IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

In his new book, "The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s" (Encounter Books, 2021), Mark Mills argues that not only is Moore's law alive and well but that a number of other technologies are now maturing into powerhouses of their own. Further, the confluence of information and these new physical technologies will lead to another "roaring" era, akin to the 1920s, when radio, automobiles, airplanes, electrification, and other technologies remade the world. In 1965, Intel founder Gordon Moore, with help from Carver Mead, saw that transistor densities on microchips were doubling every year or two and predicted that they could continue to do so for the next decade, at least.

As transistors got smaller, they would get faster and cheaper. At a furious compound doubling pace, they would launch an information revolution. Few predictions in technology work out, and none so spectacularly as Moore's law.

For the last 20 years, however, many technologists have argued that Moore's law is now, or will soon be, dead. In the last five years, those assertions have hardened into common knowledge. It's true that by the most traditional measure of feature size, Moore's law can't continue forever. Existing transistor designs can only shrink so far before they reach an atomic limit. Leading-edge "fabs" (or semiconductor factories), meanwhile, keep growing in cost (now around $12 billion to construct one).

And yet Mills shows that the combination of micro chip advances and macro architectural innovations (the cloud, in which millions of microchips are linked to perform common, commoditized tasks) have combined to keep Moore's law going strong.

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