What happens when technology changes but society doesn’t?

The Expanse is a wonderful piece of hard sci-fi that presents us all with a warning: without societal change, technology will amplify inequalities.The SyFy/Netflix series is based on the novels of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, writing together under the name James S.A. Corey. Set 200 years in the future, they tell of a solar system divided. Mars is independent, wealthy and ambitious. A neglected working class toils in the asteroid fields at the edge of the system, mining and shipping minerals under the control of Earth, technologically advanced but socially stagnant under the global control of the UN.The gap between rich and poor in this system-wide society is financially and geographically vast: perhaps this is the expanse the authors refer to. ‘The Belters’ have barely any control of their lives, bound as they are into service, and limited in their opportunities to travel by the effect of zero gravity on their bones and musculature.In my professional work I don’t try to look 200 years out. But I see a microcosm of this expanse building in the next 20.I’ve written a lot about automation and its likely effects. In short, it is hard to see how we create jobs of a volume to replace those that are likely to be destroyed by robots of various forms. But this is only part of the story.

Short engagements

In parallel with this, we are likely to see the remaining jobs for humans change. Firstly, it seems likely that engagements between employer and employee will continue to shorten. Not because people are bouncing between roles to get a pay boost. But because the increasingly cyclical nature of success will define periods in which some skills are needed and others in which they are not. Will you need all of the marketing, finance, legal, HR skills all year round? Or will you acquire them as needed — perhaps adding and dropping the same person to and from the workforce multiple times. Not freelancing exactly but multiple shorter duration stints.

BYOD

Secondly, we are moving towards a situation where a person is only as effective as the technology they bring with them. The ‘Bring Your Own Device’ trend seems innocuous and even fun at first: the reversal of companies and consumers having the best tech. But really it makes a lot of sense for the companies involved: lower capital outlay, and workers equipped with technology on which they are already trained.We are so close to our devices now that they are an extension of ourselves — again as I have written and spoken about extensively. At what point does the technology we bring with us become part of the recruitment process? Would a company (legitimately) want to select a candidate whose purely human characteristics are poorer than another’s, because their technological enhancements take them way beyond? Probably.

The haves and the have-nots

What does this do to the divide between the haves and have nots? It’s not positive. Legislation may try to prevent such discrimination based so closely on wealth. But I’m not sure what success it would have. Those who manage to get onto the bottom rung early will advance, others will not, as the gap widens over time.Technology is often painted as the villain in this piece. But technology has no agency. It simply presents a lens to the issues we have today and amplifies them. Long-range futurism and science-fiction is a wonderful way of demonstrating what might happen if we don’t address these issues today.

The Future of Moore's Law

Apparently AMD sees the end of Moore’s Law approaching. While the law may cease to be true in the strictest sense, I believe like many futurists that the spirit of the law will continue. The future of Moore's law is about a continuing growth in the bang for buck that computing delivers.

Nanometre hurdles

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, never intended to create a ‘law’ in his own name, he merely observed that the number of transistors on a silicon chip was doubling approximately every two years. This was way back in 1965, and the trend he had observed stretched back to 1958. Amazingly this statement became a ‘law’ because it remained true and continues to be so right up to the present day.Now we are constructing chips with such tiny components — working on a process at 22 nanometres, the width of just 220 helium atoms — that we are coming up against the limits of the laws of physics. AMD is struggling to shrink its transistors to this scale and beyond, though its main competitor Intel seems confident it will get down to 14nm and even 10nm in the next few years. The slower transition to 22nm is effectively breaking Moore’s law, at least for AMD.

Eventual expiration

Moore’s Law was always going to expire eventually. There are only so many transistors you can cram on to a chip however incredible your technology. But to understand the spirit of the law you have to go back to what Moore originally said: he wasn’t talking about what was technically feasible, but what was economically feasible. Now if you accept that transistor count used to be a reasonable analogue for computing power, what Moore’s Law really represents is that computing power per pound increases exponentially.Of course the measure of computing cost is not only the unit’s acquisition: you need to consider its power consumption. This too though has been falling exponentially. We can now deliver more computing power per pound and per watt than ever before. Continuing the trend is a challenge but you only need to look at initiatives like HP’s Moonshot to see the gusto with which it is being attacked (think of Moonshot like Southampton’s Raspberry Pi ‘supercomputer’ on a grand scale). After all, no-one would bet against there being a big market in the future for the infrastructure behind all internet services.

Future of Moore's Law: Continuing exponential

Ultimately we will reach the outer limits of what can be achieved with silicon. Physicist Michio Kaku predicted some time ago that we will reach that limit by the middle of the next decade. Though this may slow our ability to increase absolute computing power for a short time, it is unlikely to diminish our ability to refine the production processes and hence further diminish the financial and energy cost of each unit. And beyond this there are a number of candidates on the horizon to replace today’s silicon chips.Many people believe that Moore’s Law or its successors simply cannot continue: exponential growth would ultimately end up consuming everything in the pursuit of computing resource were it to continue. But some don’t rule out even this extreme future. In Charles Stross’ visionary novel Accelerando, humans (or our information-based descendants) begin to demolish whole planets and asteroids to support the manufacture of ever greater volumes of ‘computronium’ — smart matter — the substrate on which their pure-intelligence life form exists.That today though is the stuff of science fiction, outside of the 20 year window in which I choose to operate. Suffice to say, within that time frame I certainly don’t expect the rate of growth of computing power per watt and per pound to diminish. The future of Moore's law is safe, in spirit if not in specifics.