When I tell you that in 60 years, the average person on the planet will have and use more computing power than the entire Internet today, does that concept fit into your world view?
For fifty years, Moore's Law has reliably predicted the exponential upward trend of our silicon future. Yet every now and then, technology tabloids warn that Moore's Law is about to end. It can't last, we're told, and when it ends, the future will fall into darkness and uncertainty. Yet inevitably and without fail, scientists find yet another way to extend it, and we collectively sigh in relief.
Moore's Law isn't a mythical beast that magically materialized in 1965 and threatens to unpredictably vanish at any moment. In fact, it's part of a broader ancient mechanism that has no intention of stopping. This mechanism, which I call cost gravity, pulls down the price of technology by about half every two years.
Cost gravity affects our entire human world. It is inevitable and unstoppable, driven by the spread of information and knowledge. Every two years, any given technology becomes twice as available at half the cost, and twice as powerful with half the bulk. Look around and observe that many old (and previously expensive and large) technologies are effectively free today, except for the influences of other ancient forces such as natural resources and friction. Cost gravity has existed and will exist as long as life itself. Superficially, technology is a human invention. Broadly, however, all life is information-based and therefore subject to cost gravity.
Take bacteria, for example. Bacteria are highly advanced life forms that evolve rapidly to survive in almost any condition. Bacteria share their genes in the way open source programmers share their code. Antibiotic resistance is scary, not because there's one colony of resistant bacteria somewhere, rather because these genes can pass to other bacteria that need them. Bacteria have recently been found in the inhospitably frozen Antarctic. Genetic information flows through the bacterial world just like knowledge flows through the human world. Or consider a living cell, which has more moving parts than a Boeing 777 and is smaller than a micron. Cells are self-healing, self-reproducing, and self-organizing. You might be tempted to invoke the supernatural to explain such sophistication. The real answer is that cells represent three-and-a-half billion years of cost gravity at work.
In human society, cost gravity makes expensive technologies into cheap ones. The curves are exponential: price falls to zero, power rises to infinity. Cost gravity does more than explain why so many things are more affordable than ever before; it provides a context for human history.
Cost gravity takes emperors' toys and turns them into commoners' tools, and as it does this, it drives profound social, economic, and political change. Here's how it works: A vital new technology enters society as an expensive item for the wealthy elite. The elite use it to expand their power base. However it's the middle classes who actually make the products. The technology naturally falls into their hands and they aggressively improve it. They compete for customers by making it faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The technology enters mass production and becomes available to all.
The farmer and the laborer suddenly gain access to this new power. Society reshapes itself like bubbles in a lava lamp. New businesses emerge and power moves from old to new.
Inevitably, old money fights back and tries to squash the newcomers. It buys oppressive laws, builds police states, and crushes the commercial middle classes. Old money sometimes wins, though not for very long. Political systems crash and are replaced by new ones. The page turns and the story starts again. Most histories overlook this process and focus instead on political changes and events without explaining why they happen.
I argue that every great empire is born out of a monopoly on a vital new technology: bronze, iron, the horse, irrigation, roads, military organization, finance. In each instance, essential knowledge spreads until everyone has access to it. Then the empire loses its monopoly, crashes, and the cycle repeats.
It is hard to understand exponential curves. Our minds give up as we approach the infinite. The curve tends to look either totally flat or like a straight cliff. We can look at history and collapse it into: "clean water and roads let the Romans build their empire" or "my portable phone has more computing power than the whole of NASA in 1962."
One reason the phenomenon is hard to grasp is that there is not one single technology to consider, rather, millions. The key ones are those that solve critical problems yet remain too expensive for common use, such as solar power, genetic engineering, advanced medicine, privacy, high-bandwidth communications, higher education, political organization, insurance, banking, translation, and so on. It's fair to predict that all of these -- at least when the patents, which I'll talk a lot about later, have expired -- are affected by cost gravity and will be one-thousandth the cost in 20 years, and one-millionth the cost in 40 years.
Once we realize that the curve has always existed and will always exist, we see that there is no coming "singularity." What does happen, predictably, is that as the cost of key technologies falls below certain thresholds, these technologies create explosive changes in society. While the curve is mostly invisible, these tipping points are not.
To take one historical example, paper existed for thousands of years, yet only in the fourteenth century did it become a mass-market product. There is a theory that the Black Death left enough cheap linen clothing lying around to spawn the mass production of paper. This is a possibility. More likely, the price of paper fell (thanks to cost gravity) below the critical level where any household could buy a printed book. At any rate, cheap paper broke the church's monopoly on information and opened the way for the Renaissance.
In the last decade, we crossed another one of those tipping points as computing -- once the key to global monopolies in finance and industry -- dropped into the range of the average household budget. Our twentieth century empires are crashing, and we're witnessing that crash and the seeds of the rebirth.
Up next: how cost gravity explains the 2007/08 financial crisis and what to expect next.
From Pieter Hintjens' Culture and Empire.