Bart Hessels

No ratings yet.

Technological advancement has helped us in more ways than we can count. It has enabled us to call our friends and family on the other side of the world. It has enabled us to reduce extreme poverty and hunger. It has made our life more comfortable than at any other time in the history of mankind. On the complete other side of the spectrum, technological advancements also gave us the nuclear bomb, biochemical weapons and the slow but certain destruction of our climate. Until now we have steered clear of any directly catastrophic events caused by our own inventions, but is there a future possibility that we will orchestrate our own ending by an innovation gone rogue? In his paper “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”, philosopher and Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom discovers the possibilities.

Bostrom uses the following metaphor: We can see human creativity in science as a gigantic urn full of balls. The colors of the balls are in a spectrum from white to black, including a lot of grey variations. Throughout human history we have drawn a lot of white balls from the urn giving us a beneficial technology, for example vaccinations. We have also drawn a lot of grey balls from the urn, such as harvesting nuclear power from atoms. This gave us the ability to create energy, but also gave us the nuclear bomb.
What about the black balls? These balls represent the extremely harmful technologies that will wipe out their inventors civilization. Bostrom argues that until now, we have just been lucky. While scientific research effortlessly continues, the urn empties, and we are bound to grab a cataclysmic invention which we can not un-invent. A black ball: the end of our civilization.

These black balls might come in a wide range of forms. One can think Skynet, irreparable damage to our climate or “accidentally” destroying the ozone layer again. Bostrom uses a very interesting thought experiment of so-called easy nukes: what would have happened in an alternate universe where nuclear bombs were not made by very complex and costly procedures, but by setting your running microwave on fire? Or by simply letting an electronic current flow through a pane of glass? Every crazy person, every extremist and every tiny country would have obtained the power to destroy the earth.
Another example, that is not in an alternate reality, is is our ability to create and destroy life. In the future the 3D printer in your kitchen might be able to print meat, complete DNA sequences, or for that matter – hyper resistant aggressive viruses. Will we destroy one another and will the world end? Or can humans live in peace and survive its self-made power?

In his paper, Bostrom proposes several steps we could take to prevent us from grabbing a black ball. For example, we could severely slow down our technological process and deliberately keep away from risky research. However slowing down means not stopping, we could eventually be unlucky anyway. Another option is to target the malicious users of the technology, not the technology itself. Yet, this does require a major effort in global governance, intelligence and coordination that seems virtually impossible today.

What do you think, is it possible we will be so unlucky to grab a black ball? And what can we do about it?

Sources:

Bostrom, N. (2018). The Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Global Policy.

No ratings yet.

In the last decades, Moore’s law has been one of the backbones of our technology industry. The law, defined in 1965, states that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every two years. This prediction has turned out to be accurate on an astonishing level. By shrinking transistors and packing more and more of them on a chip, the computing power of our laptops and phones has increased exponentially over time. The current size of a regular transistor in your laptop or phone is about 14 nanometers (nm) – in comparison: a human hair is 100.000 nm thick. Keeping up with Moore’s law, whilst working with such small dimensions poses a tremendous challenge and requires a lot of research, manpower and money. But until now, we have (most of the time) succeeded.
1280px-Moore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2018

However, our constant drive for more processing power and hence smaller transistors creates an insurmountable problem: What if we can’t go any smaller? Today, transistors are made of silicon which has an atomic size of 0.2 nm. As stated above, we are nowhere near this number but fast approaching it. Even getting close to a transistor the size of an atom will be incredibly challenging. When we try to work with materials this small, we enter the Quantum realm. Due to a spooky effect called Quantum Tunneling, transistors are not able to stop electrons from passing, they just appear on the other side anyway. Other difficulties are related to heat leakage within the chip and basic economics; developing smaller and more powerful chips requires huge amounts of R&D but an uncertain return on investment. Maybe we will, or maybe we will not find an viable and scalable solution to these problems – but we will definitely not develop sub-atomic scaled transistors anytime soon.

So, why should we care? A maximum number of transistors on a chip dramatically limits the possibilities of the type of chips we are currently using. Computing power lies at the heart of technological improvements. Solving complex problems with techniques such as deep learning requires massive amounts amounts of calculations and hence computer brains. In the last decades, developers and scientists could just plan ahead for times with more powerful chips if their ideas were not feasible yet. In the future, this possibility might not be written in stone anymore. The stagnation of Moore’s rate of growth and the limits of silicon transistors might very soon knock on the door of Silicon Valley itself.
Will this be the end of years of technological improvement and abundance? Probably not. It will however force us to rethink the design of one of our most needed and fundamental technologies today, because the death of Moore’s Law will mean the end of microchips as we know it. Lucky for us, many scientists are already working on our next steps as Michio Kaku will explain to you in this video.

Sources:

Sperling, E. (2019). Semiconductor Engineering – Quantum Effects At 7/5nm And Beyond. [online] Semiconductor Engineering. Available at: https://semiengineering.com/quantum-effects-at-7-5nm/ [Accessed 5 Sep. 2019].

Tibken, S. (2019). CES 2019: Moore’s Law is dead, says Nvidia’s CEO. [online] CNET. Available at: https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-is-dead-nvidias-ceo-jensen-huang-says-at-ces-2019/ [Accessed 5 Sep. 2019].

Russel, J. (2019). Nanosheet Transistors: The Last Step in Moore’s Law?. [online] HPCwire. Available at: https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/08/19/nanosheet-transistors-the-last-step-in-moores-law/ [Accessed 5 Sep. 2019].

More readings if you are interested:

The Vulnerable World Hypothesis

10

Please rate this

The Death of Moore’s Law

8

Please rate this