The Maker Revolution

CHAPTER 1Exponential Technologies

In 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore noticed that the size of transistors was shrinking so quickly that every year since their invention in 1958, twice as many of them could fit on an integrated circuit (computer chip). In other words, processing power for computers was doubling every year and costs were likewise dropping. Moore predicted this pace (later changed to every two years) would continue into the foreseeable future. This is called Moore's Law. Doubling something every two years, particularly in physical space, is remarkable. Maintaining such a pace for more than fifty years is hard to fathom, but that is what has happened. In 1958, just two transistors would fit on a chip. In 1971, the seminal launch of Intel's 4004 processor had 2,300 transistors. Intel's Broadwell chip in 2016 had over 7.2 billon transistors. (To get an idea of the size of these nanotransistors, more than 6 million of them could fit inside the period at the end of this sentence.) This is the primary example of exponential change that many futurists and analysts talk about. These integrated chips have been woven into many other domains and are helping to create exponential trends across multiple industrial sectors enabling things like robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, drones, medicine, pharmacology, and others.

Moore's Law has, understandably and famously, driven the “information revolution” (which some consider another industrial revolution, ...