this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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We really need to work out the implications of the fact that Moore's Law is dead, and that technology doesn't necessarily advance on a exponential path like that, anyway. Not in all cases.
The cost per component of an integrated circuit (the original formulation of Moore's Law) is not going down much at all. We're orders of magnitude away from where we "should" be if we start from the Intel 8008 and cut the cost in half every 24 months. Nodes are creating smaller components, but they're not getting cheaper. The fact that it took decades to get to this point is impressive, but it was already an exception in all of human history. Why can't we just be happy that computers we already have are pretty damned neat?
Anyway, AI is not following anything like that path. This might mean a big breakthrough tomorrow, or it could be decades from now. It might even turn out not to be possible; I think there is some way we can do AGI on computers of some kind, but that's not even the consensus among computer scientists. In any case, there's no particular reason to think LLMs will follow anything like the exponential growth path of Moore's Law. They seem to have hit a point of diminishing returns.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw so much technological advancement and we got used to that amount of change.
That’s why people were expecting Mars by the mid 80s and flying cars and other fanciful tech by now.
The problem is that the rate of advancement is slowing down, and economies that demand infinite, compounding growth are not prepared for this.