NEW TECHNOLOGY 2015 LECTURE L03
For the most time of human history, life was local and linear. Local in the way that anything that happened was close by, a least within a walking distance. Linear in the way that your life was the same as your father and your children. Nothing changed.
Just like the evolution of man, technology improvements follow an evolutionary progress. New ideas or products are to begin with immature and fragile with slow improvements. Then the progress accelerates until the products become mature and taken for granted. Then the cycle repeats and a new layer of technology is added to the previous. This process is exponential. One such observation of exponential is Moore’s Law.
Exponential is interesting. We think linear, we plan linear but fail to understand exponential. Exponential grow is in it’s essence simple. Just double in each iteration. The sequence is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256… and so on. Sounds small, but after 10 iterations we have 1000 fold increase, and after 30 we have billion fold increase. So if computers have doubled the performance every 18 months since Gordon Moore’s 1965 paper where he described the observation that became know as Moore’s Law.
Here is part 1:
And Part 2:
Slides: