Moore’s Law — a sign of progress or a limitation?

I was reading this book “ Hit Refresh ” by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. It got me thinking about how deeply we are connected to technology. It also got me worried if we will be able to deliver enough computing power for increasing computing needs. Then, Moore’s Law hit my mind.

Moore’s law is an observation that “The number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit is doubled approximately every two years since their invention.”

The implication of Moore’s law is that computers become smaller and computing power becomes faster with time. The evolution of big old Desktop computers to mobile phones can be a good example to show the growth of computing power.

That said, our computational needs are growing exponentially too. From critical health care to daily office utilities, we depend heavily on technology and we want the experience to be seamless. We have great designers and developers working on seamless user experiences using tools like AR, VR and Mixed Reality. We have recently witnessed an AR based game “ Pokemon Go ” create a sensation.

We depend on tools like Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to predict the outcomes. Spotify uses Machine Learning to predict and suggest new songs using previous data. We also use AI in the field of medicine to suggest better therapies for given symptoms.

Is this rate of development of computing sufficient to meet our daily needs? How small can a transistor get? Thanks to nano-technology, we are already able to create transistors that are even smaller than a virus.

All optimism aside, a transistor can certainly not get any smaller than an atom. Well known people in the industry predict that we are going to hit the peak of Moore’s law by 2025.

So, in no time, Moore’s law will be a limitation rather than a sign of progress. We need some other means to break these limitations. Many scientists and researchers around the world are trying to build a quantum computer. One that can replace “ bits ” with “ qubits ”.

To put it simply, qubit is a “ bit ” version of Schrödinger’s cat. It is 0 and 1 at the same time — just like a girlfriend’s answer.

source: teecraze.com

A primary application for quantum computing is Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is mainly about learning from experience (data) and predicting the most probable choice among many. Using quantum computing, more data can be computed in a very short amount of time. AI like JARVIS from the Ironman movie of Marvel comics will no longer be a dream using quantum computing.

People have succeeded in making prototypes for quantum computers with only a small number of qubits — they can’t solve any practical problems.

Though no ‘usable’ quantum computer exists in reality yet. We can always be optimistic about the future.