In 1965, Gordon Moore of Intel noted that the number of transistors per square inch in microprocessors had doubled approximately every two years since their invention. He predicted that would continue into the future. It has.
For decades, Moore’s Law, by indicating the expanding power of microprocessors, has pointed toward key technological breakthroughs. If the chips could deliver the power, went the supposition, then scientists and technologists would find valuable ways to put it to work. Over many years this has been the case. Moore’s Law pointed toward graphic computers, streaming video, big data crunching and now toward VR.
But Moore’s Law is reaching its zenith. Many scientists believe silicon-based chip architecture has to plateau soon if it hasn’t already. “Moore's law has been kind to us,” wrote Adarsh Patil of the Indian Institute of Science, “and we have been able shrink transistors with each generation. However, there's not much further they can go with transistors as we know them today. Beyond the nanoscale is the atomic scale, where you're dealing with materials that are only a few atoms in size...Improvements in processing power may not continue to be exponential.”
Chips won’t impact the future as much as they have the past, not only because Moore’s Law is at the top of its S-curve, but also because the chips derived from Moore’s Law and the devices they have spawned have already endowed the world with awesome computing power. Consider this: each of today’s smart phones has more processing power than the original Cray Supercomputers. Essentially, each connected human today has a super computer in hand, and all those palm-size supercomputers are tied together over mobile and IP networks. That’s 3B individual supercomputers today, and more than 4B of them by 2019, all able to work together in tandem. This is enough computing power, essentially, in aggregate, to solve any practical problem.
Not only is today’s computing power enormous, it is fundamentally more brain-like than in the past. Think about it: a computer, no matter how powerful, having a single (or even a small cluster) of central processors, doesn’t process information at all like a human brain with its billions of parallel-firing synapses. But a huge network of billions of tiny supercomputers gets much closer to being “brain-like” in the synaptic way it can operate. We have the computing power now to make the notion of a hive mind not at all science-fictiony.
So if expanding chip power won’t define the binding curve of the technological future, what will? My candidate for the new driving force for technological transformation is: The Zetta Factor.
The Zetta Factor is a measure of mass information. In 2016, total Internet traffic passed one zettabyte for the first time. At that moment, we officially entered the "Zetta Era." A zettabyte is a truly staggering amount of information. One zettabyte equals one sextillion bytes, or 1,000 exabytes. All the words ever spoken by humanity equal 35 exabytes. One zettabyte is the equivalent of 36,000 years of streaming high-definition video, the equivalent of streaming Netflix's entire catalog 3,177 times.
Zetta is a cyclopean amount as it stands today. But Zetta is projected to double by 2020, pass 4Z by 2022 and 5Z by 2023.
Each time a human goes on the worldwide network, Zetta rises, because in the Zetta Era people don’t just absorb content from the network, they create it as well. And, each time a device goes on the worldwide network, Zetta rises, because all these devices—computers, smartphones, IoT gizmos, satellites—also both create new information and absorb it. Over the next few years, not only will more people go online (rising from 3B today, about half the world population, to 5B in 2023, just under 65% of world population) but we will all have many more connected devices. By 2023, devices could outnumber people on the worldwide network by a factor of 4 to 1.
We are entering an era defined by staggering informational density and growth, increasingly created by and on behalf of connected devices. How we deal with Zetta Era will determine the fundamental nature of the upcoming century.
I will explore some of the ramifications of the Zetta Factor in my next post.