these other tech billionaires are talking about are sort of like saying, you know, yeah, well, it's okay that we're doing what we're doing right now because in the future, we're all going to live in like Hogwarts and have broomsticks and magic wands. And like it's roughly the same level of plausibility. And so to try to get us connecting Moore's Law back with where we are in the conversation,

to me I see the connection being that you've got this. thinking that we're going to have exponential growth in our ability to do everything. So like when I was talking to space settlement people, they'd be like, I'd talk about a problem and they'd say, well, AI is going to solve it. Everything is expanding. Our ability to do anything related to technology keeps expanding exponentially. And so, you know, we've talked about how we have limits and so you can't expect exponential trends to go on forever. Do you connect then this kind of Moore's law thinking with techno-optimism and this, these sort of view? of the future? Or have we just gotten off on a different topic?

No, no, no. I think these things are connected, right? Like, there's a reason why all of these different things are in my book. One of the things that I like to remind people about when we're talking about Moore's Law is that Moore's Law, it's not just that it's an empirical observation rather than a law of nature. Moore's Law was a decision. Moore's Law was a choice that the leaders of the semiconductor industry made and then they continued making it for decades. You know, and there was a roadmap and lots and lots of

different, you know, plans made in order to ensure the continuation of Moore's Law for as long as possible. There are massive, massive amounts of money and corporate resources poured into this. And in fact, Moore's Law is not even an example of accelerating returns as Kurzweil would have, but in a sense, it's an example of diminishing returns because they got, you know, the the semiconductor industry got less bang for their buck over time. They had to spend more and more money, even adjusting for inflation, just to get the same doubling of the number of processors crammed into the same space. The techno-utopian sort of ideas that Kurzweil pushes using Moore's Law as sort of the

justification and this, you know, eternal expansion into space stuff that we've just been talking about, they all sort of traffic in the idea that the future of technology is not just eternal exponential growth and expansion, but that it's inevitably that. Not that that's something that we could do, but that it's what we have to do. It's what is going to happen. And the only alternative, if there is one, is the extinction of the species. And, you know, again, Musk is extremely clear about this. Musk has said the only choice we have, is eternal expansion out into cosmos or extinction. And when he's pushed on this, he brings up the fact that, you know, in about half a billion

or a billion years, it's going to get so hot on Earth because of, you know, the sun getting hotter that the oceans will boil off. And yeah, that's not wrong, but, you know, a lot's going to happen between now and then. Not only is it not a particularly pressing problem, but it may not even end up being our problem at all, because there are many other things that could cause humanity to go extinct between now and then, like, say, civilizational collapse due to global warming. For example, a problem that tech oligarchs and other billionaires have done a lot of work to try to prevent humanity from solving. But instead, Musk says that the solution is to leave Earth. And this is the

sort of rhetoric that I was talking about, you know, in terms of like this is what this eternal expansion idea gets you. But it's also, I think, part of the connection with the logic of taking Moore's law as this law of nature, that we can always count on these exponential trends and we can always count on human ingenuity and technical knowledge and know how to get us out of any problem. If you believe that, account for all of the problems in the world today. Like, there's so many problems that we have that are not amenable to technological solutions that people have tried to solve for a long time that are fundamentally social in nature or, you know, had a technological component but also have a social component like climate

change, right? We have a lot, if not all, of the technology that we need to address climate change. But we haven't yet as a species, and that's primarily a social and political issue, not an issue of technology. So to paraphrase your argument, I think you're saying it's not that computers won't get faster and that technology can't help us. in the future. It's just that we can't rely on it always doing so to magically solve all of our problems. Yeah. And in doing so, distract ourselves from the real problems we face in the more immediate future. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also, Moore's Law is over. I mean, come on. We have the transistors down about as small as we can get them. You know, you can't make a silicon

transistor smaller than an atom of silicon. But you do see a role for technology in shaping our future. I mean, it's not that you don't want chat GPT to cure cancer, right? I definitely think that there's a role for technology in shaping our future. Technology is a big part of how we shape our future. I'm going to just pretend that you didn't say the thing about chat GPT curing cancer, although, oh, God, there's this tweet. Like, one of my favorite tweet and responses ever is where Sam Altman said something like,

be me, build chat GPT to cure cancer. cancer or whatever, and then people start criticizing you, and then he, like, goes on and on and like has a pity party for himself. And then somebody just responded with, did you cure cancer or whatever? But, you know, there has been actually great progress made on treating cancer just in the last few years, right? You know, like these, I don't remember the names of the drugs because, like, I'm not a cancer guy, but, like, these approaches of, like, getting cancer patients own immune systems to properly recognize and attack the cancers in their own bodies has been like incredibly successful and is really promising for further developments. It's really amazing. And like there

have been all sorts of really amazing biomedical advances that are currently being destroyed by RFK Jr. and Trump, like MRI vaccines are one of the great success stories of, you know, biomedical science in the last 20 years. And I think that's important. And I think in general, vaccines are great. You know, there's all sorts of really wonderful technology that we've created that has made the world generally a better place, or has at least enabled people to make the world a better place, right? In general, technology is a tool, and there are questions about how you use it, right? You know, nuclear power can be used to build nuclear power plants, but it can also be used to make bombs, yada, yada, yada, yada. I think I just yada, yada, nuclear apocalypse, but yeah.

I think you did, yeah. Whatever, I'm a physicist. Of course, that's what I'm going to do. But the point is, yeah, of course, there's a role for technology to play in shaping our future. It's just not two things. Technology is not the only thing that shapes our future. And the development and, like, future direction of technology is not inevitable. Technology is something that humans make, and the future development of technology is filled with contingency and human choice. It is not like we build every single technology that it is physically possible to build. It's not on rails.

It's not like it's, you know, the analogy I make in the book, it's not like a tech tree and civilization, right? Where the future of technology is just sort of revealed to us and we have, we just make a choice about which branch we're going to pursue first. That's not how anything works. All right. Well, thanks, Adam, for coming on. And let's hope that chat TBT does cure cancer before any of us get it.

Thanks for being on the show, Adam. Absolutely. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

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This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow.

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Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.