Moore’s Law - Why Sustainable Economies Matter
by Pappy September 15th, 2009, Posted in: Business , Futurism , Sustainability , Technology
Few people in today’s technological age have not yet heard of Moore’s Law. Since the earliest computers of the 1940s, computing power has grown exponentially, and along with that capability has come explosive economic growth. In 1971, the CPU was introduced, containing 2,300 transistors. Moore’s Law essentially says that the number of transistors that can be contained on a silicon wafer will double every 18-24 months. This in turn doubles the capabilities of what we can accomplish with our computers, and much of THAT is the driving force behind sustaining the economic engine the modern world relies on. Without continued growth our free market economies do not just stagnate; they collapse.
By 1990, transistor counts surpassed one million.
By 2000, they had soared beyond 10,000,000.
In 2008, they exceeded 2 billion.
But, Moore’s Law is not infinite. Each new doubling of computing power comes through our ability to shrink the transistor to smaller and smaller scales, and by reducing (or at least better controlling) the heat these miniature dynamos generate. We currently operate at or around the 90 nanometer scale, but because of an effect know as “quantum tunneling” we can shrink no more than to the 16 nanometer scale. Anything smaller will require a shift to quantum computers: technology that does not yet exist, and because of the nature of quantum physics, may never exist.
What exactly makes this so important to our economic engines? Since the 1970s there has been a massive shift in 1st world countries from materials and industrial based economics, to information based economies. In an information economy, information providers must continue to offer more storage, fatter pipelines, improved data analysis, fast processing, and more advanced software capabilities, and they must do so while keeping consumer costs as low as possible to ensure a broad customer base. Failure to do so typically results in the rapid atrophy as they are soon replaced by companies who can do it faster, better, smaller, and cheaper. The information industry uses Moore’s Law to plan ahead and drive their markets.
There are differing estimates as to how long Moore’s Law will last, but without the invention of entirely new technologies there is a strong likelihood that we will slam into it’s upper limits sometime between 2015 and 2025. It’s a gamble to assume those new technologies will materialize, so what do we do?
Some say we need to return to being a primarily industrial producer. But let’s look at the realities of that. The United States simply cannot compete with China and India’s raw labor pools. At least not without completely abandoning the concepts of minimum wage, labor unions, employer provided benefits, and workplace safety standards. Even were we to do so, the issue of raw materials needed for industrialization is problematic: few of these resources are sustainable and competition to acquire them will only become more fierce as they dwindle. Without an affluent consumer base to buy our glut of cheap products dumped onto world markets, what good will it do us anyway? Presently U.S. citizens are by far the most affluent in the world. We inhale raw materials in the form of cheap, disposable Asian products, and there is nobody waiting in the wings to fulfill that role in the world economy should we abandon it to return to being a producer nation.
But therein lies an even deeper dilemma. Our consumerism is no more sustainable than the industrialization that feeds it. The economic woes of the last 2 years attest to this. We purchased beyond our means, borrowed far beyond our ability to repay, risked our wealth recklessly with an assumption there would be a continuing flow of more behind it to cover the risk. The saddest part of this is that it was almost all entirely based on the need for self satisfaction through what we possess. We seem to be able to ignore our own needs, as long as we can fulfill our wants, conveniences, and creature comforts.
Consumerism boils down to greed in the long run. A viral, hollow, unsatisfying greed that is spreading as emerging free market economies increasingly push towards American style affluence as their goals. That push will lead to even more competition for resources, and an eventual collapse so stupendous it will make the recent world economic crisis look like a 2 minute movie trailer.
After Moore’s Law.
So what, then, can see us beyond the walls of Moore’s Law?
There simply is no single, short-term answer. No silver bullet government program can change the course we’re now on. As individuals we must change the way we think. We have to significantly reduce our demands on the world, it’s resources, and our governments. That shift needs to be focused on increasing our demands and expectations of ourselves. The shift to a sustainable world economy can only come as an evolutionary force - it cannot be mandated from the outside.
Evolution always occurs at the smallest scales and then grows. In terms of social evolution that scale begins with us, individually. The types of changes I’m talking about are no different that what you hear being talked about already. Spend less. Find satisfaction in living, in family, instead of work and materialism. Start a backyard or rooftop garden with a goal of producing n% of your own food. Recycle. Buy local. Barter. Learn how to build it or repair it yourself. Turn off the TV and the light switches. Prepare for disaster so you can rescue yourself and your neighbors. Find your sense of community again.
As more and more of us learn to become self-sustaining again, those ways will become part of a larger organism; a community. Communities will merge and coalesce to become something even greater. New (or old, depending on how you look at it) economies will form. Viable models will succeed by the laws of cooperative evolution. But only if we can first change the very nature of how we look at ourselves at the individual level.
The Darker Side.
Anyone who knows me well will tell you I’m equal parts optimist and pessimist. I believe wholeheartedly in the dynamic of the human mind. We are so incredibly resilient. Any study of human history will show you we, as a species, can overcome almost any obstacle, at seemingly insurmountable odds. But we are also our own worst enemy. We have a tendency to let others do our thinking for us - to choose a course or leader and blindly follow it to our own individual destruction. As individuals we are often weak-willed and easily led. It’s too easy to become caught up in emotions and political rivalries. Some of humanity’s oldest problems are still with us today, only because of these traits.
I say this because, with the daunting future in front of us, I believe too few individuals will ultimately make the necessary choices in order to affect the needed social evolution of our species. That does not mean that those that recognize the need should not continue to strive for such an idealistic outcome. But be forewarned that at some point in the future the time will come to choose, and to make the strong choice will not be easy at all.
If the world economy hits Moore’s Law and begins to crumble, there will be a revival in converts. Without the consumer economy to provide for them they will look to sustainability en masse, but too late. One cannot evolve ones self on demand overnight, or simply by following the crowd, and without internal change at the individual level they will mostly fail.
Those who prepared, who tried to be the prophets in the wilderness, will by necessity have to step aside and allow this to happen. Almost every great leap in human evolution was proceeded by a calamitous event. Repeated ice ages where human populations fell to near extinction. Wars, famines, and diseases that destroyed entire cultures. Those that remained after these events, however, almost always experienced a period of explosive advancement and social evolution that improved the species afterwards. There are no good reasons to believe this will not be the case in the future.
Anyone that can see it coming enough to prepare as best they can should be ready to embrace that new future and shape it for the betterment of all humanity.
So. Keep your hope and faith in humanity alive. Strive to be one that’s ready to build a sustainable world by being a sustainable individual. Simply live, live simply, and leave simple minds to whatever future they create for themselves.
