
Moore’s Law Isn’t Dead: It’s Wrong – Long Live Wright’s Law - hairytrog
https://ark-invest.com/research/wrights-law-2
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dredmorbius
I'd suggest instead that an understanding of underlying mechanisms is
required.

Moore's law is predicated on the physical density of transistors on silicon.
Constant linear die advances, driven largely by CAD and silicon modelling
tools, themselves computationally bounded, deliver square-factor density
improvements, to the limits of materials physics.

Wright's law concerns _process_ improvements, on already physically-bounded
products, such as aircraft. Pilot, payload, fuel, and airframe limitations
bound the reduction in scale, absent quantum leaps in capabilities: nuclear
warheads reduce city-flattening missions from bomber fleets to single
aircraft, automation and remote control eliminate pilots, "smart" weapons
reduce payload sizes as well.

But otherwise, the bounding space is the domain complexity itself: components
and interactions, with functional limits ad interactions. Understanding of
these comes incrementally, and tends to be dominated by institutional rather
than computational information processing, cf Boeing's massive blunders in the
737-Max design.

This process doesn't lend itself to the exonential capacity-doubling of
Moore's law, but rather a cost-reduction function that asymptotically
approaches a lower bound.

(Red line in this plot:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/US...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT%2C_VMT%2C_per_capita%2C_and_total_annual_deaths.png/1200px-
US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT%2C_VMT%2C_per_capita%2C_and_total_annual_deaths.png))

Also: [https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/04/chart-of-the-
day-w...](https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/04/chart-of-the-day-why-have-
road-fatalities-declined/)

A related phenomenon is auto safety improvements, expressed as deaths per
million passenger miles, plotted from 1915-2015. There is no massive jump as
one might expect with the introduction of safety belts (as they were called)
in the 1950s, crash-test standards in the 1970s, airbags in the 1990s, or ABS
and auto-steer in the 2010s, but rather a strongly consistent halving about
every 20 years. With one exception; the halving period was _ten_ years, in the
first decade of data.

