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 slow dramatically. That, at least as far as computing is concerned, we’re looking at a mature technological base. It’s possible your children will grow up with computers that are not much faster than you yourself are used to. But that doesn’t mean that it is going to look the same.

Like many of the technological advances in the last hundred years the computer industry was born, and grew up, in the shadow of the first and second World Wars. Like the baby boomers, your smartphone is a child of the post-war years now grown to adulthood. However Chris Anderson, co-founder and CEO of 3DR, has recently argued that a lot of the tools and technologies we use today as makers are the peace dividend of another war, the smart phone war, arguing that, “when giants battle we all win.”

This technology dividend is very evident when you start to look around. Sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and even cameras, are now trivially…