To be blunt, I don’t believe Dally. A while back, in the context of technological stagnation, I compared a 2012 Ford Focus to a 1970 Ford Maverick—both popular midrange compact cars for their time—and found that the Focus beat the pants off the Maverick on every metric but price (it cost about twice what the Maverick did, adjusted for inflation). Roughly twice the engine power with 1.5 to 2x the gas mileage; more interior room; far safer and more reliable; vastly better amenities.
It’s not scaling as fast as Moore’s Law by any means, but progress is happening. That might be tempered a bit by the price point, but reliability alone would be a strong counter to that once you amortize over the lifetime of the car.
My scenario #1 explicitly says that even in the face of a slowdown, we’ll see doubling times of 10-25 years: “If the doubling time reverts to the norm seen in other cutting-edge industrial sectors, namely 10-25 years, then we’d probably see the introduction of revolutionary new product categories only about once a generation.”
So I’m not predicting complete stagnation, just a slowdown where computing power gains aren’t happening fast enough for us to see new products every few years.
To be blunt, I don’t believe Dally. A while back, in the context of technological stagnation, I compared a 2012 Ford Focus to a 1970 Ford Maverick—both popular midrange compact cars for their time—and found that the Focus beat the pants off the Maverick on every metric but price (it cost about twice what the Maverick did, adjusted for inflation). Roughly twice the engine power with 1.5 to 2x the gas mileage; more interior room; far safer and more reliable; vastly better amenities.
It’s not scaling as fast as Moore’s Law by any means, but progress is happening. That might be tempered a bit by the price point, but reliability alone would be a strong counter to that once you amortize over the lifetime of the car.
My scenario #1 explicitly says that even in the face of a slowdown, we’ll see doubling times of 10-25 years: “If the doubling time reverts to the norm seen in other cutting-edge industrial sectors, namely 10-25 years, then we’d probably see the introduction of revolutionary new product categories only about once a generation.”
So I’m not predicting complete stagnation, just a slowdown where computing power gains aren’t happening fast enough for us to see new products every few years.