I wonder what the post-Moore's law world will look like.
The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information)
As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other promising fields and technologies. I wonder if the next few decades will be dominated with developments from an entirely new discipline and culture.
?? Centuries? You mean twenty/thirty years, probably? We don't really have computers until about 50 years ago, and even then it was not widespread.
You don't have to wonder what post-Moore's law will look like. Look at other industries when they become mature. The car industry is one example: there's not that much innovation that goes into making a car better in terms of performance. I mean, a car from 30 years ago may be less comfortable but still drives pretty well as long as it's maintained. What makes the difference then is not performance anymore but whatever added value you bring on it: durability, reliability, service, etc... no doubt sooner or later electronics makers will have to innovate in different directions as well.
Cars are miles ahead of where they were in 1983 (pardon the pun). Compare everything from a family sedan to a sports car of the current era to then. Tires, creature comforts, horsepower, emissions, fuel economy, safety...
The comparison is moot. You can't drive 100 times faster with a car from 2013 than from 1983. With computers, you saw that huge progression in a matter of 10 years. Now what you have in your pocket is close to what used to run servers 10 years ago in terms of power (or maybe exceeds it). If at all, your argument strengthens my point that cars have stopped evolving in performance and now car manufacturers work on other attributes.
I suspect that though size and speed may not increase, costs will likely continue to fall for at least a while. This will affect what sorts of systems can be computerized and at what cost, if not the computational power of those devices.
And while I've been watching promises of quantum computing for a decade or more with no apparent real progress, it's possible that alternative models of computing devices will allow still greater computational power.
I think it's already plainly visible : since the only way to get more and better performance and features will be large compute farms, the entry-fee for IT related stuff will raise because you need to invest in a horizontally scaled entire data center, instead of just a few computers.
I'd also expect more of EC2 and GCE to happen, and ironically the "small" developer to pay less, but also have less options.
The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information)
As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other promising fields and technologies. I wonder if the next few decades will be dominated with developments from an entirely new discipline and culture.