Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (9 page)

Of course, many people hate going to the doctor. But in the future, your health will be silently and effortlessly monitored several times a day without your being aware of it. Your toilet, bathroom mirror, and clothes will have DNA chips to silently determine if you have cancer colonies of only a few hundred cells growing in your body. You will have more sensors hidden in your bathroom and clothes than are found in a modern hospital or university today. For example, simply by blowing on a mirror, the DNA for a mutated protein called p53 can be detected, which is implicated in 50 percent of all common cancers. This means that the word
tumor
will gradually disappear from the English language.

Today, if you are in a bad car accident on a lonely road, you could easily bleed to death. But in the future, your clothes and car will automatically spring into action at the first sign of trauma, calling for an ambulance, locating your car’s position, uploading your entire medical history, all while you are unconscious. In the future, it will be difficult to die alone. Your clothes will be able to sense any irregularities in your heartbeat, breathing, and even brain waves by means of tiny chips woven into the fabric. When you get dressed, you go online.

Today, it is possible to put a chip into a pill about the size of an aspirin, complete with a TV camera and radio. When you swallow it, the “smart pill” takes TV images of your gullet and intestines, and then radios the signals to a nearby receiver. (This gives new meaning to the slogan “Intel inside.”) In this way, doctors may be able to take pictures of a patient’s intestines and detect cancers without ever performing a colonoscopy (which involves the inconvenience of inserting a six-foot-long tube up your large intestine). Microscopic devices like these also will gradually reduce the necessity of cutting skin for surgery.

This is only a sample of how the computer revolution will affect our health. We will discuss the revolution in medicine in much more detail in
Chapters 3
and
4
, where we also discuss gene therapy, cloning, and altering the human life span.

Because computer intelligence will be so cheap and widespread in the environment, some futurists have commented that the future might look like something out of a fairy tale. If we have the power of the gods, then the heaven we inhabit will look like a fantasy world. The future of the Internet, for example, is to become the magic mirror of Snow White. We will say, “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” and a friendly face will emerge, allowing us to access the wisdom of the planet. We will put chips in our toys, making them intelligent, like Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to be a real boy. Like Pocahontas, we will talk to the wind and the trees, and they will talk back. We will assume that objects are intelligent and that we can talk to them.

Because computers will be able to locate many of the genes that control the aging process, we might be forever young like Peter Pan. We will be able to slow down and perhaps reverse the aging process, like the boys from Neverland who didn’t want to grow up. Augmented reality will give us the illusion that, like Cinderella, we can ride to fantasy balls in a royal coach and dance gracefully with a handsome prince. (But at midnight, our augmented reality glasses turn off and we return to the real world.) Because computers are revealing the genes that control our bodies, we will be able to reengineer our bodies, replacing organs and changing our appearance, even at the genetic level, like the beast in “Beauty and the Beast.”

Some futurists have even feared that this might give rise to a return to the mysticism of the Middle Ages, when most people believed that there were invisible spirits inhabiting everything around them.

END OF MOORE’S LAW

We have to ask: How long can this computer revolution last? If Moore’s law holds true for another fifty years, it is conceivable that computers will rapidly exceed the computational power of the human brain. By midcentury, a new dynamic occurs. As George Harrison once said, “All things must pass.” Even Moore’s law must end, and with it the spectacular rise of computer power that has fueled economic growth for the past half century.

Today, we take it for granted, and in fact believe it is our birthright, to have computer products of ever-increasing power and complexity. This is why we buy new computer products every year, knowing that they are almost twice as powerful as last year’s model. But if Moore’s law collapses—and every generation of computer products has roughly the same power and speed of the previous generation—then why bother to buy new computers?

Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.

Years ago, when we physicists pointed out the inevitable collapse of Moore’s law, traditionally the industry pooh-poohed our claims, implying that we were crying wolf. The end of Moore’s law was predicted so many times, they said, that they simply did not believe it.

But not anymore.

Two years ago, I keynoted a major conference for Microsoft at their main headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Three thousand of the top engineers at Microsoft were in the audience, waiting to hear what I had to say about the future of computers and telecommunications. Staring out at the huge crowd, I could see the faces of the young, enthusiastic engineers who would be creating the programs that will run the computers sitting on our desks and laps. I was blunt about Moore’s law, and said that the industry has to prepare for this collapse. A decade earlier, I might have been met with laughter or a few snickers. But this time I only saw people nodding their heads.

So the collapse of Moore’s law is a matter of international importance, with trillions of dollars at stake. But precisely how it will end, and what will replace it, depends on the laws of physics. The answers to these physics questions will eventually rock the economic structure of capitalism.

To understand this situation, it is important to realize that the remarkable success of the computer revolution rests on several principles of physics. First, computers have dazzling speed because electrical signals travel at near the speed of light, which is the ultimate speed in the universe. In one second, a light beam can travel around the world seven times or reach the moon. Electrons are also easily moved around and loosely bound to the atom (and can be scraped off just by combing your hair, walking across a carpet, or by doing your laundry—that’s why we have static cling). The combination of loosely bound electrons and their enormous speed allows us to send electrical signals at a blinding pace, which has created the electric revolution of the past century.

Second, there is virtually no limit to the amount of information you can place on a laser beam. Light waves, because they vibrate much faster than sound waves, can carry vastly more information than sound. (For example, think of stretching a long piece of rope and then vibrating one end rapidly. The faster you wiggle one end, the more signals you can send along the rope. Hence, the amount of information you can cram onto a wave increases the faster you vibrate it, that is, by increasing its frequency.) Light is a wave that vibrates at roughly 10
¹⁴
cycles per second (that is 1 with 14 zeros after it). It takes many cycles to convey one bit of information (a 1 or a 0). This means that a fiber-optic cable can carry roughly 10
¹¹
bits of information on a single frequency. And this number can be increased by cramming many signals into a single optical fiber and then bundling these fibers into a cable. This means that, by increasing the number of channels in a cable and then increasing the number of cables, one can transmit information almost without limit.

Third, and most important, the computer revolution is driven by miniaturizing transistors. A transistor is a gate, or switch, that controls the flow of electricity. If an electric circuit is compared to plumbing, then a transistor is like a valve controlling the flow of water. In the same way that the simple twist of a valve can control a huge volume of water, the transistor allows a tiny flow of electricity to control a much larger flow, thereby amplifying its power.

At the heart of this revolution is the computer chip, which can contain hundreds of millions of transistors on a silicon wafer the size of your fingernail. Inside your laptop there is a chip whose transistors can be seen only under a microscope. These incredibly tiny transistors are created the same way that designs on T-shirts are made.

Designs on T-shirts are mass-produced by first creating a stencil with the outline of the pattern one wishes to create. Then the stencil is placed over the cloth, and spray paint is applied. Only where there are gaps in the stencil does the paint penetrate to the cloth. Once the stencil is removed, one has a perfect copy of the pattern on the T-shirt.

Likewise, a stencil is made containing the intricate outlines of millions of transistors. This is placed over a wafer containing many layers of silicon, which is sensitive to light. Ultraviolet light is then focused on the stencil, which then penetrates through the gaps of the stencil and exposes the silicon wafer.

Then the wafer is bathed in acid, carving the outlines of the circuits and creating the intricate design of millions of transistors. Since the wafer consists of many conducting and semiconducting layers, the acid cuts into the wafer at different depths and patterns, so one can create circuits of enormous complexity.

One reason why Moore’s law has relentlessly increased the power of chips is because UV light can be tuned so that its wavelength is smaller and smaller, making it possible to etch increasingly tiny transistors onto silicon wafers. Since UV light has a wavelength as small as 10 nanometers (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter), this means that the smallest transistor that you can etch is about thirty atoms across.

But this process cannot go on forever. At some point, it will be physically impossible to etch transistors in this way that are the size of atoms. You can even calculate roughly when Moore’s law will finally collapse: when you finally hit transistors the size of individual atoms.

The end of Moore’s law. Chips are made the same way as designs on T-shirts. Instead of spray painting over a stencil, UV light is focused on a stencil, burning an image onto layers of silicon. Acids then carve out the image, creating hundreds of millions of transistors. But there is a limit to the process when we hit the atomic scale. Will Silicon Valley become a rust belt? (
photo credit 1.1
)

Around 2020 or soon afterward, Moore’s law will gradually cease to hold true and Silicon Valley may slowly turn into a rust belt unless a replacement technology is found. According to the laws of physics, eventually the Age of Silicon will come to a close, as we enter the Post-Silicon Era. Transistors will be so small that quantum theory or atomic physics takes over and electrons leak out of the wires. For example, the thinnest layer inside your computer will be about five atoms across. At that point, according to the laws of physics, the quantum theory takes over. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you cannot know both the position and velocity of any particle. This may sound counterintuitive, but at the atomic level you simply cannot know where the electron is, so it can never be confined precisely in an ultrathin wire or layer and it necessarily leaks out, causing the circuit to short-circuit.

We will discuss this in more detail in
Chapter 4
, when we analyze nanotechnology. For the rest of this chapter, we will assume that physicists have found a successor to silicon power, but that computer power grows at a much slower pace than before. Computers will most likely continue to grow exponentially, but the doubling time will not be eighteen months, but many years.

By midcentury, we should all be living in a mixture of real and virtual reality. In our contact lens or glasses, we will simultaneously see virtual images superimposed on the real world. This is the vision of Susumu Tachi of Keio University in Japan and many others. He is designing special goggles that blend fantasy and reality. His first project is to make things disappear into thin air.