Old hat

Do you know Moore's Law? Michael S. Malone at the Wall Street Journal defines it as

the observation that performance (speed, price, size) of integrated circuits, aka microchips, regularly doubled every 18 months.

Moore's law was plotted on a graph by Gordon E. Moore, who was director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1965. Malone writes,

Moore’s Law became iconic not because of its novelty or through media promotion, but because it has proved to be the most effective predictive tool of new chip generations, technology innovation and even social and cultural changes of the last half-century.

Millennials now entering the workforce

have never known a world not defined by Moore’s Law. But unlike their generational predecessors, to this new cohort social networks and iPhone apps are old hat.

What obsesses them is hardware—drones, robots, 3-D printing—that is even more closely connected to the fortunes of Moore’s Law. Their careers will rise and fall on how well they ride the curve of an equation devised during the Johnson administration by a now-octogenarian settled into a comfortable retirement in Hawaii.

...The great turning took place a decade ago, while we were all distracted by social networking, smartphones and the emerging banking crisis. Its breathtaking climb since tells us that everything of the previous 40 years—that is, the multi-trillion-dollar revolution in semiconductors, computers, communications and the Internet—was likely nothing but a prelude, a warm-up, for what is to come. It will be upon this wall that millennials will climb their careers against almost-unimaginably quick, complex and ever-changing competition.

...Moore’s Law has always induced de-massification: giant mainframe computers become smartwatches, giant vertically-integrated organizations are defeated by what Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds has dubbed an “Army of Davids.”

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is already challenging the value of a traditional college education, and Khan Academy, among other online universities, is offering an alternative. Hospitals are losing their walls to a revolution in personal health monitoring. And after the progressive experiment of this decade, millions of Americans will go to the polls in 2016 asking if big government itself is an incompetent anachronism. Even the human brain will be challenged by artificial intelligence—the latter enjoying the advantage of continuously improving at the pace of Moore’s Law.

...The good news is that this generation seems to be already, often unconsciously, preparing for this adventure—through robotics competitions, gatherings of tech enthusiasts, engineers and tinkerers at Maker Faires and other do-it-yourself events, and playing with new applications for their drones and 3D printers. Having lived their entire lives at the pace of Moore’s Law, they seem to sense that the time has come to hit the accelerator. If millennials don’t entirely get it yet, they soon will.

Read more here.
Thanks to Instapundit