Of Silicon Valley, AI, and the Laws of Infinite Growth
“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year…. there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least ten years. “ 1
What he meant was that the number of transistors you could fit on a semi-conductor, or micro-chip - which roughly translates to the computational power of the chip - would double every year. It was later qualified to every two years.
The author was Gordon Moore, who later co-founded semi-conductor giant Intel. And when a journalist stumbled upon this article a few years later, it went a kind of pre-internet viral over several years, it was dubbed Moore’s Law, and it become deeply enmeshed in the foundational mythos of Silicon Valley.
As Silicon Valley companies grew in wealth and influence, Moore’s Law was further buttressed by other laws, such as, Metcalfe’s Law 2 , more commonly known as the “Network Effect”, which posits that the value of a network is the number of nodes squared. So a network of 2 telephones has a value of 4, but a network of 3 telephones has a value of 9 – and so on.
And then the “Power Law” 3 , borrowed from mathematics, and adapted (to put it mildly) by venture capitalists to explain how, across a spread of risky investments, 10 per cent of them will provide 90 per cent of the gains.
