File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9705, message 89


Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 15:33:27 -0700
From: Ben Seattle <icd-AT-communism.org>
Subject: M-I: (POF-1 replies)[2 of 2] Moore's Law will lead to collapse of


(continued from [1 of 2])


The bourgeoisie is split on what to do about the communications revolution.
 This split is permanent.  It will not go away.  On the one hand the
communications revolution will empower the proletariat to do away with
bourgeois rule.  On the other hand, it will be a long time before that
happens and a big section of the bourgeoisie is going to get very rich off
of this process before it is all over.

Furthermore, the bourgeoisie of each country faces a dilemma.  They have no
choice but to create the conditions of their demise.  In order to remain
competitive in international markets--they must build the infrastructure
that will bring knowledge and consciousness to their proletariat and
inevitably lead to their extinction as a class.  Hence, their dilemma: they
must pave the road to their extinction while saying, after Louis XIV,
"Apres moi, le deluge."


12. Will all hell really break loose ?
=====================================
In section 5 (above) I posed the following questions:

	What are the political consequences of all this?
	Will governments really be unable to censor or control
	the use of communications technology by the masses?
	Will the masses really be able to use this technology
	to organize themselves and overthrow bourgeois rule?

Unfortunately, I do not have time or space to explore these very important
questions right here and right now (the margin of my paper is too small ;-)

Hopefully this interesting question can be explored further as participants
and readers of M-I decide that this topic really is worth discussing.

For now I will note that there seems to be no shortage of would-be
revolutionary thinkers who make arguments to the effect that--if this thing
really emerges as a threat to bourgeois rule--the bourgeoisie can simply
"pull the plug".

What this argument overlooks is that the central role the communications
infrastructure will play in the economy--will mean that the bourgeoisie
will not be able to "pull the plug" without crippling the economy.  Would
the bourgeoisie cripple their own economy in order to prolong their class
rule ?  Yes, they would--but this does not become a viable option in the
long run.  Any ruling class in the modern world that cripples its own
economy tends not to fare very well in the long run.  A man can hold his
breath also--for a period of time.  But he can't do it for very long.
Similarly, the bourgeoisie of any country will not be able to "pull the
plug" for any length of time--without dire effect and a rapidly escalating
crisis.


Censorship ?
------------

Similar arguments apply to the possibility of censorship by the
bourgeoisie.  Today there is no lack of people (and even governments) that
believe that they will be able to censor the internet.  There are all sorts
of schemes to build national firewalls (ie: the great firewall of China,
etc), lock out troublesome foreign news sites and arrest internal
troublemakers.  Good luck.  The problem with all such schemes is that they
result in crippling the growth of the communications infrastructure and put
the country with such a crippled infrastructure at a major disadvantage in
relation to other countries with which it must compete.

There will be some cooperation among the international bourgeoisie to deal
with the common threat they all face from the communications revolution
(recent diplomatic activity to organize a united bourgeois front--to deal
with the "threat" of encryption is an example of this).  But this will not
alter the fundamental forces at work.  The current Chinese government, for
example, will be lucky to hold out 10 years against the "spiritual
pollution" against which its net censorship is aimed.


Will the masses be able
to actually use the weapon 
of many-to-many communications ?
--------------------------------

That will be a discussion for another day.  I have already drawn my
conclusion.  Some reformist trends have already drawn theirs.  For example,
"Monthly Review" came out with a special issue (July-Aug 1996) on
"Capitalism and the Information Age" where they ridicule "the extravagances
of the technophiles" which "stem from the belief that once the information
is available political power will fall, or perhaps drift into the hands of
the many" (see the only article in that issue that bothered to deal with
this question: "Democracy and the New Technologies" by Ken Hirschkop).

There is a grain of truth in Hirschkop's argument.  Hirschkop argues that
the masses will not gain power without a struggle requiring courage and
political organization.  And this is true.  What Hirschkop overlooks,
however, is a "trifle":

	the communications revolution
	will connect the masses to one another--
	and this will catalyze their courage
	to create their own political organization
	and overthrow bourgeois rule.


==============================================Appendices:
==============================================
   A1 -- reference material: internet usage & shrinking transistors

	1. Estimates of internet use today
	2. Estimates of internet use tomorrow
	3. Estimated number of users on the internet (1983-2001)
	4. My own long-range estimates of digital penetration
	5. Penetration of television (selected countries)
	6. Microprocessors for PC's shipped last year
	7. The shrinking transistor
	8. Estimates of when Moore's Law will be dead

   A2 -- boddhisatva's two posts of May 3, 1997
   A3 -- "Wired" interview with Gordon Moore (May 97)


==============================================Appendix 1:

	Reference material:
	internet usage & shrinking transistors
==============================================

1. Estimates of internet use today:
==================================
   ( Numbers and percentages vary depending on who    )
   ( is counted and what qualifies as "internet use". )

   Year by which more than 50 % of internet users
   will be located outside of the United States
   (ie: mainly Europe and Japan):

	1997 or 1998 (source: I can't remember)

   Adult U.S. citizens who use at least
   one internet application besides e-mail:

	27.7 million (ie: 14 % of adults) *

   U.S. adults who use e-mail only--or--who have tried
   to use the internet but have not stuck with it:

	12.6 million (ie: 6 % of adults) *

   U.S. or Canada (16 years old and over) who have
   been on internet in any form in the past month:

	50.6 million (ie: 24 % of 16 and over) **

   E-mail and web users by frequency of usage:  (*)

	use e-mail daily:		59 %
	use e-mail at least weekly:	89 %

	use web daily:			49 %
	use web at least weekly:	78 %

	(*  source: 1997 American Internet User Survey, NYT 5-7-97)
	(** source: March 1997 Neilsen Media Internet Demographics)

	Note: I have not seen stats on this--but it is probably
	a safe guess that well over two-thirds of all internet
	usage is from businesses and schools.


2. Estimates of internet use tomorrow:
=====================================
   Here are estimates by various analysts:

   Person		year	people on-line
   -------------	-----	--------------
   Negroponte/Tapscott	2000	1 billion
   (can't remember)	2000	700 million
   Dertouzos		2007	500 million

Don Tapscott is coauthor of "Paradigm Shift" and author of "The Digital
Economy" (1996).  Nicholas Negroponte is head of the Media Lab at MIT and
also writes the back page editorial in each Month's "Wired".  He is also
the author of "Being Digital".  Althou both Negroponte and Tapscott are
very widely known and respected, this estimate of theirs has been widely
ridiculed and my guess is that it is fairly unrealistic (see below).
Michael Dertouzos heads the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.  His
recent book on the digital communications revolution is titled "What Will
Be" (1997).  His estimates are more conservative and (in my opinion) likely
to be more accurate.


3. Estimated number of users on the internet (1983-2001)
=======================================================
	(See my note below for a comment)

			  graphical representation of "X", where
  year	number of users	  Number of Users = 2 to the (X)th power
  -----	---------------	  ------------------------------------------
  1983	  2 thousand	  ***********			   (11)
  1984	  4 thousand	  ************			   (12)
  1985	  6 thousand	  *************			   (13)
  1986	 10 thousand	  **************		   (14)
  1987	 22 thousand	  ***************		   (15)
  1988	 80 thousand	  *****************		   (17)
  1989	400 thousand	  *******************		   (19)
  1990	  1 million	  ********************		   (20)
  1991	  2 million	  *********************		   (21)
  1992	  3 million	  **********************	   (22)
  1993	  7 million	  ***********************	   (23)
  1994	 12 million	  ************************	   (24)
  1995	 20 million	  *************************	   (25)
  1996	 40 million	  **************************	   (26)
  1997	100 million	  ***************************	   (27)
  1998	200 million	  ****************************	   (28)
  1999	400 million	  *****************************	   (29)
  2000	  1 billion	  ******************************   (30)
  2001	1.6 billion	  *******************************  (31)


	(Source: "The Digital Economy", Don Tapscott, Fig 1.2)
	(  I estimated the number of users from Tapscott's   )
	(  logarithmic chart and hence this is a bit rough.  )

	--- Note ---
	This chart is the likely source for the widely ridiculed
	estimate of one billion users by the end of the decade.
	The values for 1997 - 2001 seem to represent Tapscott's
	estimate based on the wildly erroneous assumption that
	exponential growth will continue unabated.  By this logic,
	the number of internet users in 2010 will be one trillion
	and still going strong.  Exponential growth may be
	characteristic of the early phase of the "S" curve
	representing the penetration rate of new technology, but
	this exponential growth must give way to more ordinary
	arithmetic growth as the various strata of the population
	which can afford the technology are saturated and new
	strata make purchases based on the declining cost and
	increasing usefulness.  In spite of this kind of error,
	I highly recommend Tapscott's book "The Digital Economy".


4. My own long-range estimates
   of digital penetration:
=============================
	Estimated penetration of digital infrastructure
	(prediction method: scientific wild-assed guess)

 year	|pictograph		| (percent of world population)
------------------------------------------------------------
 1995	|			|  0%
 (today)|			|  1% (approx. 60 million)
 2000	|			| 
	|			|
 2005	|*			|  5%
	|**			|  8%
 2010	|***			| 15%
	|*****			| 
 2015	|******			| 30%
	|********		| 40%
 2020	|************		| 60%
	|***************	| 75%
 2025	|****************	| 80%
	|*****************	| 85%
 2030	|******************	| 90%
	|*******************	|
 2035	|*******************	| 95%
	|********************	|
 2040	|********************	|100%


 scale:	|*  =  5% of world population (300 million)
	|** = 10% of world population (600 million)
	|******************** = 100% of population


Above is my own estimate (from note 1.3 in POF-1) of the "S" curve likely
to characterize the penetration of the many-to-many digital communications
infrastructure.  (I reformated it so that it should now be readable for
readers who have mail programs set to proportional-spaced fonts.)

Note: there is no empirical data backing up this chart.  Nor would any
"think tank" or similar outfit dare offer such blatant speculation on how
quickly the population of the world will be online.  However I believe this
graph is extremely important (if any reader believes there is a more
important curve affecting the future of humanity--he is invited to offer
suggestions of what it might be) and therefore made my own estimate.  I
have looked at the "S" curves for other communications technologies (phone,
radio, TV, etc), done a lot of reading and, in the end, made a "scientific
wild-assed guess".

Internet usage in many parts of the world will likely be a phenomena
confined for a considerable time to the white-collar workforce.  The
driving force for a long time will be the need of corporations to make
e-mail and the web available to their workforce in order to be competitive
in the international market.  Penetration of digital communications
technologies to the consumer market--to the home--typically follows in the
wake of wide-spread corporate adoption.  In the gigantic U.S. consumer
market this is already beginning to happen in a major way (PC sales in the
U.S. are as big in the consumer market as they are to corporations)
although the extraordinary size and wealth of the U.S. market makes it very
atypical on a world scale.

Because a number of non-PC devices (such as the NC, or network computer)
will emerge, and because PC prices are declining--it is still very unclear
precisely what kinds of devices will emerge as the predominant type of
many-to-many digital communications devices.  In the U.S., set-top boxes
such as "WebTV" (that convert TV's to e-mail clients and web browsers) are
being sold for $250 with a $20/month fee for internet connection.  Sales to
date of such devices (under 60,000) are considered as being equivalent to
zero in the massive U.S. market.  Within ten years, however, all new TV's
sold in the U.S. will be digital (ie: capable of being used as a computer
display) and will likely have web browser ability, not as an option, but a
standard feature.


5. Penetration of television (selected countries)
================================================
	percentage of total households
	that own a television

  country	color	black & white
  --------	------	--------------
  India		12 %	30 %
  China		40 %	54 %
  France	88 %	20 %
  Italy		88 %	37 %
  Germany	94 %	17 %
  Britain	94 %	34 %
  U.S.		97 %	(Not Applicable)

	(source: Gallup India, WSJ 5-23-97)

  The penetration of television gives a rough idea of what
  the penetration of digital communication devices would be
  once digital communication devices are as cheap as a TV.
  Note: statistics of telephone ownership would likely
  be a more useful and relevant indicator--because
  telephones require a monthly fee--but my apartment
  is so cluttered I cannot find these stats.  The general
  order of widespread adoption of many-to-many digital
  communication devices, however, is indicated.  China
  trails Europe, India trails China, and most of Africa
  (not shown) trails India.  Penetration of telephones is
  considerably less than TV and is probably only 1 or 2
  percent in India and Africa.  More than half the world's
  population have never spoken over the telephone.
  Penetration of telephone (and possibly simple internet
  usage) in many of the poorer countries may initially be
  via wireless infrastructure since this is much cheaper,
  faster and easier to set up.


6. Microprocessors for PC's shipped last year:
=============================================
	Microprocessors are the "brains" of a personal computer.
	The great majority of PC's have a single microprocessor.
	This number would be very close to the number of PC's sold.

		83 million (source: Economist -- 10 May 97)

	PC's are currently the main platform for many-to-many
	digital communications.  In the recent period, a large
	number of non-PC digital communication devices (ranging
	from boxes to set on top of a TV, to phones that send
	e-mail and browse the web, to fancy pagers) have either
	been brought to market or have been proposed.


7. The shrinking transistor:
===========================
	Transistors are the switches that make
	digital communications possible.  The
	number of transistors in a device are
	a rough measure of its computational
	"power" (ie: ability to do useful work)

		minimum		transistors
		feature		per square
		size 		centimeter
   Year		(microns)	(millions)
   ------	-----------	------------
   1995		0.35		 4
   1998		0.25		 7
   2001		0.18		13
   2004		0.13		25
   2007		0.10		50
   2010		0.07		90

	Source: "As Limits on Chip Size and Price Near ..."
	M. Hiltzik (Los Angeles Times 5-12-97) (Sidebar)

   --- note 1 ---
   The great majority of the cost to produce a chip
   is the fixed cost to produce the first one
   (ie: R&D and building the plant to produce it).
   The variable cost for each additional chip is
   usually a small fraction of the price it sells for.

   --- note 2 ---
   The chart above showing the minimum feature size on a chip
   is very important but many readers may not have a clear
   picture of how big a micron is and its relationship to the
   size of a wavelength of light or an atom.  Yet these
   relationships are important in order to understand the
   physical limitations which technology is now running into.
   Therefore I have added the following as background:

   How big is a transistor ?

   Most of us know how big a millimeter is.  (For Americans
   unfamiliar with the metric system--there are about 25 
   millimeters in an inch.)  There are a thousand microns in
   a millimeter.  The diameter of a single human hair (about 
   .003 inches) is approximately 75 microns.  The wavelength
   of light is approximately half a micron.  Therefore--while we
   may think of a wavelength of light as being very small--they
   are only about 150 times smaller than the width of a hair.

   And, as we shall see, a transistor is about this size also,
   but just a little bit smaller.

   There are a thousand nanometers in a micron.  A wavelength of
   light would be about 700 nanometers for red and 400 nanometers
   for violet, with all the other colors in between.  Hence, a 
   transistor that is 0.35 microns in width--is 350 nanometers--and
   just a bit smaller than the smallest wavelength of light.  This
   is why transistors can no longer be carved out by photons of
   visible light.  Particles with shorter wavelengths are needed.

   The portion of the spectrum with wavelengths shorter than visible
   light is called the ultraviolet.  Ultraviolet wavelengths range
   from 400 nanometers down to 1 nanometer.  Wavelengths smaller than
   1 nanometer are called X rays.  The diameter of a hydrogen atom
   (the smallest atom) is about a tenth of a nanometer.  Atoms of
   silicon on a computer chip would be slightly larger and I will 
   estimate here that there are about 6 silicon atoms per nanometer 
   (the number 6 is only a guess but it makes the numbers come out 
   nice and round).  Hence a transistor that is 0.35 microns
   (or about 350 nanometers) represents a structure approximately
   2000 atoms wide.

   Hence, we could rewrite the chart above, using nanometers and
   atoms instead of microns:

		mimimum		(approximate)
		feature		feature
		size 		size 
   Year		(nanometers)	(atoms)
   ------	-----------	------------
   1995		350		2100
   1998		250		1500
   2001		180		1100
   2004		130		 800
   2007		100		 600
   2010		 70		 400

   When we picture transistor size in terms of atoms it is easier
   to gain an understanding of the kinds of difficulties that
   technology is encountering and why Moore's law (a law that 
   states that the ability of technology to use light to carve 
   silicon is improving resolution at a rate of approximately 
   20 percent a year) cannot go on forever.


8. Estimates of when Moore's Law will be dead:
=============================================
   faction		year
   -------		----
   main stream		2007 - 2010
   pessimists		2003
   optimists		a long time

   Gordon Moore himself (see the interview below) says:

	"in about a decade, we're going to see a distinct
	slowing in the rate at which doubling occurs.
	I haven't tried to estimate what the rate will be,
	but it might be half as fast -- three years instead
	of eighteen months."


===============================================Appendix 2:

	Boddhisatva's two posts of May 3, 1997
===============================================
----------------------------------
Date:    Sat, 3 May 97 4:27:03 EDT
Subject: Re: M-I: (POF-1 Notes)

To whom...,

There is a company in southern California called Cymer Inc.  which has made
a tremendous amount of money because people were dumb enough to call an
observation - that by Mr. Gordon Moore of Intel - a "law". Moore's "law",
they reasoned, was so brilliantly predictive, that one need not diddle
around with light lithography since the sainted Moore had predicted
transistor packing only achievable through x-ray lithography. By this
logic, Cymer's business - deep ultraviolet lasers for photolithography -
was a loser.  Well, of course Mr. Moore about as prescient as Kenny
Kingston's Psychic Friends Network when it came to man's ability to
overcome physics, and Cymer now has back-orders on deep UV light sources as
far as the eye can see.

The moral to this story, one that should be painfully obvious to Marxists,
is that "laws" which predict the end-product of human interaction well into
the future are so much hokum.  Yet, the temptation to make obvious and
simple statements like "I think we're really gonna have to keep trying to
pack those transistors on chips." into "laws" seems irresistible.  The
dynamic Mr. Moore hit upon: namely that processing speed begets the need
for more processing speed, is certainly reasonable.  Likewise, the dynamics
Marx identified within society are equally reasonable and brilliantly
observed, not because they are so complex, but because they are so basic. 

We have to resist the urge to create arcane formulas out of fundamental
observations about human relations.  

peace

----------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 3 May 97 4:39:31 EDT
Subject: Re: M-I: (POF-1) Appendix:
         A Terror Discussed Nonstop
         at Washington Cocktail Parties

To whom...,

Of course, the fact that the Internet is a bourgeois phenomenon (at least
for the foreseeable future) makes this even more interesting. Personal
computers' having a penetration to 30% of American homes, with links to the
internet less than that, with links to the non-AOL internet less than that
(yet far above the average in the rest of the developed world) or
accessible on a regular basis only to some majority proportion of college
students, the arguments of Internet doom are arguments among elements of
the bourgeoisie.  That the Internet will have some bearing on the
revolution is clear, but to what extent it will shape the views of the
proletariat directly is not.

peace


====================================================Appendix 3:

	"Wired" interview with Gordon Moore (May 97)
====================================================
( The following appeared in the May 1997 issue of _Wired_.   )
( It is copyrighted and reproduced here for private use only.)


Moore's Law Repealed, Sort Of

Gordon Moore foresees a day when his famous law
breaks down -- well, maybe not.

By Peter Leyden

(sidebar:)

For more than 30 years, Moore's Law has governed Silicon Valley like an
immutable force of nature.  The idea that processing power will double
every 18 months has been treated as an axiom -- rather than the rule of
thumb it actually is.  No one knows this better than Gordon E. Moore.  In
an obscure 1965 magazine article, Moore, then Fairchild Semiconductor R&D
director, reluctantly predicted the expected increase in the power of
integrated circuits over 10 years.  By the late 1970s, Moore was a
cofounder of Intel, and his tenuous "law" was well on its way to become a
self-fulfilling prophecy among researchers, manufacturers, and vendors.
Now, at 68, Moore will serve as Intel's board chair emeritus.  _Wired_
asked him to look to the next 30 years and, once again, make some
predictions about the future of computing power.


(interview:)


________________________
Wired: How long will
       Moore's Law hold?

Moore: It'll go on for at least a few more generations of technology.
Then, in about a decade, we're going to see a distinct slowing in the rate
at which doubling occurs.  I haven't tried to estimate what the rate will
be, but it might be half as fast -- three years instead of eighteen months.


______________________
Wired: What will cause
       the slowdown?

Moore: We're running into a barrier that we've run up against several times
before: the limits of optical lithography.  We use light to print the
patterns of circuits, and we're reaching a point where the wavelengths are
getting into a range where you can't build lenses anymore.  You have to
switch to something like X rays.


_________________________
Wired: Would X rays
       open a whole new
       round of doubling?

Moore: Theoretically, they keep us on this curve a longer time.
Practically, they have a lot of problems.  If we get away from optical
lithography, somehow we have to get the subsequent technique up to the same
level of sophistication to keep making progress rapidly.  X rays represent
a sufficiently dramatic change that it will be difficult to build on what
we've done in the past.  We'll have to start over, and it's going to take a
long time to get traction.

Obviously, the industry is worried about this.  We're looking at a US$200
billion industry that typically invests 10 percent of its revenues into
research and development.  A significant fraction of that will be aimed at
solving this problem.  Maybe something will come out that will make this
transition a lot less onerous than I believe.


___________________________
Wired: Are the costs
       getting prohibitive?

Moore: Recently someone gave me Moore's Second Law: The cost of
manufacturing facilities doubles every generation.  In the late 1980s,
billion-dollar plants seemed like something a long way in the future.  They
seemed almost inconceivable.  But now, Intel has two plants that will cost
more than $2.5 billion apiece.


______________________________
Wired: And the cost
       of each generation
       after that will double?

Moore: That's where you get into numbers that sound impossible again.  If
we double it for a couple of generations, we're looking at $10 billion
plants.  I don't think there's any industry in the world that builds $10
billion plants, although oil refineries probably come close.

Obviously our first reaction is to see what we can do to keep the
technology moving but the costs down.  For example, we used to build a
completely new set of equipment each generation.  Now our development
people try to reutilize as much of the previous generation's equipment as
possible.  And they've been pretty successful.  We may bring a $10 billion
dollar plant down to the $5 billion range.  But these are still huge numbers.


________________________________
Wired: What will we be able to
       do with these superchips?

Moore: Even with the level of technology that we can extrapolate fairly
easily -- a few more generations -- we can imagine putting a billion
transistors on a chip.  A billlion transistors is mind-boggling.
Exploiting that level of technology, even if we get hung up at a mere
billion transistors, could keep us busy for a century.


________________________________
Wired: How much more powerful
       than today's chips are
       billion-transistor chips?

Moore: Our most advanced chips in design today, will have less than 10
million transistors.  So, we're talking about a hundred times the
complexity of today's chips.  We wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what to
do with a billion transistors right now, except to put more memory in a
chip and speed it up.  But as far as adding functionality, we don't know
what can be done.


_______________________________________
Wired: Do you think DNA computing,
       or organic semiconductors,
       could supersede microprocessors?

Moore: I'm skeptical about that stuff.  You stir up a bunch of goo, and
it's going to do something?  I'm a chemist, so I can say this.  The things
we build don't happen that way.  We're more deliberate in the way we do
things.

I believe the technology our industry has developed -- this idea of
building very complex structures layer by layer -- is a fundamental
technology.  It is as fundamental to the Digital Revolution as metalworking
was to the Industrial Revolution.  I don't believe it's going to be
replaced.  But I could be wrong; I could be too tied up in my own technology.


___________________________________
Wired: What about quantum computing
       or building computers
       with nanotechnology?

Moore: I'm skeptical about this, too, but it's closer to what we do than
the DNA stuff.  Quantum devices may be the ultimate transistors.  The
transistor doesn't behave very well when you get down to very small
dimensions, but that gets into the realm where things like quantum devices
start working.

We may make the transition to a kind of quantum device that keeps the whole
trend going.  Quantum devices are pretty far out, and a lot of work has to
be done.  They're far enough away that they're beyond my tenure in this
industry -- a couple of decades from now.


__________________________________
Wired: Is there ever a point where
       you see so many problems
       on the horizon that
       you just want to give up?

Moore: Engineers thrive on problems.  They're trained to solve problems.
When they run out of problems, they become very frustrated.


________________________
Wired: I see.  So you're
       just loving this.

Moore: Yeah, this is great stuff



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