Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It

Predictions that improvements in manufacturing will lead to lower prices are made ceteris paribus; rising prices caused by a temporary disruption cannot be used to conclude manufacturing costs have gone up until the original conditions have been restored or been shown to be unable to be restored. Since R&D has largely gone on unmodified, there is no particular reason yet to expect that hard drive prices per unit capacity will be any higher in 2013, after most manufacturing facilities are restored and the market has had time to readjust, than an extrapolation made 1990-2010 would have predicted.

And the relevant question as to whether a facility is too expensive to rebuild is not one of the size of firms in that business currently, but of the expected rate of return on the capital. Sunk costs in the form of destroyed fabs will not prevent new capital from coming in to build new fabs (though it might bankrupt specific firms). For sabotage to actually have a long-term effect, it would have to happen regularly enough and effectively enough to significantly drive down the expected rate of return on capital invested in building fabs.

Related (about memory chips, but probably still relevant): A 0.07-Second Power Problem at Toshiba Chip-Plant May Affect Digital Device Availability/Prices.

There was a Wall Street Journal news story (among others) this morning reporting that "there was a sudden drop in voltage that caused a 0.07-second power interruption at Toshiba's Yokkaichi memory-chip plant in Mie prefecture" causing a problem which Toshiba said will reduce its shipments of NAND flash memory by 20% for the next two months. This, the Journal article says, would translate into a 7.5% reduction in world-wide shipments through February.

NAND memory is used in everything from USB flash drives to MP3 players to digital cameras to smartphones and tablet PCs. [...]

The WSJ article also says that apparently the uninterruptible power supply system at the Toshiba plant failed when the region was hit by a drop in voltage, causing the chips being fabricated to be ruined.

http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2010/12/the-value-of-007-seconds.html :

Toshiba's troubles started early Wednesday when, according to power supplier Chubu Electric Power Co., there was a sudden drop in voltage that caused a 0.07-second power interruption at Toshiba's Yokkaichi memory-chip plant in Mie prefecture.

Even the briefest power interruption to the complex machines that make chips can have an effect comparable to disconnecting the power cord on a desktop computer, since the computerized controls on the systems must effectively be rebooted, said Dan Hutcheson, a chip-manufacturing analyst at VLSI Research in San Jose, Calif.

For that reason, chip companies typically take precautions that include installing what the industry calls uninterruptible power supplies. Part of Toshiba's safeguards didn't work this time because the voltage drop was more severe than what the backup system is designed to handle, a company spokesman said.

Power outages frequently cause damage to chips, which are fabricated on silicon wafers about the size of dinner plates that may take eight to 12 weeks to process, Mr. Hutcheson said. Wafers that are inside processing machines at the time of an outage are often ruined, he added, though many that are in storage or in transit among those machines are not.

Norwegian construction reports (with their long experience in underground construction) for power stations and waste treatment plants indicate that underground construction premiums are more like 1.25x and may even save money in the long run. These hardenings, however, are not robust against nuclear or bunker-busting bombs, which require overburdens up to 2000 feet.

Ok, but what kind of actor are you envisioning as wanting to blow up the fabs? Nukes and bunker-busters seems to me to indicate nation-states, which - if genuinely convinced of the dangers of Moore's Law - have all kinds of other options available to them, like regulation. (Just look at what they've done to nuclear power plants...) If you decided to go terrorist and had access to a nuke, would a chip fab really be your highest-priority target?

A variety of links are broken- these include the link about suppression of firearms, the Cheyenne mountain link, the 2011 Thailand flood link, and the experience curve effect. It appears that something has messed up all the links that were to Wikipedia.

This piece seems to be proposing a solution to something that isn't obviously the thing to worry about. There are a variety of other threats to long-term human survival that require technological improvement to combat. Three obvious issues are asteroid impacts, large scale disease (due to modern infrastructure allowing the fast spread of otherwise localized diseases), and resource limitations (such as running out of easily accessible fossil fuels). Some of these are not directly connected to chip improvements- the Apollo program happened with mid 1960s level technology, and it is likely that the technological barriers to dealing with an annoying asteroid or comet are not strongly connected to computer tech level. However, others are not so limited- better computers mean better treatment of disease from better drug design and detection. Similarly, more efficient chips mean less use of oil (since less energy cost for the same computation) and less use of rare earth elements (which while not actually rare, are distributed in ways that make them inefficient to obtain except for in specific locations).

In general, the worry here is not existential risk threats by themselves: If an event or series of events puts us back a few centuries, it isn't obvious that we will have the resources to bootstrap us up back to current levels. Easily accessible oil and coal played a major part in allowing the technological and infrastructural improvements of the last two centuries. While we will likely have coal reserves for a long time, and to a lesser extent have oil reserves, none of the remaining reserves are nearly as accessible as those used in the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century.

Finally, it is very hard to suppress one area of technology in a narrow fashion without suppressing others as well. Many other areas require heavy duty computations, and computational power in many areas of biology, astronomy, math and physics are a major limiting factor. Your essay uses the Tokugawa period as an example of a technology being given up. However, there's a fair bit of controversy over how much guns were actually suppressed, and the point has been made that the Edo/Tokugawa period was relatively peaceful. More to the point in this context, almost no scientific or technological research was occurring in Japan of any sort until the Meiji restoration.

TBH i'd rather share my planet with the mind uploaded folks than the folks that bomb factories. Both of those folks are potentially non-friendly non-me intelligences, except the latter type is for certain non-friendly while the former type might end up friendly enough in the sense in which corporations and governments - as meta-organisms - are friendly enough.

Looking at the essay more, I would say: the chip fabrication labs are amazingly cheap and even highly coordinated efforts by all terrorist groups can not make even a small dent in the progress (excluding scenarios such as big nuclear war)

The several billion dollars apiece for a fab is cheap . The margins may be thin when everyone else, too, is making chips. But I can pay 10x of what I am paying for my electronic equipment, if needs be, and all chances are you can too if you are posting here. The income distribution being what it is (power law, see Pareto distribution), the costs can be raised massively while retaining the revenue as long as the cheap alternatives are not available. More than 50% of your customers can and would pay >2x (if the alternatives weren't available). Think about it. 20% own 80% of everything (or even more skewed), and its like this all the way to the top. With this kind of income distribution the luxury market alone can support entire industry along with progress. Look at Apple, and how successful it is even though the products are not all that popular worldwide - they make huge margin.

Anyhow, with regards to the de-novo AGI, really, all we have is extremely shaky guesses as to whenever de-novo AGI would be more or less disruptive than mind uploads, arguments which have extremely low external probabilities. Due to this uncertainty bombing fabs would result in negligible change of expected post-AI utility, as calculated by any rational agent that does not delude itself with regards to the strength of it's evidence (and argumentation) towards de-novo AGI being safer than mind uploads. (note that the negligible difference of expected value is different from negligible expected square of difference)

(the pascal's mugging, i think, is only a problem due to our self delusion with regards to strength of the prediction of superpowerful entity based on what superpowerful entity says; it can be that the superpowerful entities too would usually lie when doing pascal's mugging, and sufficiently often lie in an evil way involving eternal tortures when you accept what they say. This overconfidence in own prediction is a huge problem, manifesting itself not just in theoretical examples like pascal's mugging but realistic and soon to be practical examples like attitude towards de-novo AGI vs mind upload)

Are you actually suggesting that people attack chip fab plants in attempt to prevent WBE from occurring before de novo AGI?

I think if you were successful, you'd be more likely to prevent either from occurring than to prevent WBE from occurring first. It takes a whole lot of unfounded technological optimism to estimate that friendly de novo AGI is simple enough that an action like this would make it occur first, when we don't even know what the obstacles really are.

This is haunting the site. I see that your perspective is: "Does this imply that regulation could be accomplished by any modestly capable group, such as a Unabomber imitator or a souped-up ITS? No (reasons)" and that your position is that Terrorism is not effective. However, I have found several mentions of people being creeped out by this article around the site. Here is the last mention of someone being creeped out I noticed.. I think there is a serious presentation problem with this piece that goes like this:

1. Person clicks article title thinking "This is going to be about ways that Gwern thinks are good ideas to stop Moore's Law". Most of them do not know that Gwern thinks terrorism is not effective.

2. Person reads "the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by attacks on chip fabs."

3. Person assumes attacker will be a terrorist, because that's the reflexive reaction after hearing that term so much in the media.

4. Person thinks "Gee, a guy who thinks terrorism is a good idea. I'm outta here!"

5. Person never reads far enough to realize that Gwern's conclusion is that only a conventional military attack would work to stop chip fabs.

Please fix this. My suggestion is to do the following three things:

1. If you change the title, they won't interpret any of the scenarios you analyzed as "My idea of a great way to stop Moore's Law." For instance "Things that would and wouldn't work to stop Moore's Law" sounds more like an exploration of the possibilities, which is what you seem to have intended, than "How would you stop Moore's law?" which sounds like you're setting out to stop it.

2. There's a lot of mindkill about terrorism. If you state in the very beginning, before mentioning anything about attacks, that your view is that terrorism is not effective, and link to your article on your site, I think that will inoculate against people jumping to that conclusion while they're reading it. Without a blatant statement against terrorism, this is probably going to trigger mindkill for a lot of people.

3. The beginning of the article is a little bit confusing. I think if you introduced the possibilities you'll be going over before diving in, and stated your point in the beginning, it would be clear what your intent is. For instance: "I analyzed several different ways that people might try to stop Moore's law. Terrorism would not be effective but a conventional military assault could be."

Isn't the first rule of Fight Club that you don't talk about Fight Club?

It seems to me that the key point is Moore's second law, leading to centralization. Centralized facilities are easy to sabotage. But if this law keeps going, it might end Moore's law all on its own.

If the capital expense of a fab keeps growing exponentially, pretty soon there will be a monopoly on state of the art silicon. What happens to the economics then? It seems to remove much of the incentive to build better fabs. Even if pricing keeps on as normal, the exponentially increasing cost of the fabs seems hard to finance.

The obvious solution is not to make them so big. This gives up some economy of scale, but if the alternative is not building a better fab, it will probably happen, at least for a couple of cycles. How far can this be pushed? It seems to me that this is exactly the same question that people will ask if a single big fab is destroyed and they want to decentralize.

Great analysis. I am skeptical, though, that a campaign of targeted disruption could permanently derail Moore's law as long as the economy as a whole remains strong. Markets are really good at responding to dislocations like the destruction of a chip fabrication plant: other facilities would increase production in response to higher prices, unnecessary consumption would be curtailed (think of all those college kids using their fabulously advanced computers to surf Facebook), and future facility development would incorporate the threat of attack into their designs. We might even see companies start to trade special forms of insurance against such attacks.

I have some ideas for slowing Moore's law as well and, I'm wondering what you guys think of them (Gwern, too). I'm thinking of making these into post/s of their own and am curious about whether they'd be well-received or what, if anything, should to be done first.

Upvoted; very interesting.

the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by global regulation of chip fabs

I think it might be a hard sell to convince governments to intentionally retard their own technological progress. Any country who willingly does this will put themselves at a competitive disadvantage economically and defense-wise.

Nukes are probably an easier sell because they are specific to war - there's no other good use for them.

I think this might be more like Eliezer's "let it out of the box" experiments: The prospect of using the technology is too appealing to restrain it.

Also, another problem is that this is abstract. Nuclear weapons are a very tangible problem - they go boom, people die. Pretty much everyone can universally understand that.

With AI, the problems aren't so easy to understand. First of all, people might not even believe AI is possible in order to believe it is a risk. Secondly, people regard IT people practically the way they'd regard a real life wizard. I am called a genius at work for doing stupid tasks and thanked up and down for accomplishing small things that took five minutes. This is simply because others don't know how to do them. Simultaneously, it is assumed that no matter what type of IT problem I am given, I will be able to solve it. They assume a web developer can fix their computer for instance. I can fix some problems, but I'm no computer tech.

I wonder if they don't understand the risks of AI well enough to realize that the IT people can't fix it.

And then there's optimism bias. I can't think of a potentially useful technology we've passed up because it was dangerous. Can you think of an example where that has actually happened? Or where a large number of people understood an abstract problem, believed in it's feasibility, and took appropriate measures to counteract it?

I'll be thinking about this now...

If we wanted to shift probability towards de novo AGI (the desirability of uploads is contentious, with pro and con), then we might withhold support from hardware development or actively sabotage it.

Sabotage? Isn't that going to be illegal?

Maybe there's an intermediate possibility between WBE and de novo AI-- upload an animal brain (how about a crow? a mouse?) and set it to self-improvement. You'd still have to figure out Friendliness for it, but Friendliness might be a hard problem even for an uploaded human brain. How would you identify sufficient Friendliness when you're choosing humans to unpload? I'm assuming that human ems would self-improve, even if it's a much harder problem than improving a de novo AI.

Moore's Second Law reminds me of a good enough for sf notion I've got. Chip fabs keep getting more expensive until there's one per spiral arm.

More seriously, how stable is the Second Law likely to be? The First Law implies increasing competence at making things, and whether the First Law eventually dominates the Second or the other way around isn't obvious.

The real question is how to accelerate it, not ti stop it. And more likely to happen, too.

In some homes, the electricity used to power computers is already a significant fraction of total household power used. If a carbon tax were applied to the natural gas bonanza from fracking, prices would discourage buying just straight additional CPUs, in favour of making better use of the CPU speed we have already - it would simply be uneconomic for a company to run 100 times the CPU power it currently does.

EDITED TO ADD:

I guess I should expand on my reasoning a little.

Moore's law continues, in part, because there is the demand for additional computing power (as well as the expectation that it will keep getting cheaper). Reduce the demand, and you reduce the pressure for the law to be continued.

There's near infinite demand for increased computing power, so trying to suppress the demand part of the equation might at first seem a dead loss. However compare it to cars. People like cars that can drive fast. So why isn't the top speed of all cars 180 mph, now that technology can achieve that and more? The reason isn't just the purchase price of the car (which is what Moore's law covers - the price per cpu power purchased). The reason is also the cost of running the car. Engines designed for speed use lots of fuel. Having an 4 litre engine in their car is uneconomic for many families.

Keeping a server on for a year costs about $200 in electricity. source. Unless the energy efficiency per CPU dramatically improves, a server with 10 times the computing power would be more expensive, one 100 times would be more expensive still, etc. At some point, more computing power (desirable though that is) is no longer affordable in terms of what it costs to run. And the higher energy prices are, the sooner we reach that point.

I mentioned fracking because that's the reason the American price of natural gas (which fuels many power stations) has more than halved in the last few years. A carbon tax might be one method of reversing that price increase.

I know, not a major effect, but it could be a contributing factor, give us a few years grace. shrugs

There are 2 main routes to Singularity, brain emulation/upload and de novo AGI.

Brain emulations are a joke. Intelligence augmentation seems much more significant - though it is not really much of an alternative to machine intelligence.

This used to be an interesting site for discussing rationality. It was bad enough when certain parties started spamming the discussion channel with woo-woo about the machine Rapture, but now we have a post openly advocating terrorism, and instead of being downvoted to oblivion, it becomes one of the most highly upvoted discussion posts, with a string of approving comments?

I think I'll stick to hanging out on sites where the standard of rationality is a little better. Ciao, folks.

Moore's law is really hard to stop. Destroying all humans seems to be the only practical method of stopping it for any length of time, and even then I don't think it would be permanent.