Comment by guentherium on Has Moore's Law actually slowed down? · 2019-09-02T06:19:05.863Z · LW · GW

Doesn't the observation of any turbulence in the statistic contradicts already with the specific understanding (which is how? physically?) of the term law? Or doesn't it make it obsolete? However, the next question could be, how many technical changes in chip construction/integration/assembly are we going to still understand as an updated [version of] Moore's law? James Bridle writes in „New Dark Age“:

„[…] But Moore’s law, despite the name by which it came to be known (one which Moore himself wouldn’t use for two decades), is not a law. Rather, it’s a projection – in both senses of the word. It’s an extrapolation from the data but also a phantasm created by the restricted dimensionality of our imagination. It’s a confusion in the same manner as the cognitive bias that feeds our preference for heroic histories, but in the opposite direction. Where one bias leads us to see the inevitable march of progress through historical events to our present moment, the other sees this progress continuing inevitably into the future. And, as such projections do, it has the capability both to shape that future and to influence, in fundamental ways, other projections – regardless of the stability of its original premise.

What began as an off-the-cuff observation became a leitmotif of the long twentieth century, attaining the aura of a physical law. But unlike physical laws, Moore’s law is deeply contingent: it is dependent not merely on manufacturing techniques but on discoveries in the physical sciences, and on the economic and social systems that sustain investment in, and markets for, its products. It is also dependent upon the desires of its consumers, who have come to prize the shiny things that become smaller and faster every year. Moore’s law is not merely technical or economic; it is libidinal. […]“