Capable Computing
Computing that is good enough.
We’ve come to expect that next year everything will be faster, and just a bit cheaper. In fact we’ve decided that it’s the law. In 1965, Gordon Moore made a prediction that came to be known as Moore’s Law. He stated that each year the number of components per integrated circuit would double, and that this trend would continue for at least another decade. Ten years later in 1975 he revised his prediction, saying that it would double every two years. Remarkably this prediction held for the next forty years. However earlier in the year Brian Krzanich, the CEO of Intel, confirmed what many had expected that “…our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two.”
The last fifty years have been exceptional time, and have given many of us that have grown up in the shadow of Moore’s Law a false impression of how the world works. Most of human history is static, and progress is slow. Unlike today, throughout most of history the technology your children would grow up with would be very similar to the tools and technology you remembered from your own childhood.
While I’m not quite sure I believe it myself, there is an argument that we’re reaching the limits of our current technology, and that the pace of progress will…