Moore's Law Redux: Connectivity is More Important that Processing Power

While Moore's law continues to slow, traffic on international internet links continues to grow faster than capacity. 

Moore's law, which predicted a doubling of the number of transistors per chip every 18 months, lasted from the 1960's through the early 2000s.  Over the last 10 years, newer chips have cost less and use less energy, but they have not been noticeably faster. Yet, even as Moore's law has slowed, the rise of the internet has made individual computer chips less important.

Chip density is still increasing, but progress has slowed as chip designers bump up against fundamental physical constraints, like the size of silicon atoms.  Also, as chips get smaller and denser the problem of dark silicon has increased.  To combat these limitations, manufacturers have added multiple cores and specialized architecture for graphics processing and other specialized operations. But multicore processors are hard for software to use efficiently. (Ars Technica article.)

So the current state-of-the-art 14nm Broadwell chips will remain best for the next 18+ months.  Intel promises to go to 10nm and then 7nm with new non-silicon technology.  Non-silicon technology may also finally allow faster chip speeds.  3D chip architecture is the next big advance that will improve power efficiency.  

In the meantime, manufacturers have focused on building specialized chips for mobile applications and the internet of things.  It seems the brave new frontiers are really in new mobile and cloud-based applications where energy efficiency matters more than processing power.  Every person in the world will have, on average, three internet-connected devices by 2019.

Global peak Internet traffic volumes rose 37 percent overall in 2015.  In years past, peak  internet traffic increased in excess of 41 percent each year, a rate which implies that traffic is more than doubling every two years. Over the next three years, overall growth is projected to slow to 23% a year (Telegeography 2015 Annual Report, Executive Summary.)

Even with the relative slowing of internet growth, global internet traffic in 2019 will be equivalent to 64 times the volume of the entire global internet in 2005. Globally, Internet traffic will reach 18 gigabytes (GB) per capita by 2019, up from 6 GB per capita in 2014.

IP traffic is growing fastest in the Middle East and Africa, followed by Asia Pacific. Traffic in the Middle East and Africa will grow at 44 percent annually between 2014 and 2019. By 2019, there will be more internet traffic in east Asia than in North America.
(Cisco 2015 analysis.) (Ars Technica has an older analysis)

Don't Read This if you Trust Me: The Pitfalls of Trusted Sources

Keith Kloor reports that Daniel Kahan recently "said that 'people misinform themselves.' What did he mean by this? Well, people have go-to sources for issues they don’t have time (or the inclination) to research. Your go-to source on a contentious issue–such as climate change or GMOs–is likely to share your values. That affinity is what makes the source trustworthy to you. But that doesn’t mean your trusted source is necessarily going to provide you with correct information."

I disagree for two reasons: 1) That's not quite what Kahan is concerned about, and 2) I think there are some information sources that are able to resist ideological decisions -- and we would do well to turn to them in times of misinformation.

1)  Kahan has an excellent blog where he tries to explain his often counter-intuitive research.  For example: a study he conducted evaluating the relationship between numeracy and ideology.  He looked at a person's ability to detect statistical covariance in case studies that were value-neutral versus case-studies about hot-button topics like abortion and gun control.

Not surprisingly, people had a harder time correctly interpreting data about hot-button topics.  To be specific, people failed to properly analyze data when it conflicted with their ideology.  

Kahan likes to say that "critical reasoning is being used opportunistically."  And he goes on to point out that more proficient people (i.e. more proficient at value-neutral numeracy tasks) are more polarized than less proficient people, not because they are more biased (although this may be true) but because they are better at fitting the evidence to their existing ideological biases.  Importantly, this effect appears to be equivalent on both sides of controversial topics.  Neither liberals nor democrats have a monopoly on crazy baseless beliefs.

2)  This brings me to my second point.  Perhaps there are a group of people who are not liberal or conservative; people who do not have strongly-held opinions about anything apart from what the evidence provides.  Probably more people would self-describe themselves in this group than can actually live up to this standard, but still.  It seems to me that this would be the ideal of a dispassionate, objective observer.  A true scientist.  And if our go-to sources are value-less, or better stated, if our go-to sources hold objective knowledge as their highest value, than we are justified in turning to them for information.  Doesn't mean they can't be wrong, but if they have the characteristics I mentioned previously, then at least they are thoughtful, transparent, and open to conflicting data.

Presumbably Keith would support this second point, if he wants us to keep reading his blog!  However,  Keith Kloor goes on to point out that even trustworthy sources can hold fallacious viewpoints: "Groups like Greenpeace and thought leaders such as Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, and Bill Nye have enormous clout in their respective spheres. "  These people and groups earned this clout by speaking truth to power.  But that doesn't mean all of their opinions are objectively justified.  People can be rational about some topics, but irrational about other topics!