

New Moore's Law: Electrical efficiency of computing doubles every 1.6 years - kunle
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/10/computing-power

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kgermino
Why do all these things have to be presented as a "law". Their not laws, their
observations, while the semantics of the difference dont really matter (to me
at least) the usage and understanding of the observations has been skewed by
the use of the word law. Every time I hear someone say that "in two years
computers will be twice as powerful as they are today because of Moore's Law"
I cringe. Computers won't be twice as powerful _because_ of Moore's Law they
will become more powerful because technology marches forward and humans are a
creative bunch. Moore's Law is only an observation of the pace at which this
happens.

<\rant>

Tldr: people need to stop attributing Moore's Law as the cause of
technological innovation.

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alttag
Part of this perhaps comes from the way Moore's law is presented in
introductory Information Systems classes at university business schools. (I'm
currently teaching one such.)

As sad as it sounds, university freshmen/sophomores aren't as true to the
cause/effect logic (including correlation != causation) typical of scientists,
engineers, and other logically minded folks.

We use Moore's law as an explanation of the growth of the past, which has led
(according to the text) to the commoditization and near-zero cost of storage
and bandwidth. We further make the simplifying assumption that Moore's Law
will continue to hold, and then discuss its consequences on potential future
endeavors.

In other words, I think you're seeing "because of Moore's Law the future is
such-and-such" as shorthand for "using the assumption that the pace of
technological advancement predicted by Moore's Law continues to hold, the
future may look like such-and-such." Yes, the language isn't as tight as those
who thrive on specificity (e.g., programmers) might like, but that's perhaps a
consequence of sharing these principles with every person in every discipline
in the business school.

~~~
kgermino
That's an interesting point and I'm sure that your conclusion is true in many
if not most cases. Honestly I haven't thought of that.

However, I would posit that, likely because of the way things are taught and
because people use it as shorthand, there is a portion of the population that
doesn't understand the link from "because (as a result of) Moore's Law" ->
"based on the assumptions described in Moore's Law"

I guess the issue would be how much of the population falls into that second
group.

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wmf
Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2988208>

